Homelessness in Ukraine in Wartime: Assessment of the Situation and Public Attitudes is a major analytical study conducted by Depaul Ukraine, in partnership with the Sociological Group “Rating” and the Mykhailo Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Quality of Life Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The research received financial support from the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). Depaul Ukraine is part of the international Depaul Group and has worked with people experiencing or at risk of homelessness in Ukraine for nearly two decades.

The study combines several complementary forms of research conducted in April 2026. It includes face-to-face interviews with 1,090 people using homelessness services in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Lviv; a detailed survey of 250 people experiencing homelessness; in-depth interviews with 10 representatives of organizations providing assistance; and a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,200 Ukrainian adults. It also uses the European ETHOS Light framework, which recognizes that homelessness includes not only living on the street, but also staying in shelters, temporary accommodations, non-conventional dwellings, or temporarily with relatives or friends because no secure home is available.

Drawing on this extensive evidence, the following series explores twelve different dimensions of homelessness in wartime Ukraine—from its largely hidden scale and its causes to health, employment, public prejudice, housing solutions, and the need for systemic change. Together, the posts seek to make visible the people behind the statistics and to encourage an informed, compassionate, and effective response.

We invite all members of the Vincentian Family to learn more about the homelessness crisis created and intensified by the war in Ukraine, to discover how Vincentian organizations are responding, and to engage more deeply with the findings of this study—either through these twelve summaries or by reading the full report.

You can read or download the full report by clicking here (in English).

Homelessness is often imagined as sleeping on a sidewalk. In wartime Ukraine, however, the reality is far broader: people may be living in shelters, abandoned buildings, temporary rooms, or the homes of relatives without possessing a safe and stable place of their own.

More Than Life on the Street

When most people hear the word “homelessness,” they picture someone sleeping outdoors. Living on the street is its most visible and dangerous expression, but it represents only one part of a much wider reality.

The report Homelessness in Ukraine in Wartime: Assessment of the Situation and Public Attitudes adopts a broad European understanding of homelessness. This approach recognizes that a person may have a roof for the night and still have no genuine home—no secure place where they can remain, exercise privacy, rebuild their life, and know that they will not be forced to leave tomorrow.

In wartime, this distinction becomes especially important. A person may escape a destroyed town and find a temporary bed in another city. A family may stay with relatives for several months because their home is no longer habitable. An older person may sleep in a shelter, while someone else moves repeatedly among hostels, garages, abandoned buildings, and railway stations.

None of them may be sleeping openly on a sidewalk. Yet none has the security that a home is meant to provide.

The ETHOS Light Definition

For its analysis, the study refers to ETHOS Light, a European framework developed by FEANTSA, the European network of organizations working with people experiencing homelessness. The framework is widely recognized by European institutions and offers a more complete understanding than definitions limited to street homelessness.

The report focuses on several ETHOS Light categories:

• people living rough, including those sleeping on the street;
• people staying in emergency shelters;
• people living in accommodations intended for homeless people, such as hostels or temporary housing;
• people living in non-conventional dwellings;
• people staying temporarily with relatives or friends because they have no housing of their own.

ETHOS Light also recognizes people who are about to leave institutions—such as prisons, hospitals, or residential facilities—without having anywhere suitable to live. Although the Ukrainian study was unable to survey this group directly, it examines how discharge from institutions can become a pathway into homelessness.

This framework shifts attention away from a single question—“Where did you sleep last night?”—toward a more revealing one: “Do you have a secure and adequate home to which you can return?”

A Narrower Definition in Ukrainian Law

Ukrainian law uses a more restrictive definition. It generally describes a homeless person as someone who has no place of residence and is not living in residential premises.

This can leave many forms of severe housing insecurity outside the official picture. A person temporarily sleeping on a friend’s sofa may technically be inside a residential property, but that does not mean the person has a home. Someone staying for months in emergency accommodation has shelter, but not necessarily stability. A person living in a garage or ruined building may be hidden from public view while remaining exposed to danger, cold, violence, and eviction.

The difference between definitions is not merely academic. How homelessness is defined determines who is counted, who qualifies for assistance, and whose needs are recognized in public policy.

When the definition is too narrow, people often become visible to the system only after their circumstances have deteriorated severely. By then, they may have lost documents, employment, family connections, physical health, and confidence in public institutions.

Where People Experiencing Homelessness Stay

Among the people surveyed in the report, the most frequently reported sleeping arrangement was a shelter, cited by 60 percent of respondents. Another 19 percent were staying with friends or relatives, while 9 percent reported sleeping outdoors—in the street, a park, a building entrance, or another public place. Six percent were living in non-residential premises such as garages, basements, or derelict buildings.

These figures must be interpreted carefully because the interviews took place primarily in shelters, service centers, and near food distribution sites. People already connected with services were therefore more likely to be included than those living entirely outside assistance networks.

Even so, the results show that homelessness takes multiple forms. Women, for example, were less likely than men to report sleeping in shelters and more likely to stay with acquaintances or relatives. Former prisoners and people without anyone to rely on faced a greater risk of sleeping outdoors or in non-residential buildings.

Staying with another household can protect someone from the immediate dangers of the street, but such arrangements may be overcrowded, dependent on personal relationships, and vulnerable to ending without warning. They can also remain invisible to government services and community organizations.

