Cash assistance helps people survive winter in frontline villages
Cash assistance helps people survive winter in frontline villages
Anatolii lives in a small village in Sumy region and is ready to face the cold months, now having a stock of firewood that he bought using cash assistance from UNHCR.
Heavy snow has arrived in the village of Pisky in the Sumy region of Ukraine, where the border with the Russian Federation lies less than ten kilometres away. Here, and in many other frontline communities, the cold winter has brought additional challenges for people who have decided to remain in their homes despite the hostilities nearby and the tense situation as the full-scale invasion soon nears its third year.
“Our village is slowly dying, many homes stand empty like ghosts, and drones are flying above our heads every night,” says Anatolii, a 68-year-old pensioner who lives in Pisky together with his wife Valentyna.
At the start of the full-scale invasion, their children and grandchildren fled to Poland, while Anatolii and Valentyna were determined to stay in their community. Once livestock farmers with a cow and pigs, they now only have ducks and chickens. Their modest pensions, totaling about 6,000 UAH (about USD 146) a month, barely cover their basic needs. Heating their home with wood during the long, freezing winter requires careful planning and sacrifices.
This winter, UNHCR’s winter cash assistance allowed Anatolii to purchase enough firewood to heat their home for three months and a gas canister to fuel their cooking oven.
Cash assistance for solid fuel is vital for people living in rural areas in the frontline communities, like Anatolii.
“For pensioners like us, this assistance means so much,” Anatolii explains. “We bought a truck of firewood and can now stay warm throughout the winter. No matter what happens next, this is our home, and we are not leaving.”
For most older people in the frontline communities, their pensions are barely enough to support themselves. Gas heating has been a privilege for them, and buying wood is not so easy, with prices almost doubling.
For Valentyna, another resident of Pisky in Sumy region, UNHCR’s cash assistance brought relief.
“Living so close to the border feels like sitting on a powder keg,” she says. “But now, we have one less thing to worry about—we will not freeze in our homes this winter.”
Valentyna purchased a gas heater and enough firewood to endure the bitter cold. Firewood, she says, is a small but essential assurance of survival during another war-time winter.
Firewood is a small assurance that Valentyna’s family will stay warm during the cold season.
During this winter season 2024-2025, UNHCR provides one-off cash assistance to internally displaced and war-affected people living in nine regions that have been the most affected by the ongoing war: Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Chernihiv. These areas continue to suffer from relentless Russia’s attacks on homes and energy infrastructure.
Within this initiative, implemented in partnership with the Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, UNHCR aims to support over 93,000 families.
Another winter cash programme to support 57,000 vulnerable families to be able to pay for heating costs is implemented together with the Ministry of Social Policy and the Pension Fund.
UNHCR aims to provide a total of 550,000 displaced and other war-affected people in Ukraine with cash assistance this winter, if we receive the funding needed, enabling them to meet their most basic needs—whether it is repairing war-damaged homes, securing dignified housing or covering utility bills and buy solid fuel.
In Ukraine, UNHCR is operating its largest cash assistance programme in the world, having delivered over USD 556 million in cash assistance to more than 2,3 million people since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. This has been possible thanks to our steadfast donors like the United States of America
