In June 2022, the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs launched a crisis assistance hotline for veterans and their family members. Since then, in six months of work, more than seven thousand calls have already been received. The project is planned to be scaled up in 2023.
12 experienced psychologists work on the hotline at 0 800 33 20 29. The work format is 24/7. Without weekends and holidays.
Sometimes just one phone call can provide relief, support and at least some confidence in tomorrow.
Psychologists say that appeals to the hotline are very different: guys call at night from the frontline just to “speak out” about their fear. Girls call when waiting and fear for a loved one eats unbearably from the inside. Parents who do not know how their relatives are in captivity and parents who lost sons or daughters in the war. People also call during massive shelling, when it is difficult to overcome panic and you need someone to be there, even if it is someone on the other side of the phone.
“There was a call from the wife of a soldier who is at the frontline. We talked with her and at the end she said something very important: “If I had known that it would get better for me, I would have called much earlier,” says Tetyana, a psychologist at the crisis support hotline of the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation.
The services of the hotline are used by relatives and friends of defense veterans, relatives of the dead, military personnel undergoing rehabilitation.
“I really wanted to be useful to our common cause of defending our state and supporting people in a difficult moment of their lives, in the places where they are now, because we are approached from different parts of the front and from all over Ukraine, and this is very important,” she says. psychologist Olena.
The hardest thing was when people told about the horrors they experienced – Azovstal, Mariupol, Kharkiv. How they ran away, how they survived this experience. I talked to my psychotherapist. Because it is, by the way, very difficult to listen to,” Tetyana, a psychologist at the UVF hotline, shares her work experience.
“My slogan is: “A person needs a person“. I see the great value of our line in this, that a person can get support anywhere in Ukraine, wherever he is, just a phone call away,” explains psychologist Nadiya.
The project is implemented with the assistance of the “Ukrainian Rapid Response Fund” program, implemented by IREX with the support of the US State Department.
