HOMELESSNESS in Ukraine was highlighted when the Roman Catholic Depaul group of charities marked 35 years in existence last week.

The charities’ Ukrainian branch reported, on 24 September, on the situation of the country’s homeless people. Homelessness is exacerbated by the ongoing war with Russia, its report concludes: people internally displaced by the fighting make up almost one quarter of those sleeping rough or in emergency shelters.

The charity describes its report as the most comprehensive report on homelessness in Ukraine so far. It draws on interviews with 234 people who were homeless of at risk of being so.

Homelessness-prevention services in Ukraine are “alarmingly limited”, the report says, and “the extent and composition of services nationwide” are not enough to meet current needs.

Depaul’s research suggests that rough-sleepers in Ukraine are “functionally excluded from almost all forms of assistance they need”; it recommends collaboration between charitable organisations and the government to bring about systemic change.

On Thursday of last week, Depaul Ukraine’s chief executive, Anka Skoryk, said: “The full-scale invasion has changed everything in our country. We noticed that more and more people had lost their homes, and a lot of people were displaced because they tried to flee military actions. Thanks to the support we received, thanks to all our donors, we scaled up our operations and we started the humanitarian response.”

To address the problem, charities and government agencies needed to co-operate more closely, said Ms Skoryk, who was speaking on the sidelines of an event in the House of Lords held to mark Depaul’s 35th birthday.

The group’s president, Mark McGreevy, paid tribute to the breadth of the work done by seven independent charities operating within the group, based in the UK, Ireland, France, Croatia, Slovakia, the United States, and Ukraine.

It was established out of three organisations, including the Daughters of Charity, a religious order founded by St Vincent de Paul in 1633.

Baroness Casey, a crossbench peer whose career has been in homelessness prevention, is an ambassador for Depaul International, and said: “What we need as human beings is a safe place that we can call home.” She emphasised the importance of international action.

The United Nations adopted a formal definition of homelessness in 2021, and Lady Casey said that this would not have happened without the work of countries in the global South.

Now, the ambition was to incorporate homelessness prevention in the UN’s updated Sustainable Development Goals, she said, as, in her experience, setting measurable targets was the key to making progress. “If you don’t count it, it isn’t seen, and if it isn’t seen, it doesn’t become a target,” she said.