The three-year milestone since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine falls in the depths of winter, when temperatures hover around freezing.
Since that day in February 2022, more than 2mn homes have been damaged by attacks, according to the UN, leaving many with destroyed roofs, shattered windows and a lack of power. Or worse. “For the residents remaining in front-line communities, many of whom are the most vulnerable older people, the repairs of homes are vital,” says Matthias Schmale, UN resident and humanitarian co-ordinator, Ukraine.
While centralised repair and rebuilding efforts have been ongoing — including those by the government, the UN and the EU — independent groups have stepped up.
“We saw the scale of destruction in the villages with our own eyes,” says Ihor Okuniev, a Ukrainian artist who travelled to the deoccupied countryside around Chernihiv and Kyiv in May 2022. “People had nowhere to go; they continued living in partially destroyed houses, with leaking roofs, dampness and mould.”
Okuniev — together with Vladyslav Sharapa, a construction manager, and florist Kseniia Kalmus — had already been providing humanitarian aid in Kyiv. Their volunteer organisation, Livyj Bereh, was named after the left bank of the Dnipro River, where its efforts began. But seeing the residents of these villages catalysed a focus on supplying free new roofs.
“If the roof is damaged, it’s only a matter of time before the entire structure begins to fall apart,” says Okuniev. To date, Livyj Bereh has rebuilt approximately 400 roofs across Ukraine, working with village councils to identify families in need.
One, the Hlushko family, lives in Slatyne, Kharkiv, just 12 miles from the Russian border. Oleksandr Hlushko has provided “extensive support to fellow villagers” throughout the war, says Kalmus. His 11-year-old daughter Masha cares for the animals abandoned by neighbours forced to flee. The Hlushko home was damaged by heavy shelling in June 2022, and following deoccupation by Russian forces, Livyj Bereh repaired its roof. Now, Oleksandr helps distribute roofing materials in the village.
Livyj Bereh uses sheets of galvanised corrugated metal — “a universal solution that suits most houses”, says Sharapa. It is robust, easily available and relatively affordable. Still, the average cost of each new roof, including labour, is around €2,000. Livyj Bereh is funded solely by charitable donations.
Through its restoration work, Livyj Bereh has also been documenting Ukraine’s at-risk vernacular architecture, showcasing it at exhibitions through photography and artefacts. “Due to massive shelling and fighting, many traditional houses — vivid examples of Ukrainian architectural heritage — have been destroyed or marked by significant destruction,” says Okuniev.
After one exhibition in Düsseldorf in 2022, it decided to dismantle the exhibition pavilion and use the materials to construct a new home for a family in Sloboda Kucharska village, working alongside Ukrainian architectural studio MNPL Workshop. In 2023, the story of the house was presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
In November last year, the organisation won the 2024 Royal Academy Dorfman Prize, awarded to “an architect, practice or collective who are reimagining the future of architecture”.
Another organisation driving change is Warsaw-based BRDA, established by Polish charity worker Zofia Jaworowska and Ukrainian architect Petro Vladimirov, which has been co-ordinating the delivery of windows to Ukraine since July 2022. Jaworowska had been helping Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Poland find housing, but she and Vladimirov decided there must be something they could do to help those who stayed in Ukraine — or were returning.
The duo reached out to NGOs there to find out what was needed. “They specifically said that the biggest challenge is finding windows and doors, which suffer most during air raids,” says Jaworowska.
Funded largely by charitable donations, BRDA began to collect windows from a range of sources — renovated office blocks in Warsaw, homeowners in London — and organised transport to Ukraine. There, volunteers in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions distributed the windows.
BRDA’s “Window” project was showcased at the 2023 London Design Biennale. Here, visitors could see the stories of some of the windows that had been donated, alongside a manual BRDA created to help recipients install them in different situations.
Over the past few years, their process has been streamlined. Now, instead of small numbers of windows coming from scattered sources, BRDA obtains large quantities from single sources, such as developers. “Anywhere where there’s a large building that has windows being replaced, or the whole building is being demolished, that’s our best source,” says Jaworowska. Currently, BRDA is working with a French investor renovating a large housing estate outside Lyon, sending windows from there to Kharkiv and Kherson. As of last month, BRDA has sent 2,658 windows to Ukraine.
Glass has become prohibitively expensive for many in Ukraine. Previously reliant on Russia and Belarus, Ukraine was forced to turn to pricier imports from other European countries after the war began. While donations organised by groups like BRDA help many, the scale of demand is huge. Insulate Ukraine, a charity established by British engineer Harry Blakiston Houston, supports Ukrainian communities by installing new, shatterproof windows using plastic and duct tape — and no glass.
Houston developed the emergency window design as a University of Cambridge PhD candidate; it is touted to be better at insulating than double-glazed windows. Established in December 2022 and supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Deutsche Bank, among others, Insulate Ukraine sources materials and pays local labourers to make and install windows where they are needed. According to Houston, more than 37,000 windows have been installed in Ukraine so far.
According to the UN, in 2024 humanitarian groups supported more than 114,000 people in Ukraine with “light and medium . . . repairs of apartments or houses”.
Restoring a house can only do so much, but it is a first step to survival — and recovery. For Livyj Bereh, the biggest challenge is “seeing people who have suffered because of the war — those who have lost loved ones, their homes and everything they had built or gathered throughout their lives”, says Kalmus. “While homes and material possessions can be restored, lives cannot be brought back.”
Kalmus hopes they are giving people “hope for the future” — whenever that peaceful future might arrive. “Because the biggest dream for all of these people is to stay on their land, in their own homes.”
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