Ive asked the local kindergarten if I can work there as an assistant, Monika says.

On cold nights, Lesya likes to stand on the balcony and gaze out onto the majestic peaks of the Carpathian range. HIAS is a nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) refugee protection organization based in Silver Spring, MD. There, they slept in a hangar that had been repurposed to house refugees before Natalya found a volunteer who directed them to the house in Zakopane. Years of tireless labour earned 36-year-old Lesya Grichuk her own slice of paradise in the north of Ukraine, about 80km (50 miles) from the Belarusian border. They arrived in Zakopane on March 4, tired and disoriented. The VOICE report calls for a shift in power to women-led organizations.

Olha spends her time caring for her grandchildren and her youngest daughter Nadezhda. On the car ride there, a colleague from her school got in touch to tell her about the house in Zakopane. I was really scared it would be the next Chernobyl. Angelina and Kostya are thrilled by the slanted roof above their beds, and it is a perpetual source of amusement for them.

Im happy theres very little homework here, Kostya says with a cheeky grin. Fresh-faced and with her hair pulled back in a thick braid, 21-year-old Diana Oliynyk looks serene as she wraps her dozing infant daughter in a warm blanket.

The suggestion from the global refugee agency follows reports that Ukrainian refugees, predominantly women and sometimes accompanied by children, are at risk in the UK of sexual exploitation. I really wish he could have just come with us, she says. Diana is from Miakoty, a village with little more than 1,000 residents located in western Ukraine. Many of the children, like Olha, were not in fact orphans. We were just doing well enough to hire four other workers, she says. She was born into chaos, spending her infancy in a trench dug by her mother and a group of other women in an attempt to hide from the Nazis as they invaded Ukraine during WWII. When she was just 12, she went to work on a Soviet sovkhoz a state-owned farm to support her mother, who had been critically injured in the war.

We decided to cease the bulk of our business to host fleeing Ukrainians, says ukaszayk, a lawyer specialising in civil disputes. When school finishes for the day, the children excitedly spill into the games room.

I ask Iryna about her own emotional response to the war. This is a lucky charm from my grandmother, she says. The number of Polish women receiving abortions after rape is practically non-existent: in 2020 there were only two terminations granted on these grounds of Polands 1,000 or so legal abortions. I have five siblings with whom I run these guesthouses. Iryna Melnyk, 40, is in an odd situation. I cant believe I have to move even though I am already so old, she says melancholically. VOICE held 171 interviews with staff in organizations inside Ukraine, includinggroup discussions with over 167 women who have been forcibly displaced. To continue practising as a psychiatrist in Poland, she has to apply for a professional licence, for which she must attain a certain level of proficiency in Polish. My grandmother took over ownership of the house and turned us out, she recalls. I milked the cows, did all kinds of agricultural labour, and eventually went to work in a factory, she says. They first stayed in Lviv, then entered a Polish town with a name she does not remember. She drove her family including her mother Olha, 50, sisters Ulyana and Nadezhda, 16 and 10, and her two children across the border to Poland.

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Monika has only condemnation for the Russian army. Her daughter Zlata has not taken well at all to her new environment, crying often and waking every few hours from nightmares.

She ran a hair salon from her apartment, and business was brisk.

The assessment was conducted from March 25 through April 15, 2022. Since the start of the war, Harvard Universitys Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict research group has documented gang rape, mutilation of genitals, the threat of rape, and people forced to watch their friends and relatives raped by others, says Ukrainian academic and member Marta Havryshko, who is also a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Less than a month later, as a psychiatrist by training, she is in Zakopane, offering counselling sessions to the Ukrainian women living in the three houses. We do not favor or oppose any candidate for public office. The bus ride there was nerve-racking. The woman she calls her mother-in-law, Monika Chernyeska, 37, is a Benedictine nun who took Mykhaylo into her care when he was little.

But now that Im here, I feel absolutely nothing.. Its their choice whether or not they want to be in touch with their parents.

