Life in limbo: Millions of people displaced inside Ukraine wait and hope

Tania Meleshchenko lives in hope.

She hopes to one day be able to go home to Svatove, Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine.

More immediately, she hopes to make contact with her parents in the Russian-occupied town, located along the Krasna River.

The former local water commission employee's wide grey eyes brimmed with tears as she described how she and her son were forced to flee alone at the end of August last year. They travelled almost 400 kilometres to reach the wide, smooth Dnipro River and the relative safety of the city of Dnipro.

'We are exhausted," Meleshchenko told CBC News at a shelter for internally displaced people, one of dozens in the city.

"My child at first asked me, why did the Russians invade us? What do I need to tell him? I don't know why Russia did such terrible things to us. My child asked me a really adult question but he is only eight years old.

"He asked me when we would come home. But I don't even have answers. I'm not sure if we still have a home."

Meleshchenko doesn't even know if she has a family to go back to. Her father was the local water commission manager; he and other municipal officials in the region were ordered to exchange their Ukrainian documents and passports for Russian ones. When he refused, he "disappeared" last spring for several days and eventually turned up alive in a pit near the town.

Meleshchenko has not spoken to her father or her mother — who could not leave home because of a medical condition — for more than five months.

"The only thing I want is to hear their voices," she said.

Her husband managed to escape and join them in Dnipro. Now reunited in the shelter, they have started to search for work and an apartment.

While much of the world's attention on Ukraine's refugee crisis remains focused on those who've fled to other nations, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recently reported that 5.3 million Ukrainians are displaced within their own country because of the war.

Many of them, such as Meleshchenko, have fled only a few hundred kilometres and now wait anxiously in nearby cities for the fighting to end.

Unemployed and often living in shelters, they present a humanitarian crisis in the making as the war enters its second year. They also represent an economic crisis the Ukrainian government is struggling to address.