Assistance from the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation for Mariupol Residents Evacuated to Zaporizhzhya Continues

Every day and every hour, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation continues to help those who need it most. Since the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, thousands of IDPs from Mariupol have had to leave their homes and evacuate to a safe place in Zaporizhzhya.

For the second week in a row, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation has been delivering humanitarian aid for IDPs from Mariupol to Metinvest’s Green Centre in Zaporizhzhya. The Foundation is currently delivering another batch of more than a thousand food assistance packages.
 
Overall, the Foundation’s volunteers have distributed more than 6,000 packages to evacuees from Mariupol. The assistance from the Foundation includes the most necessary food products, such as flour, pasta, sugar, stewed meat, pate and biscuits.
 
‘The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation has been active in the field of charity for many years, and in times difficult for the whole country this help will be even more significant. The assistance that is being provided currently will be sufficient for all people. We are ready to accept a large number. Everything is in stock. The only thing is people need to come to us and receive these packages. And, of course, we need the war to end,’ said Oleksandr Balaba, head of Metinvest’s Green Centre civil society union in Zaporizhzhya.

In addition, IDPs continue to receive psychological support from the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation on a daily basis. Skilled psychologists, experts in crisis psychology and in overcoming traumatic experiences work with both adults and children. Their task is to provide urgent psychological assistance to people who have just got out of hot spots. About 300 evacuees, that is, almost one in ten persons, turned to the Foundation’s psychologists for help.
 
Back in 2014, the Foundation was the first to provide psychological support to residents of Donbass. Then, the Foundation trained 250 psychologists under the War Trauma course for the first time. As a result, more than 60,000 people in the east of the country received psychological support. Today, the expertise that the Foundation developed is needed for the whole country.
 
The assistance is provided under the program Rinat Akhmetov – Saving Lives. During 16 years of its work, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation helped eight million people survive, three and a half million of them were saved in Donbass.