We heard about places all around our home that were being bombed. As she gently rocks Yeva to sleep, her son Marko, 2, totters around the room, pulling open drawers and peering inside them to see if he can find any toys. Polish people have been really kind to us, but even then, they cant fully understand whats going on, because it hasnt happened to them. We need help. HIAS is providing emergency humanitarian aid to displaced Ukrainians around the world. Magazines, Foundation for Women and Family Planning (Federa), Carbon Credits Should Be One of Our Best Tools to Fight Climate Change, What Watergate Experts Think About the Jan. 6 Hearings, Or create a free account to access more articles, Ukraines Women Refugees Face the Harsh Reality of Polands Abortion Restrictions. Their husband may have died, or its just a difficult time to have a baby, she says. In another picture, she is driving a truck with her 10-month-old son Matviy on her lap and her two-year-old daughter Zlata seated next to her. The measure was passed by Polands Constitutional Tribunal, whose independence has been eroded by the ruling party, rights activists say. Both her daughters are now enrolled in school and are adjusting fairly well to studying in a foreign country.

While exact numbers are hard to pin down, and the scale of the violence is difficult to verify, U.N. officials have as of early June received over 120 reports of rape. Waiting for the Sky to Close: The Unprecedented Crisis Facing Women and Girls Fleeing Ukraine, Parents With Disabled Children Find Support From a HIAS Partner in Poland, Right to Protection's Quick Pivot to a War Footing, UNHCR: 100 Million Now Displaced, 27 Million Refugees Worldwide, Video: Helping Refugees Find Financial Footing, DONATE TO SUPPORT HIAS' UKRAINE CRISIS RESPONSE.

The driver kept swerving because of the shooting, she remembers. I hope that the government here will create a system that makes it easier for me to work here. Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022, more than 14 million people have been displaced from Ukraine (as of May 24); 90 percent of those fleeing Ukraine are women and children. With few employment prospects after leaving school, Olha took a job as a cleaner.

My role is to help them grow up in a loving family.. Two floors below the Sydors lives Anna Karpovna Polachek, 80, who everyone affectionately calls babka, or grandmother. Abortions even in cases of severe fetal abnormalities, which had formed the majority of legal terminations before then, were no longer permitted. I hope you have a very good life. VOICEs 10-member team conducted a 4-week in-person assessment of womens rights organizations, frontline workers, local NGOs, United Nations-affiliated groups, and refugee populations in Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania,Slovakia, and Ukraine. Read More: Ukrainians Are Speaking Up About Rape as a War Crime to Ensure the World Holds Russia Accountable, So far, Ala-Siuaras organization has provided abortion pills to more than 50 Ukrainian refugees in Poland, who range in age from 20 to 35. I missed him a lot. Anna sobs uncontrollably when she talks about her 28-year-old grandson, Sergiy, who has epilepsy and schizophrenia, and lives in a facility for people with a mental illness in Ukraine. Her husband Vasily, 38, her college sweetheart whom she married in their fourth year of medical school, had also made the switch early on to work in the pharmaceutical industry instead, as there was more money in it than the medical profession. The countrys reproductive rights campaigners and providers of abortion advice are working in overdrive to navigate some of Europes most restrictive abortion laws. Her oldest sons Daniil, 17, and Kirill, 14, are in Ukraine along with their father, supporting him as he joins the Territorial Defence Forces like millions of other men between the ages of 18 and 60. I try not to cry. Ive never done anything like this before, Jadniga admits as she pulls a stack of Polish textbooks and worksheets out of her bag to distribute to the eight children who are here for her class. I told him that I dont need a lot of money. It also contains pictures and photos of her children feeding lambs, growing juniper shrubs, and singing while horse riding. UN agency intervenes after claims predatory men using Homes for Ukraine scheme to target vulnerable. But they must know that blood is also partly on their hands, she says. I worked very, very hard to earn enough to get them back, Olha says.

HIAS provides a helping hand to refugees through our economic inclusion programs. We understand that theyre going through heavy emotions, says Ewa from Women on Web, where she receives requests for help from women responding to the organizations campaigns on Instagram and Facebook.

1300 Spring Street, Suite 500Silver Spring, MD 20910301-844-7300. When they realised that I was quite good at it, they referred me to other people they knew, she says. By now, ski season is over in the picturesque town of Zakopane in the south of Poland.

Grocery shopping is done at a small local store just down the hill, aptly called Brutal Market. In early March, days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the first refugees started arriving. Federa set up a Ukrainian-language hotline explicitly to help women in need of abortions in Poland in the early days of the war, complementing its Polish hotline. Girl, you are young, she says. Its not just eco-friendly, theres good money in it. Until the war, Monika had been living in this house with Mykhaylos foster siblings. Sometimes they cant, or wont, ask for official help.

