After four years of war in Ukraine, humanitarians evacuate as frontlines keep shifting

After the missile hit in 2024, the team repaired everything they could in a single day. After each successive strike, they picked up the pieces and began again. They fixed what was broken, swept away what was burned, dusted off the debris, and opened the door again to continue their work.

“We worked together and fixed it, but we all felt heavy because we knew, after this, that the time will soon come when we will need to leave,” Yulia tells us. They stayed, she says, “because we still could!”

Then, in September of that year, a call came from management. It had become too risky to stay in Pokrovsk. Staff safety came first, and they needed to leave.

“I was heartbroken. Leaving was very hard. I really loved our community center, and we put so much work into it to make it feel like a home. It had become a part of my heart. Even today I can still see in my mind where each and every folder was,” Yulia says.

Her colleague Natalia, 46, was also reluctant to leave. Originally from Pokrovsk, Natalia joined Avalist in August 2024 as a psychologist. One month later, she was evacuating her hometown, packing up the community center together with Yulia and the team. Three large vehicles carried away desks, furniture, plants, and paperwork.

“I remember that day very clearly. We cried a lot together as a team. We did not know how we would continue or if we would even see each other again after we fled,” Natalia says.

Yulia took the plastic palm trees from the large colorful room in Pokrovsk with her. They came with her to Slovyansk, where she continued working for Avalist. The tall poplar trees on the square in Pokrovsk were eventually shot down, their silver trunks left to lie on black soil.

Before the war, 82,000 people lived in Pokrovsk. Now, rusty and burned-out cars sit abandoned on damaged streets. Soviet-era buildings are riddled with bullet holes. Rubble is all that marks where homes once stood. The entrances of any buildings still standing are stacked with sandbags, and windows are boarded over with wood. In a video Yulia saw online, the community center was still standing, but the territory is now occupied.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Scenes like this have become almost commonplace over the past four years of war.

Staying and going

Slovyansk was about 30 kilometers from the frontline when Yulia moved there. The danger didn’t phase her.

“It was obvious for me to go. I was used to working under these conditions and the risk. I knew I could do it.” When asked if she ever thought about working somewhere safer, she takes a moment to think about it, then shakes her head, “It is my home region. My team. My work. I felt like this was what I needed to do. These are my people and they need me.”

Through 2025, the frontlines kept shifting. Areas that were once accessible became too dangerous to visit. Each month pushed the line closer to Slovyansk, limiting the area where Avalist could operate. At the beginning of 2026, Yulia evacuated again, this time to Dnipro. Unlike the previous evacuation, this was her own decision.

“The last months in Slovyansk were hard. I could not sleep. When I went to bed there, I did not know if I would wake up the next day.”

She saw a vacancy for the same position in Dnipro and applied. “I was emotionally exhausted in Slovyansk. I needed to leave.”

Again, the plastic palm trees went with her.

Part of her team remained in Slovyansk and continues to work in the few ways still possible.

“I really admire them. After every sleepless night, being bombed, they get up and go to help others, even though they themselves are emotionally dry,” says Yulia. Just three weeks earlier, she was one of them. She spent her own nights in the corridor of her apartment, waiting for the explosions to pass. Work was where she regained her energy — listening to others, helping them breathe through panic, helping children draw again, and helping adults find structure in days that had lost all shape.

Starting over again

Now, Yulia and her colleague Natalia both work in Dnipro. Natalia is part of a mobile team that goes into local communities, and she connects with participants through shared loss.  

“They are sad and depressed at the beginning and cannot see how to move forward,” Natalia says. “But then they hear that I am also from the same place they fled from, and they see that this is not the end for them. There is more. We are alive. We are here. There is always a new day.”  

Natalia has herself experienced trauma and loss. “As a psychologist, I can help people. My personal experience helps me. But I think if I stopped working, it would be harder for me to deal with my own trauma,” she says.  

The exercises she teaches are the same ones she uses for herself. “Where I live, there is still a lot of shelling, so I use some breathing techniques and try to find a pleasant place in my mind,” she says as an air raid siren wails in the background and her phone lights up with warnings.

Her old apartment in Pokrovsk is gone now. “It was completely destroyed. That made me realize that the feeling of safety is just an illusion. I felt safe in my home. My flat was my fortress, and I thought those four walls would protect me, but they cannot. The missiles can find you everywhere,” she says.

What remains

Both Yulia and Natalia recently attended a CARE training on psychosocial support and crisis intervention. For Natalia, it was both professional and personal. “It is very relevant to my work, but also for me personally on how to take care of myself.”

In Dnipro, Yulia is able to sleep again. She went to the cinema twice. She smiles when she talks about it, as if she’s naming something fragile. “I have been evacuated so many times now. I hope this will be the last time.”

But as frontlines continue to move, she can’t know for certain.

The war continues to escalate. Places where humanitarian aid organizations once worked have become inaccessible. Buildings these organizations painted, repaired, and turned into places of support have been abandoned. Yulia is still disappointed that she was forced to leave her participants behind and hopes they have also moved to safer places to wait for peace. Despite this disappointment, she knows it was time for her to leave.

Regardless of location or circumstance, the work these humanitarians do does not disappear. It doesn’t end when a center closes or when a team evacuates. It moves with the people — into new offices with the same bright plastic plants on the windowsill, into mobile teams reaching the communities they still can, into breathing exercises during sirens, into children who smile again, and into adults who rediscover a sense of pride and stability.

A place can be destroyed, occupied, or left behind. What matters remains. It lives in the people who carry the work forward and in those who receive it. They stay as long as they can. And when they cannot, they take what matters with them and start again somewhere else.