Legal aid under fire: how the Eastern Human Rights Center in Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast, operates

Publication date: October 6, 2025

Author: Yuliia Bilyk, Communications Manager, Legal Development Network

The Eastern Human Rights Center is a member organization of the Legal Development Network from the city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk Oblast, established in 2022. Even before its official registration, the team provided free legal assistance. The founder and head of the organization, Oleksandr Kadievskyi, a professional lawyer and attorney, has been working pro bono since 2014, defending the rights of military personnel, veterans, and their family members, as well as internally displaced persons.

After the start of the full-scale invasion, the head of the organization himself joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This experience allowed him to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of military personnel and assess their problems from within.

Along with Oleksandr Kadievskyi, two lawyers and an attorney currently work in the Eastern Human Rights Center team. Thanks to flexible funding received through the Legal Development Network from the international charity platform GlobalGiving, the organization was able to overcome the difficult start of 2025, retain its team, and continue its work.

The Eastern Human Rights Center continues to focus on providing legal assistance to people affected by the war. The team considers any Ukrainian citizen to fall into this category, regardless of their place of residence or the extent to which they have been affected by the war. At the same time, a significant proportion of those seeking assistance continue to be servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, veterans, and their family members. Despite the daily deterioration of the security situation in Kramatorsk, the organization continues to find opportunities to provide the city’s residents with free legal assistance.

“We continue to provide legal assistance within Kramatorsk to some extent. However, residents are now less likely to come to us in person due to the military conflict that has been ongoing in Donetsk Oblast for over ten years. The majority of our clients are now residents of Donetsk region who have moved to Lviv region. We provide them with offline consultations in Lviv, as well as remote consultations, including abroad,” says Marina Kuprikova, a lawyer with the Eastern Human Rights Center.

According to the lawyer, the military threat is becoming increasingly apparent in Kramatorsk. This is forcing many people who had returned after evacuation to leave the city again. As a result, lawyers are receiving more frequent inquiries regarding evacuation and the search for safe housing in other regions of Ukraine.

Residents of Donetsk region also often need advice on claiming compensation for destroyed or damaged property, restoring lost documents, and registering their homes in state registers. Military personnel, in turn, are asking about social guarantees, the possibility of transferring to another military unit, or returning to service after leaving their unit without permission.

During the three summer months of 2025, the Eastern Human Rights Center team, as part of a project implemented with the support of the Legal Development Network and GlobalGiving, advised a total of 160 citizens on various legal issues. Almost all of them belong to the category of internally displaced persons (IDPs). In addition, the NGO team held three legal awareness events, which were attended by over 60 participants. Although the threat of shelling sometimes requires changing the time and place of educational events several times, the organization tries to hold them directly in temporary accommodation facilities for IDPs.

“We are invited by hubs, centers, and spaces for IDPs to hold events and explain certain legal issues. In other words, we clearly focus on the requests of people that will resonate with the community. At various times, the most popular topics for explanation were issues related to benefits and guarantees for internally displaced persons, amendments to Resolution No. 332 on living allowances (Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine “Certain Issues of Living Allowances for Internally Displaced Persons” — Author), subsidies for housing rent, compensation for damaged/destroyed housing, and work with the International Register of Damage,” says Marina Kuprikova.

While helping displaced persons and other vulnerable groups, the NGO itself has to overcome life challenges. The team members are internally displaced persons themselves, forced to live and work in several cities. In 2025, when the suspension of funding for a significant portion of USAID projects was announced, the Eastern Human Rights Center was able to continue its work and retain its team thanks to timely support from GlobalGiving.

“Even in the absence of funding, we did not stop working for a single day, but this could not go on indefinitely. You can continue to provide pro bono legal assistance on your own—that’s your choice. But you can’t force the team working alongside you to do the same. GlobalGiving’s support played an important role in our continued work,” notes Marina Kuprikova.

The scope and pace of assistance provided by the Eastern Human Rights Center is of significant importance, particularly for residents of the Donetsk region.

“The best thing about our organization is the experience we have gained over decades of work, our reputation, and the cases we have won on behalf of our clients. Many people come back to us repeatedly: for example, they came to us in 2020, in 2022, and are coming back now,” says the NGO’s lawyer.

The organization began its work in 2014, when there were already about 50,000 displaced persons from the then-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Kramatorsk, but the war was not yet so noticeable for the rest of the country. Even then, the NGO team administered the reception office of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union in Kramatorsk, worked with IDPs, and, as a result, established its expertise in the field.

“Our contacts were passed from one person to another. Therefore, when the full-scale invasion shook the whole of Ukraine, we already had a large number of clients whom we had helped before. Some of them were displaced for the second time. And we tried to help each and every one of them. After moving to Lviv in 2022, I visited all the temporary settlements for IDPs and left my contact details. And so, in our new location, we began to find people for whom our help was relevant and useful,” says Marina Kuprikova.

Among the NGO’s clients are residents of Donetsk region who were evacuated due to the war to different regions of Ukraine and abroad. The Eastern Human Rights Center is well known and recognized by the residents of Donetsk region, wherever they may be. However, the organization maintains the closest ties with its hometown.

“Our organization has a strong foundation in Kramatorsk. We cooperate with local authorities on the basis of signed memoranda and have implemented projects to monitor the work of local self-government bodies and advocacy. We are well known and therefore trusted,” says Marina Kuprikova.

Given the security challenges, it is difficult for the Eastern Human Rights Center to plan even for the immediate future. Therefore, the team is focused on the present and on its human rights work, which is a source of support for many people.

This material was created by the Legal Development Network with the support of the international charitable platform GlobalGiving. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the Legal Development Network.

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