This is a record of the stories of several Ukrainian women who have sought refuge at these holiday homes. The familys room is on the top floor of the house, which is connected to an attic. The global humanitarian community is failing women and girls displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war who continue to face a dire and deteriorating situation inside Ukraine and across the region, a new report shows. Asked to respond to the UNHCRs request for an intervention on sexual exploitation of Ukrainian women, a government spokesperson said: Attempts to exploit vulnerable people are truly despicable this is why we have designed our Homes for Ukraine scheme to have specific safeguards in place, including robust security and background checks on all sponsors, both by the Home Office and local authorities. I cant teach my children well, so the only thing I can do is give them all the love they deserve.. Some men lied about having several bedrooms in their one-bed homes while another proposed sharing a bed, writing: I have a large bed.

Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022, Global Humanitarian Community Failing Ukrainian Women and Girls. If there is an intention to help us, its important to accept our agency.. It took her 27 hours to arrive in Warsaw. Thousands of others were with them, many completely incapacitated by distress and grief. It has been difficult for Iryna to continue teaching her students online, with Irpin being at the forefront of Russias most brutal assaults. I was approached by one older guy from London who said that I would have to share a bedroom with him, and was asked if I was OK with that, she said in an email seen by the Guardian. Her eyes well up with tears when she talks about the life she is so proud of having built for herself and her family. Reports on Tuesday claimed Gove had been accused of bullying Home Office officials by Patels permanent secretary, Matthew Rycroft.

The UN refugee agency has called on the UK government to intervene to stop single British men from being matched up with lone Ukrainian women seeking refuge from war because of fears of sexual exploitation. Volodymyr, Oleh and Lyudmila were all given up to an orphanage for several months at various points. We, women who stay in Ukraine, are not just victims, we are also fighters, we are actively resisting and defending ourselves, a representative from a women-run organization in Ukraine told VOICE. Following claims that predatory men are using the Homes for Ukraine scheme to target the vulnerable, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) told the Guardian a more appropriate matching process could be put in place to ensure women and women with children are matched with families or couples. All Rights Reserved. I miss working with heavy machines, Lyudmila says, her stern demeanour giving way to the smallest of smiles. Life in Ukraine had not been a bed of roses for Iryna. Federa has also worked with the International Planned Parenthood Federation to dispatch emergency contraception and abortion pills to Ukrainian medical facilities that are currently under Russian occupation. There is growing public anger over the length of time that Ukrainians are being forced to wait before being given visas from the Home Office amid the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since the second world war. I was thinking of setting up a waste recycling business in our area. There, she worked as a maths teacher in a primary school. And as for Putin, Im sure ordinary citizens are scared of him after years of totalitarianism. Aside from her husband, Lyudmila left behind two brothers: 23-year-old Volodymyr, who lives with a disability, and 19-year-old Oleh, who was initially conscripted to join the army but is now on leave. They were exhausted, having travelled for days in freezing temperatures, barely stopping to rest at makeshift shelters in Polish border towns.

The house has 16 occupants in total, and 14 are members of Dianas family. Diana worries about Mykhaylo and her mother, who chose to remain in Miakoty.

She was raised in a type of orphanage in the city of Zalishchyky known as an internat a type of boarding school where children with various disabilities can live and study, with the option to visit their homes over the weekends. Im always telling the children that were not at home, were only guests, and we need to be careful with peoples things, Lesya says. A government-backed matching service run by the charity Reset offers to match UK hosts with refugees but has been operating for just over a week. It determined that women-led organizations on the frontlines of the emergency response are not getting the support they need to properly assist displaced women and girls, and survivors of conflict-related sexual violence need better access to medical and mental health services and resources. Louise Calvey, the head of safeguarding at the charity Refugee Action, told the Observer it was at risk of being a Tinder for sex traffickers.

