Supporting the towns that took people in

Most displaced Ukrainians did not go abroad. They went to another part of Ukraine, and overwhelmingly to towns in the centre and west that had not planned for them.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A town of thirty thousand that receives eight thousand people has a school system, a clinic, a water treatment plant, a sewerage network and a housing stock designed for thirty thousand. Every one of those is now running at a quarter over capacity, and none of them can be expanded in a season.

Why individual assistance was not enough

Cash to a displaced family is necessary and it does not create a school place. If assistance goes only to the arrivals, the host community absorbs the cost in longer queues, larger classes and slower services — and resentment follows, which is how a well-intentioned response damages the social fabric it was meant to protect.

What was funded instead

Classrooms and teachers in receiving schools. Equipment and staff for clinics. Water and sewerage capacity. Repair of vacant housing stock — old dormitories, empty apartment blocks, unused public buildings — into habitable accommodation. Municipal budgets topped up so a community head could act rather than petition.

This is unglamorous and it is the difference between integration and friction. I have seen towns in the centre of the country absorb a fifth of their own population and come out of it with better services than they had before, because the money that arrived was spent on the town rather than distributed through it.