Renovated collective site provides comfort for families recently displaced from frontline areas

When Nadiia made the difficult decision to flee her home city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk region in east Ukraine in mid-August 2025 with her four-year-old daughter Valentyna and a few scarce belongings, it was not the first time, displacement became the only viable option.

Back in 2022, at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Nadiia and her daughter was forced to flee to Poltava. They stayed there for several months, until she felt it was safe enough to return home.

However, recently intensified hostilities and a Russian ground offensive in Donetsk region, has once again made the situation too unsafe for the small family.

“It’s dangerous to live there in Kramatorsk now. It was our only option to leave again,” explains Nadiia who once again sought safety in Poltava.

The mother and young daughter were accommodated in a collective site, hosted in the dormitory of Kremenchuk Medical Vocational College. Here, they were reunited with Nadiia’s parents who fled Kramatorsk after their home was severely damaged in an attack, that shattered the windows and blast off the roof. The older couple was supported to evacuate, as her father is quite fragile from fighting cancer, and they are now accommodated at the same collective site as Nadiia and their grandchild.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, this dormitory has hosted internally displaced people with nowhere else to go and no opportunities to rent accommodation on their own. Recently, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, completed large-scale renovations of the dormitory to improve the living conditions for the currently 119 displaced people residing in the building.

This included replacing windows and doors, upgrading the electricity, heating and water supply systems as well as renovating the rooms and common kitchens, toilets and showers. The building has also been made more accessible for people with disabilities or low mobility, with a ramp and designated accommodation on the ground floor.

Across Ukraine, some 70,000 of the most vulnerable internally displaced people are accommodated in more than 1,500 collective sites. The facility in Kremenchuk is the latest of several collective sites in Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Poltava, and Vinnytsia regions that have been renovated by UNHCR, thanks to the support from donors such as the European Union. UNHCR and its Ukrainian NGO partners also support people living in collective sites with information and referrals to services, legal and psychosocial support.

For Nadiia and her family, the dormitory feels comfortable and safe – and four-year-old Valentyna has started attending kindergarten in Kremenchuk.

“Here at the collective site, it’s comfortable for us. It’s a new place, where we can start our life over. Yet again,” says Nadiia. “I am grateful for the support to displaced people like us, who really lost everything.”