Still, Lyudmila felt it was best to go somewhere safer because of her homes proximity to an army barracks, a prime target for the Russians. One 32-year-old woman from Bakhmut, Ukraine, who has been searching for an appropriate person to match in the UK, wrote that she had received suggestive messages from men on Facebooks Messenger app. They write to her in Polish, English, Ukrainian, and Russian. A wizened woman who is often wrapped in shawls and sweaters, Polachek has been reflecting on the irony of having her childhood and old age marked by carnage. I love Ukraine, I really do.. Officials in Kyiv have also said the number is at least in the hundreds. As a nun, Monika is of modest means. Its very good to see.. Repeat after me now, Jadniga says as she pins to the wall a large sheet of paper where she has scrawled Polish verb conjugations. Grichuk and her husband Anatoly had met while studying at a college in Irpin, a city 20km (12 miles) northwest of Kyiv. Whats more, Ukrainian women and girls crossing the border into Poland often arrive with no knowledge of the restrictive laws. She is eager to share anecdotes from her life, clicking her tongue impatiently whenever a photo will not load on her phone due to the poor connection in her room. People had been waiting on the platform for hours, only to be told that the trains might not depart because of damage to the tracks caused by shelling. Phone calls and messages to the hotline belonging to the Polish branch of the non-profit Women on Web, which provides abortion pills up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, have shot up by nearly a third. Jadniga Trebunia, a teacher from Poronin, a town that is a 12-minute drive away from Zakopane, is here to deliver a Polish language lesson to the children in the house. After a failed attempt to move to Belarus, Lesya and Anatoly heard about the tiny village of Buda, where there was a house cheaply available. But this winter has been unusually long and it is accompanied by the unrelenting bitterness of a war raging 250km (155 miles) away. Although emergency contraception remains available by prescription in Poland, its notoriously difficult to obtain. At 9am on March 6, a huge blast reverberated outside Irynas apartment. Today, one of the mothers from the house next door has also chosen to attend. Her husband, who is in the Ukrainian army, was fighting and away from home.

Anatoly worked as a truck driver previously but gave it up as the job took him away from home for long stretches of time.

Through word-of-mouth, they had found out about three holiday homes in Zakopane, owned by the family of 38-year-old Weronika ukaszayk. Now their plans have been thwarted. Poland has taken the lions share, earning praise from Western powers, even as that generosity has raised uncomfortable questions about its treatment of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa. Federa was able to organize a rare medical abortion for the woman in a Warsaw hospital, using a small exception in the law for cases of rape. The houses are structurally almost identical, with four floors and a loft. VOICEs 10-member team conducted a 4-week in-person assessment of womens rights organizations, frontline workers, local NGOs, United Nations-affiliated groups, and refugee populations in Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania,Slovakia, and Ukraine. Her self-possession wavers for a fraction of a second. There was only one other home in the vicinity. In a statement, the UNHCR said there was a need for adequate safeguards and vetting measures to be in place against exploitation, as well as adequate support for sponsors. Just to be together is a luxury, Lesya says. Her phone contains footage of her mixing concrete in a barrel. The Times reported this week that a journalist posing as a 22-year-old Ukrainian woman from Kyiv found that within minutes of posting a message on the largest Facebook group for UK hosts she was inundated with inappropriate messages. From time to time, one of the children picks her up and gives her a cuddle. More than 6 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, have fled their country since the war began, creating Europes largest refugee crisis since World War Two. Developing long-term, gender-informed strategies for response to the Ukrainian crisis. In 2012, Iryna moved to Kyiv for a few years before getting married and settling down in Irpin. But if a Ukrainian woman can now get an abortion in a hospital in Poland, maybe Polish women can too, says Kacpura, describing how Federa managed to comply with Polish legislations complicated, multi-layered procedures to prove that a woman became pregnant through rape, including getting a prosecutors opinion on the matter. The Grichuks brought little with them.

