Fifty dollars. While in many parts of the world consumers regularly plunk down the sum on a nice pair of jeans, in Ukraine it can mean a month’s worth of food staples, said Jerusalem-based head of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Ukraine desk Oksana Galkevich.
This reality is a far cry from the headily optimistic days of February 2014 when Ukraine’s progressive Euromaidan Revolution forced a changeover in government from a corrupt pro-Russian head of state to a Ukrainian nationalist. But war came quickly: The Crimean peninsula was annexed by Russia in March 2014 and by April, 40,000 pro-Russian separatist forces entered the self-declared Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, areas of Ukraine bordering Russia.
Though there are tenuous cease fire agreements — most recently in February — civil unrest continues on the eastern border where 6,000 have been killed and, as of March 2015, some 1,168,600 are displaced in this year of rebel fighting.