Social assistance and psychological counseling in Ukraine against the backdrop of Russian armed aggression

Abstract

The work aims to analyze the specifics of social assistance and psychological counseling against the background of the spread of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The object of the work is psychological aid to servicemen, children, internally displaced persons, and general peculiarities of psychological counseling development in Ukraine against the background of Russian aggression. The work uses general scientific methods of research: axiological, comparative, historical, systematic, and others. The results consider the structural changes in relation to psychology and the organization of psychological help that took place in Ukraine after 2014. Particular attention is paid to the coverage of the peculiarities of assistance to children affected by war. Active hostilities affect the disruption of children's habitual life: they begin to experience fear, anxiety, and despair at the level of adults. Such conditions need correction by specialists. The paper also considers the problem of support for servicemen - veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It is concluded that since the beginning of the full-scale Russian offensive (February 2022) there has been an urgent need for psychological help for many categories of the population: internally displaced persons, children, servicemen. It is noted that Russian aggression has changed the system of psychological assistance, in particular, due to the involvement of certain American models of psychological rehabilitation.