<\/p>\n
Whenever warm days come to Kramatorsk, near the eastern Ukrainian front, the Svitanok organisation leaves its door wide open, offering advice or a cup of tea to the city’s social outcasts.<\/p>\n
People living with HIV, those recovering from drug addiction, sex workers — all are welcome to seek medical guidance and respite from stigma and solace as Russian troops advance toward Kramatorsk.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The refuge they find at Svitanok is vital during the war, when marginalised communities often feel left behind and face heightened insecurity and stigma.<\/p>\n
“They support me here, they respect me. I just came to drink some tea. They’ll treat me, I know they’ll accept me,” says Oleg Makaria, who is HIV-positive.<\/p>\n
Makaria, who comes to Svitanok most days, hardly reacts to the air raid sirens once again wailing in Kramatorsk, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the front.<\/p>\n
The 41-year-old jokes that he does not look his age. But he suddenly breaks down thinking about Donetsk, his home city now in Russian hands.<\/p>\n
“I understand I can’t return to Donetsk anymore. Never in my life. Probably… I’m here alone,” he mutters through tears.<\/p>\n
Moscow-backed separatists seized parts of the Donetsk region in 2014, a prelude to the Kremlin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, which the UNHCR says has displaced nearly 11 million people.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The conflict disrupted treatment — which needs to be taken daily to control HIV — to some of the 250,000 Ukrainians estimated by UNAIDS to be living with the infection in 2020.<\/p>\n
Advances from Russian troops have also threatened drug treatment programmes.<\/p>\n
Moscow and its proxies have banned opioid substitution, which replaces dangerous opioids with less harmful substances such as methadone.<\/p>\n
Approved by the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, the treatment also reduces HIV transmission as it lowers drug injections.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
No one would guess looking at Natalia Zelenina, but the bright social worker sporting a red bob and bright pink lipstick spent five years in Russian custody.<\/p>\n
She was carrying legally prescribed drugs for her replacement therapy when she was stopped by Moscow-backed separatists controlling parts of the Donetsk region in 2017.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I realised how strong I was,” the 52-year-old said.<\/p>\n
While her colleagues campaigned to get her out, she fought to obtain treatment for her HIV.<\/p>\n
“I survived, I endured it all. I went through it all. I didn’t break,” she said.<\/p>\n
After being released to Kyiv-controlled territory in a prisoner exchange, Zelenina returned to Svitanok.<\/p>\n
“I knew that I could only recover in a familiar atmosphere,” she says.<\/p>\n
But even in the protective bubble of Svitanok, where most workers have HIV and a drug dependency, the boom of explosions can be heard in the distance.<\/p>\n
One employee told AFP she started consuming “just a little bit” of drugs to alleviate her anxiety — until her colleagues helped her get clean again.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Iryna Mamalakieva arrives holding her four-year-old son Maksym, who wobbled off at any opportunity to pick dandelions on a patch of grass.<\/p>\n
The unemployed 31-year-old former mine operator, diagnosed with HIV in 2019, relies on Svitanok for medical and legal help.<\/p>\n
“Some people give up, some hang themselves. I knew people like that: They found out about their diagnosis, and even if they had children, they drank themselves to death and quietly went to hang themselves,” she said.<\/p>\n
The war has exacerbated stigma towards HIV-positive people and those suffering from drug addictions, counsellor Svitlana Andreieva told AFP.<\/p>\n
“The rest of the world that’s outside our doors, it tells them that they are nobody, that they’re not accepted, they’re not respected,” she said.<\/p>\n
Andreieva herself remembers being kicked out of hospitals and beaten up by the police because she was addicted to drugs and HIV-positive.<\/p>\n
Then she learned law, which she shares with visitors who went through similar experiences.<\/p>\n
“The next time they don’t come with tears,” she said. “They say: ‘What do I need to do, which law article should I rely on?'”<\/p>\n
But Andreieva’s patience is often tested.<\/p>\n
After an altercation with a regular, she finds a bouquet of lilacs in lieu of apologies in the office.<\/p>\n
Hard to win over, she initially shrugs it off.<\/p>\n
But Svitanok’s workers and beneficiaries face yet another hurdle: cuts in US humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n
Svitanok has for now survived Washington’s aid freeze, but is scrambling to find alternative sources of funding for some of its many programmes, which partly rely on US money.<\/p>\n
The uncertainty “really knocked me out of my stability”, Zelenina says.<\/p>\n
“There’s such a melancholy in my soul, you know? I love my job. I simply can’t imagine what I will do tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n \n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Svitanok: Whenever warm days come to Kramatorsk, near the eastern Ukrainian front, the Svitanok organisation leaves its door wide open, offering advice or a cup of tea to the city’s social outcasts. People living with HIV, those recovering from drug addiction, sex workers — all are welcome to seek medical guidance and respite from stigma […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4847,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions\/4847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}