Ukraine’s homefront: People fill void left by overwhelmed government
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When Olena Danylenko saw the unsmiling older woman approaching her outside the Lviv shelter where she now lives, her thoughts filled with the stories she’d heard of Ukrainians tiring of refugees.
“I feared she might say, ‘Why are you here disturbing my peaceful neighborhood?’” says Ms. Danylenko, who in May left her home in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region – two daughters, a granddaughter, and a dog in tow – after a bomb blast left her with three broken ribs.
Instead, the woman said she knew that families displaced by the war lived in the building, and she invited Ms. Danylenko to her nearby home to see if anything among her possessions could be of use.
“I was so grateful,” she says. “What I have found is that the citizens of this city are very supportive of us” – meaning, she explains, of her fellow Ukrainians who have been
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