Six Million Uprooted – The New York Times

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Six million uprooted

When Hanna Obuzhevanna fled her home in eastern Ukraine, she thought she would be back in a few weeks. Three months later, she is still living with her two sons in an abandoned hotel in central Ukraine. Her hometown, Kreminna, is under Russian control.

“I am sitting in someone else’s damp room,” she said. “I am wearing someone else’s sweater. I miss my home so much. But there is no way I will go back there if there are Russian occupiers.”

About one-third of Ukraine’s population has been forced from their homes, including more than 6.27 million people who are displaced inside the country, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Helping the displaced return to their homes — or find new ones — is shaping up as a huge challenge, whatever the outcome of the war, my colleagues Emma Bubola and Megan Specia report.

Most of the displaced are now coming from the east, which has become the center of the fighting. On trains and buses, civilians have poured out of cities and towns, fleeing for the relative safety of the west and the capital, Kyiv.

In the east, the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk have become a hollow prize as the Russian and Ukrainian armies fight over largely abandoned fields and streets. Many of the area’s towns are ruined, its factories destroyed and its population depleted.

This mass displacement has reshaped communities across the country. Shelters have sprung up in public buildings, university dorms have been converted, and some modular homes have been set up to house the displaced.

The majority of those who have fled are women and children, in need of food, water and basic necessities. Many have started to fear they will never go back.

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The downfall of Russia’s coolest company

Yandex was a rare Russian business success story — the equivalent of Google, Uber, Spotify and Amazon rolled into one. But then came the war, and with it a precipitous decline that is emblematic of the economic and cultural troubles spawned by the invasion, Neil MacFarquhar reports.

Yandex’s market value plunged by 80 percent, to less than $7 billion, in only a few months as Western investors fled and sanctions hit the Russian economy. Nasdaq suspended trading in Yandex’s shares. The company’s founder, Arkady Volozh, and his top deputy stepped away from the company after facing E.U. sanctions.

About a sixth of its work force in Russia, or 2,500 employees, have fled the country.

Besides running what the company has claimed to be the country’s top search engine, Yandex also ran one of Russia’s largest news aggregation sites, drawing around 50 million visitors a day before the war. Executives and users had come to accept the Kremlin’s version of news sources, but with the invasion, Yandex quickly became the butt of jokes.

“Yandex was like an island of freedom in Russia, and I don’t know how it can continue,” said Elena Bunina, a math professor whose five-year tenure as Yandex’s C.E.O. ended in April, when she emigrated to Israel.

How the war changed your worldview

I thought that Russia was moving gradually toward a country with Western values of enlightenment and liberal views and that the old guard of Russia could not stop this move. Now I am terrified by Putin and his entourage and the paralysis of the Russian people. If one adds up the dangerous and lunatic leaders of China and North Korea, I am very concerned. I am so concerned that I think that NATO has no choice but to intervene in Ukraine and demand from Russia to withdraw from Ukraine except perhaps for Crimea. — Alberto Gabizon, Jerusalem

I became more and more pessimistic. The arrival of my second granddaughter makes me fear for the world she will have. I have installed a backup generator for my home because the electrical grid is vulnerable to cyberwarfare. — Irwin Levinstein, Norfolk, Va.

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