On 24 March Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mariin Ratnik laid the cornerstone for an apartment building for internally displaced persons in the small town of Brusyliv in Ukraine, to be constructed in cooperation between Estonia and Japan.
The social housing building, comprising 18 apartments, will be built in Brusyliv in Zhytomyr Oblast, where the population has increased by 40% due to the arrival of internally displaced persons since the start of the full-scale war. “Estonians know well what it means to be forced to leave one’s home due to occupation and war. By building this apartment block for internally displaced persons, we are giving these people a new opportunity to feel at home again – something that the invasion by Russian forces has taken from them,” Undersecretary Ratnik said in her address to the residents of Brusyliv. “Estonia is not merely building four walls, but giving Ukrainians the confidence that they are not alone in this war.”
According to Ratnik, Estonia is at the forefront globally in Ukraine’s reconstruction, and its success stories are encouraging other countries to participate in projects. “This also has an important impact on Estonian companies’ access to the Ukrainian market. With the Ukraine Recovery Conference to be held in Estonia next year, we will once again demonstrate how a small country can achieve great things,” Ratnik said.
“Estonia is contributing to the development of the town of Brusyliv through development cooperation, as the town has demonstrated strategic readiness to address the needs of internally displaced persons,” Ratnik added. For Brusyliv, this is the third time it has had to deal with internally displaced persons – the first wave arrived after the Chernobyl disaster, the second with the war that began in 2014, and the third and largest with the full-scale war that began in 2022.
Ukraine is a priority country in Estonia’s development cooperation, and Zhytomyr Oblast is the region where Estonia’s key reconstruction projects are located. “At the beginning of the war, Zhytomyr Oblast received approximately 126,000 war refugees, of whom around 56,000 have remained in the region.” This is the second apartment building for internally displaced persons that Estonia has built in this region of Ukraine.
The social housing building is being constructed as a joint project between the Estonian Centre for International Development (ESTDEV) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). On the Estonian side, construction is being carried out by Harmet OÜ and Nordecon, and the building will be the first three-storey wooden structure of its kind.