A borrowed sofa is safer than a sidewalk, but it is not a permanent solution.

When Emergency Accommodation Becomes Long-Term Housing

Emergency shelters are intended to provide immediate protection. They are not designed to become permanent homes. Yet the report found that many people remain within temporary systems for months or even years because they have no realistic route into affordable or social housing.

Sixty-six percent of respondents had experienced a period of relatively stable emergency or temporary accommodation lasting at least three consecutive months during the previous year. Among those who had stayed somewhere continuously, shelters remained the principal location.

This apparent stability can be misleading. A person may sleep in the same shelter for an extended period but still lack privacy, legal security, independence, and the freedom to build an ordinary daily life. The person remains dependent on emergency provision because no permanent alternative is available.

The report concludes that many people are effectively trapped in temporary accommodations, not because they reject permanent housing, but because Ukraine lacks sufficient social housing and effective pathways from emergency support to a stable home.

More than half of the people surveyed—54 percent—said they currently needed emergency or temporary accommodation. The need was especially high among former prisoners, people without supportive relationships, people with disabilities, and internally displaced people.

Displacement and Homelessness Are Related—but Not Identical

The full-scale invasion has displaced millions of Ukrainians. Many have lost homes through destruction, occupation, or forced flight. Yet the report does not automatically classify every internally displaced person as homeless.

Many displaced people have secured stable rented housing, moved permanently into another home, or found sustainable accommodation with relatives. Displacement alone, therefore, does not necessarily mean homelessness.

At the same time, the boundary between displacement and homelessness can be extremely fragile. Internally displaced people may exhaust their savings, lose temporary employment, struggle to meet rising rental costs, or find that relatives can no longer accommodate them. Language differences, unfamiliarity with local services, disability, age, and trauma may further complicate their efforts to establish a stable life in a new community.

The study found that 40 percent of the homeless respondents were internally displaced people. Among the entire sample, 46 percent said that military action or occupation was the principal reason they had lost their permanent residence. The proportion rose to 84 percent among internally displaced respondents.

The researchers intentionally excluded people living in collective centers and other temporary accommodations specifically created for internally displaced populations. Some international experts might place at least some of these situations within a broad definition of homelessness, particularly when residents have no secure path toward permanent housing. The report, however, treats them as a separate category within Ukraine’s wartime context.

This methodological decision means that the study’s homelessness estimates should not be interpreted as encompassing the full scale of wartime displacement or housing insecurity.

The Blurring of “New” and “Traditional” Homelessness

Experts interviewed for the report describe an increasingly blurred distinction between those who became homeless because of the war and people who had already experienced long-term social exclusion.

At the beginning of the invasion, a newly displaced person might have arrived at a service center with documents, personal belongings, recent employment experience, and active family relationships. After months or years without stable housing, however, those differences may gradually disappear.

Savings are exhausted. Documents are lost or damaged. Health deteriorates. Relationships weaken. Temporary jobs become harder to maintain. Repeated rejection can undermine trust and motivation.

The report notes that people who lost their homes because of the war may eventually become outwardly indistinguishable from those commonly described as “traditional” homeless people. This makes their wartime history less visible and can reinforce the false impression that their situation resulted from personal choices rather than displacement, destruction, poverty, or institutional failure.

The distinction may also create an unfair hierarchy of compassion. Society can be tempted to view someone who recently lost a home in a missile attack as more deserving than a person who has lived in a shelter for years. Yet both need dignity, safety, housing, and sustained support.

The report warns against separating homeless people, homeless veterans, and homeless internally displaced people into competing categories. Their experiences are interconnected expressions of the same wartime housing crisis.

Why Language Matters

Words shape the way society responds.

When homelessness is understood only as sleeping outdoors, people in shelters, unstable rooms, abandoned buildings, or temporary family arrangements can disappear from view. When it is described as a lifestyle, an individual failure, or an identity, society may overlook the sequence of events that caused a person to lose housing.

A more accurate understanding recognizes homelessness as a housing and social condition, not a defining characteristic of the person experiencing it.

The phrase “a person experiencing homelessness” emphasizes that the situation can change. It does not reduce an individual to the place where he or she slept last night. It also reminds institutions that homelessness should not become permanent simply because someone has remained outside stable housing for a long time.

Recognizing the Full Human Reality

For the Vincentian Family, understanding the breadth of homelessness is essential to responding effectively. The Vincentian approach has never been limited to offering immediate relief while ignoring the circumstances that keep a person in poverty.

Street outreach, food, clothing, and emergency shelter remain indispensable. But someone staying temporarily with relatives may need help before that arrangement collapses. A person in a shelter may need legal assistance and permanent housing rather than another year of emergency accommodation. An internally displaced family may need rental support before debt and eviction push it into homelessness.

Seeing homelessness early creates the possibility of preventing it from becoming prolonged.

In wartime Ukraine, a home cannot be understood simply as a roof. It is a place of safety, continuity, privacy, belonging, and hope. Recognizing the many ways in which people can lose that security is the first step toward ensuring that emergency refuge becomes not a permanent destination, but a bridge toward a home of one’s own.

Image © DePaul Group.