Weronika ukaszayks niece, a toddler who looks about three or four, prattles on in Polish to Olena Grichuk, who is about the same age. I started by giving discounts to my friends whenever I cut their hair. The Sydor family shares two rooms on the top floor of the house. Oleh also has a wife who is pregnant. And we are eager to do this., The Pharmacist Expanding Abortion Pill Access, How We Can Learn to Live with COVID-19 After Vaccinations. I always felt that it was my calling to look after as many children as I could, Monika explains as she sits down for a quick breather. Sometimes their lives have changed dramatically and they need to start from scratch. Ternopil has remained unscathed from the relentless shelling sustained by other parts of Ukraine. Leading refugee charities raised their concerns about the Homes for Ukraine scheme in a letter to Michael Gove, the minister in charge of the scheme. Iryna and Nadiya were forced to flee on foot. Womens war has its own colours, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. In its statement, the UNHCR also raised concerns about the repercussions should the original UK host prove a potential threat to the safety of the refugee, and the six-month minimum duration on the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Usually, they find her through word of mouth. Rosy-cheeked Monika busies herself in the kitchen, preparing borscht and cake in anticipation of many hungry stomachs when the children come home from school. Conflict is like a curse that has followed 41-year-old Iryna Lipkova for the last 10 years. HIAS has a wealth of experience with GBV programming, and its goals align with those of VOICE, as both groups build partnerships with women-led organizations, and strive to keep the input and needs of survivors a priority and incorporate their leadership in program design and implementation. Matching done without the appropriate oversight may lead to increasing the risks women may face, in addition to the trauma of displacement, family separation and violence already experienced, a spokesperson said. Sweet-natured and softly spoken, Olha has known hardship for most of her life. Together, both of them were able to eke out a more comfortable life for themselves and their daughters. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital But I just have to wait, and hope theres still an opportunity in the future for me to do it, she says with a smile. The rest of the children have gone to school, leaving Yeva and Marko who are too young at home. Kacpura sent them to a clinic in Warsaw where they were tested for HIV and given medication as as a prophylactic against other sexually transmitted diseases before moving on to France to rejoin their families. Their parents were alive but were mired in substance abuse or were in a constant state of inebriation meaning that the state often intervened to place these children under its care. UNHCR says safeguards must be in place to guard against exploitation of refugees.

The report notes that in armed conflicts mens violence against women and girls increases rapidly and stays elevated long after the fighting stops. Womens rights organizations throughout the region have been responding to the needs of forcibly-displaced women and girls since the war began, according to the report, and these groups are best-positioned to help. Their children attend school in the town centre, which is a short drive away. This service will vet eligibility, assess needs, and provide training for sponsors to ensure they can support the people they host., Asked to confirm or deny whether there had been a complaint that Gove had bullied staff, the spokesperson added: Humanitarian schemes set up in record time by the Home Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities working closely together are helping thousands of Ukrainians find safety in the UK., Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Lesya and her other four children, Kostya, 12, Angelina, 10, Zakhar, 7, and Olena, 4, stayed for as long as they could before leaving for Poland on March 24, when the shelling around their home began to intensify. Now, some of our neighbours who heard about what were doing are also opening their homes to refugees. She ambles slowly up the stairs to show me her room. In a matter of weeks, the refugees have had to learn how to live together in an arrangement that they hope is temporary, supporting one another while grappling with the shared pain of displacement. (Ewa spoke on condition that only her first name is used, citing concerns over repercussions given Polands restrictive abortion measures.). Among her scant possessions are her passport, a small cupboard full of medication for high blood pressure, and some wool blankets. Other concerns raised by the report include how women and girls are being forced into exploitative labor in both institutional and informal settings; women who have been raped are not being cared for properly; cash assistance is not reaching women and girls; and Roma, LGBTQ, people of color, and other marginalized groups are facing additional discrimination. Its a beautiful city.

I tell the children that theyre safe, and that at least well go home one day. As gunfire rattled around them, they carefully made their way across a bridge linking Irpin and Kyiv, which had been demolished by the Ukrainian army to slow the Russian advance.

Since coming to power in 2015, Polands right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) has repeatedly moved to curb sexual and reproductive health and rights, frequently targeted LGBTQIA+ people, and threatened to abandon domestic violence protection measures for women. Soldiers helped us carry our things over this makeshift walkway, Iryna says. Federa has also published manuals explaining how to seek help and advice. Angelina was entered at a lower grade than in Ukraine, and she says she has already learned most of the material being taught. Years ago, Daniil had gone on an exchange programme to Switzerland for Ukrainian children from financially underprivileged backgrounds and had stayed in touch with his host family. On March 6, along with her daughters Anna, 16, and Marharyta, 7, she fled her home in Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine for the safety of Warsaw, where one of her aunts has been staying for many years. Some of the many specific recommendations from the report include: Providing flexible, multi-year, and unrestricted money to local women-led organizations to fund programming tailored to the specific needs of the women and children fleeing Ukraine, as well as host communities. I really wanted to have somewhere to go, but I didnt know my family, Olha says. Several are terrified that their daily existence is precarious and hinges upon the generosity of the Polish state, which may run dry one day.

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