The UN refugee agency is holding a photo exhibition at a museum in Kyiv, featuring works highlighting the support that the agency has been giving people displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees launched the exhibition on June 20, which has been designated World Refugee Day by the UN.
The exhibition features 30 photos depicting the agency’s 30 years of work in Ukraine.
One of the photos, taken in 2022 after the start of the invasion, shows a mother carrying two babies and walking across the border to Hungary.
Another photo taken in the southern region of Odesa shows children drawing pictures of the land of their dreams. The agency provides the children with mental health care.
The exhibition also highlights the support that the agency gave the ethnic Crimean Tatars, who returned to their native land in southern Ukraine in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. They had been deported to Central Asia by the Soviet administration of Joseph Stalin in the 1940s. A picture shows children studying in a school that was repaired with the agency’s assistance.
The UNHCR Representative in Ukraine, Karolina Billing, said nearly 15 million people in Ukraine are in need of humanitarian support. Billing said: “There is always a risk that with time, people forget. And there are new crises like the one in Gaza that the focus is on. So I think we have a responsibility to highlight that the war continues.”
She added, “There are people who are being killed, injured, having their homes destroyed.” She also said, “We will be here for as long as the people need us.”