Fighting at the front in Ukraine kills thousands each week, but behind the frontline, the war continues to shatter lives in less visible ways. Across Ukraine, an estimated 3.8mn people have been internally displaced (IDP), according to the UN's International Organisation for Migration. The real figure is likely much higher.

A growing trend has been for those leaving their homes in frontline towns to try and start new lives in the rural expanses of central Ukraine. In the absence of any new homes being built for IDPs, the best that many can do is to move into semi-derelict cottages.

bne IntelliNews travelled to Kirovohrad and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts to meet with recently displaced families. Their life savings exhausted, and with almost no support from their government or aid organisations, they are neither able to return to their previous homes nor possess the resources to establish new lives.

Leaving home

Sisters Lera and Daria had spent their entire lives in Myrnohrad, a mining town built by Soviet planners to house workers for the surrounding coal mines. The sisters care for their elderly and bedbound parents. Lera’s husband was paralyzed in a botched operation five years ago, and her adult son has autism.

A few minutes down the road is Pokrovsk. The area has been the hottest point on the frontline for much of the past year. They spent two years trying to live in the middle of a warzone.

“I used to see war on television, on the news, but I never thought I’d see it with my own eyes. Jets flying so low you think they’re going to hit your building. It was terrifying,” says Daria.

By summer of 2024 the town was in range of Russian artillery. They left at the start of August, when heavy shelling had already started.

Their first priority was finding a place for their parents, and Lera’s husband and son. Lera at first didn’t think she would be able to evacuate because she had no savings with which to buy a place to house her family. But relatives helped out and they managed to scrape together $5,500 for a derelict cottage in a village outside Kryvyi Rih.

The house didn’t have running water when they moved in, but they spent what little money they had left getting it fixed. But it was only in October and the start of the heating season that they discovered the central heating didn’t work.

“The meter spins and the gas runs up huge amounts, but the radiators stay cold. Everything got damp - the wallpaper, the cabinets, clothes. Everything started to smell of mold,” says Daria.

The family spent the winter there regardless, without even an electric heater, sleeping in their coats and hats. The parents occupy one cupboard-sized room, Lera’s husband another. Lera and her son sleep in cots in an upstairs room.

The free market for derelict housing

The internal migration to this area of Ukraine is partly driven by its relative proximity to their former towns, but mainly because it is the only part of Ukraine where house prices are affordable.

But even so, the appearance of a wave of displaced people looking to buy or rent has created a previously non-existent market for cottages, driving up prices in regions that before the war had been slowly depopulating.

The price of one of these cottages represents the entirety of a families’ life savings.

“We looked at many houses, but the prices were simply unrealistic. $20,000 for a shed. It was awful,” says Daria.

“[People] want to buy, but the prices are so high, it’s unbelievable. Business has started,” says Mykola Gavrilov, former head of a village on the border between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, who has been trying to help members of his community find new homes.

Families are left attempting to navigate the property market at a time of maximum desperation and are vulnerable to unscrupulous landlords.

Marina and Serhiy spent a year saving for their retirement, moving from an apartment in Myrnohrad to a private cottage ten years ago, where they hoped to spend the rest of their lives. They decided to leave in 2023, when a Russian bomb exploded in their rose garden.

At first, they looked to rent. Twice they moved into run-down houses and spent their own money doing them up, only for the owners to one day tell them they’d decided to sell, taking full advantage of the work that the couple had done to make the cottages liveable.

In February last year, they finally found a cottage to buy in a village in Kirovohrad oblast. The house had no running water or electricity when they moved in. They spent the last of their savings installing heating, power and plumbing.

But for now, there’s no more money for further work. Marina loves to cook, but her new kitchen is in an outhouse across a muddy yard, the walls smeared black and green with mould.

Marina and Serhiy are the only IDPs who’ve settled in their village. They have not found the village to be particularly welcoming, and their fellow residents have kept themselves at a distance.

“There’s no war here, and they don't know what it’s like. We’re almost like foreigners to them,” says Marina.

Dwindling support

At the end of April, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that it was scaling back its support for newly displaced Ukrainians as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID. “

"We had to reduce the number of people we are prioritizing," Karolina Lindholm Billing, UNHCR Representative in Ukraine announced in a briefing.

Organisations like UNHCR fund support schemes for IDPs, and those whose homes have been damaged or destroyed. Even before the announced cuts, access to these schemes was already being curtailed.

At the start of the war, anyone who had to leave their homes because of the war could claim support payments from the government, but the rules for qualifying for the scheme were changed last March. A new set of criteria were introduced, limiting the payments to families with young children, people with disabilities, or the pregnant.

But even those who should qualify for the scheme are being rejected by opaque bureaucratic criteria.

Lera, who cares full-time for four adult dependents, was told that she didn’t qualify for IDP assistance because she could technically find a job. There is no work in the village that she has moved to, and even if there was, she cannot leave her family for more than a few hours at a time. The family are currently surviving off her parents’ pension, which is scarcely more than €100 a month.

Support is also increasingly limited to those who have fled an area where a compulsory evacuation order has been announced, encouraging people to stay in their homes as the war gets ever closer. Many of the IDPs that bne IntelliNews heard from have been left struggling to make sense of a system in which the goalposts seem to be constantly shifting.

Olha, who left Novopavlivka earlier this year, has been left in limbo trying to claim support payments.

“They said we’d get UAH 10,800 (€230). It's been three months already and there's no sign of [it]. I appealed to the UN and [they told me] we’re only registering those who left from March 1. Now they say they’re only registering those who left in April,” Olha says.

“We only have UAH 1,500 [per month] for two people to live on. I’m 77, and I’m on medication but I don’t know how to pay for treatment. And that UAH 10,800 can't be obtained anywhere,” she adds, her voice trembling.

Compensation for destroyed homes

The Ukrainian government operates the e-Vidnovlennia program to compensate people if their homes are damaged or destroyed. For those who are able to stay in their homes, the scheme works well. A local commission visits your property, assesses the damage, and issues a certificate that you can use to claim money from the scheme.

Ada Wordsworth, founder of KHARPP, a charity that repairs war damage to homes, saw firsthand the impact that e-Vidnovlennia had in villages in Kharkiv oblast that saw fierce fighting in the first months of the war:

“For the year before e-Vidnovlennia existed it felt like there was just this never-ending pool of people [in need of support] and it was just never going to get any smaller. And then e-Vidnovlennia appeared and suddenly 50% of people were getting at least some support.”

But for those who have had to leave their homes the scheme is almost impossible to access, for the simple reason that e-Vidnovlennia commissioners can’t travel into dangerous frontline areas to assess property damage.

None of the IDPs that bne IntelliNews spoke to have applied for compensation under the scheme. They know that their homes have been destroyed, but have no way of providing the necessary evidence to receive compensation.

No way back

According to the World Bank’s most recent Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment report (RDNA4), around 13% of the country’s housing stock has been destroyed or damaged, affecting 2.5mn households. The estimated cost to rebuild this housing is estimated at $83.7bn.

If the war ends this year, then perhaps reconstruction will begin. But for the former residents of cities, towns and villages along the frontline, no amount of money will be able to restore their former lives.

“We don’t have a way back there anymore. Who will restore them, these houses? Nobody. They’ve driven us out, and there won't be anything there anymore,” says Daria. “Somehow, we continue to live, we don't give up, what else can we do? Well, this is our fate, and the fate of the Donbas as well probably. As my cousin says, we’ve just been lost in a game of cards. Lost.”

All names of internally displaced persons in this article have been changed at their request to protect their privacy and security.