Nearly a year after Russia launched a war for the full invasion of Ukraine, the UN on Wednesday appealed for $5.6 billion to help the millions of people who have been affected inside and outside this war-torn country.
The situation for many people in Ukraine remains desperate, under “incessant” shelling of civilian targets and infrastructure, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told reporters in Geneva.
The funding is needed to continue to support the delivery of vital humanitarian aid to communities on the front lines,”the areas of greatest danger and difficulty and with priority needs”, said Griffiths, who heads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
help under fire
Griffthis described how UN country team personnel had traveled from Dnipro on Tuesday in six truckloads of supplies to the eastern Donetsk region, some 200 kilometers away, to provide aid to two villages located in “the worst part in those war zones (…) people living under daily bombardments, daily attacks, bombed houses, icy cold and electricity problems.”
To continue carrying out this lifesaving work, the head of OCHA made an appeal for a value of $3.9 billion to help the 11.1 million of the 18 million people who need assistance humanitarian inside Ukraine.
Officially called the Humanitarian Response Plan for Ukraine, the appeal includes more than 650 partners, most of them Ukrainian organisations.
Funding for refugees
Parallel to the call from OCHA, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has also requested $1.7 billion to help Ukrainian refugees in 10 host countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
The High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, warned against complacency about what is happening in Ukraine. “I think we’re getting a little used to this; We should notbecause it’s quite appalling what the Russian invasion is doing to the country,” he said.
Describing a recent official visit to Ukraine, the UNHCR official said that in the year since Russian battlegroups crossed the border on February 24, 2022, Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure has continued to come under constant attack, leaving “day care centers devastated and elderly living in basements due to the danger of bombing“.
Support for health, education and employment
Refugees from the conflict have every intention of returning to Ukraine at some point, Grandi continued, but until that happens, he said Tuesday’s Response Plan appeal will continue to help the millions of people outside their country and the hundreds of organizations working with the UN on the ground.
In particular, the funding will support the health and nutrition services, education, livelihoods and temporary protectionexplained the High Commissioner.
“The Ukrainian refugee crisis – a displacement crisis – remains the biggest in the world, clearly,” he said. “It is estimated that there are almost six million internally displaced persons. In addition, refugees in Europe who have registered for temporary protection are already close to five million (4.8 million), although we know that many more have not been registered”.
As violence is reported to have escalated in the east of the country, according to the latest UN estimates, more than 7,000 civilians have been killed and 12,000 injured in Ukraine in the past year.
“This is almost certainly an underestimate,” Griffiths said.
Asked about the efforts led by the UN to guarantee the extension of the agreement for the supply of fertilizers and food from Ukraine and Russia to the many countries that need them around the world, the veteran official insisted that “the Global South and international food security need this operation to continue“.
More than 21.3 million tons of corn, wheat, oil and other foodstuffs have been shipped across the Black Sea as part of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which must continue, said the Emergency Relief Coordinator of the ONU.
I assure you that you hope and believe that the agreement will be extended. “It’s an obvious deal for international humanitarian security,” he added.
Wiped cities off the map
Within Ukraine, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has stated that the scale of destruction in the south and east has been massive, to the point that a senior aid worker from the agency stated in an interview with UN News that some cities “don’t even exist anymore”.
“We see heavy fighting on both sides (of the contact line),” said an IOM representative, Johannes Fromholt, describing how some towns were “full of military personnel and equipment.”
Amid an uptick in violence in the east, Fromholt explained that some civilians have managed to flee Donetsk province to the more central city of Znamyanka, where IOM is helping repair collective shelters for new arrivals.
For those unable to flee, the situation remains desperate.
“On the front lines, (the conflict) is actually getting worse, with fighting increasing by the day,” Fromholt said. “So people just have to stay in the basements of the shelters where, of course, it’s cold. There is no electricity in these areas on the front line.”
