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There are No Humanitarian Solutions to Humanitarian Problems
Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 22 sent shockwaves around the world. More than 11
million people have been displaced, including two-thirds of Ukraine's children.1 Of that, nearly
four million have fled to neighboring countries, including Hungary, Moldova, and Poland. A
total of 2,685 civilian deaths during Russia's military attack on Ukraine as of April 13, 2022.
Finally, 2,613 people were reported to have been injured, according to the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR ) 2
However, Volodymyr Dubovyk, professor of international relations at Mechnikov National
University in Odessa, Ukraine, believes the number of displaced persons is much higher.
“Western Ukraine is full of people from eastern, southern and central Ukraine. And I think it's
even an undercount. It may be even more than you just mentioned. I think it's about one-third of
the population of the country which has just been urgently uprooted. And we are talking about
not some small trickling out of population to the west, but a very quick movement of people.”3
Since the end of March, Devex's Funding Platform has recorded more than $12 billion in
commitments related to the country, though not all of that is humanitarian-focused.,
A search of the platform's database reveals more than $1.5 billion of primarily humanitarian
grant funding, allocated by national governments and other funders between Feb. 24 and March
18. Additionally, Devex discovered almost $11 billion in loans and other repayable finance, not
all of which will be spent on aid. However, new pledges of additional assistance are being
received weekly.
European Union
The European Union has already provided €90 million out of a total of €550 million in funding,
to fund food, health care, housing, and other necessities for those most vulnerable in Ukraine and
refugees in Moldova. In addition to humanitarian grant funding, the EU has also provided
hundreds of millions in loans, directly and through the European Investment Bank.
3https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/14/volodymyr_dubovyk_russia_ukraine_war_invasion
2 https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/ukraine-humanitarian-crisis-refugees-aid
1 https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/14/volodymyr_dubovyk_russia_ukraine_war_invasion
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Meanwhile, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is partially owned
by EIB and by the EU and its member countries, has made €2 billion in loan finance available.
United States
The U.S. government has announced a huge package of emergency funding for Ukraine, worth
$13.6 billion, including both military and humanitarian aid. According to the New York Times,
$4.05 billion of that is humanitarian aid, $2.65 billion will be directed to food assistance, health
care, and other aid, while migration and refugee assistance adds up to $1.4 billion.4
As billions of dollars in humanitarian and medical assistance continue to pour into Ukraine,
questions remain about what other strategies are needed to ensure that UkraIne has the resources
it needs to build its future. Looking back in history can provide wisdom gleaned from previous
international refugee resettlement efforts.
In 2005, at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Sedaka Ogata, the former United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights from 1991-2000 argued, “There are no humanitarian solutions
to humanitarian problems. The international community must stop using humanitarian action as a
fig leaf for political inaction,” stressing that strong political will is crucial to prevent a repeat of
crises like the Rwandan genocide.”5
Ogata's prescience was born out of her diplomatic experience leading the refugee agency in
providing hands-on protection of refugees and displaced people in Iraq, the Balkans, Africa's
Great Lakes region and Afghanistan. As such, her words add weight to the burden of the history
of international conflict, providing a cautionary tale for future generations.
In the wake of the war in Ukraine, many in the international aid and development communities
believe that in the nearly two decades since Ogata spoke those prophetic words, that
humanitarian problems have only become worse, while political actors and institutions have
mostly stood on the sidelines.6
6 https://www.concernusa.org/story/humanitarian-action-political-commitment/
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Ogata
4 https://www.devex.com/news/funding-tracker-who-s-sending-aid-to-ukraine-102887
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How can Ogata' s words help the world find a way forward in addressing the political problems
underlying Ukraine's humanitarian crisis? One lesson honors the importance of grassroots
organizing efforts that provide meaningful ways for the people living in war- torn countries to
have a voice at the negotiating table and empower ordinary citizens to assume a sense of agency
through involvement in projects and activities which seek to advance peacemaking and other
social justice efforts.
While there has not been a systematic accounting of grassroots humanitarian aid efforts, stories
of caring and compassion abound. What follows are a few of these stories.
UkraineTake Shelter
In the face of such brutality and suffering the world is watching.For many of us, our impulse is
to want to find a way to help, to make a difference somehow.That's just what Ari Shiffman, a
student att Harvard aimed to do when he and his classmate Marco Burstein. So they set to work
creating a website that matched Ukrainian refugees with hosts in neighboring countries, it took
little more than three days to launch Ukraine Take Shelter. Within 5 days of the launch, business
boomed: more than 4,000 hosts from the U.S. and several other countries around the world
offered a place to stay to Ukrainians.7
Humanitarian Mission to Krakow
Since the war's outbreak there have been countless religious humanitarian missions from all over
the world: One humanitarian mission to Kraków, Poland, drew rabbis from all over the U.S.
collecting funds to donate to the Krakow Jewish Community Center, the largest JCC in Poland to
provide both humanitarian assistance as well as funding to support its the JCC's partners who are
working to provide other forms of relief to the Ukrainian people. I spoke with a member of this
delegation, Rabbi Betsheba Meiri from her home in Asheville. For Rabbi Meiri, besides
strengthening the Kraków ongoing JCC's solidarity work with Ukraine, the mission opened her
eyes to the possibility of Poland's reconciliation efforts blossoming, noting that, “Krakow is in
Auschwitz's back yard.” A She added that during WWII, Poland didn't have the agency to
decide what role it would play in rescuing Jewish and other refugees. She suggested that Poland
was now positioned to reshape its history through its humanitarian efforts housing 2.8 Ukrainian
refugees.8
Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
The international medical aid organization, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) has been delivering urgent medical supplies, training health workers on managing mass
8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5sEI7T-QNs
7https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/03/10/teens-website-ukrainian-refugee-housing/
?fbclid=IwAR0Ke-wz946f3ymo2cpQ7P0I8E7xTLgsxA8brrlUOElZYXKn_OdSUzVbTF8
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casualty incidents, running mobile clinics, and organizing medical evacuations of hospitalized
patients from the east to the west of the country.
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The Forgotten War
Lily Hyde, a journalist and consultant for health and development NGOs based in Kviv, has been
covering the conflict since 2014. Her account reinforces Osata's claims. She argues that despite
all of the international aid and development efforts mobilized to rebuild Ukraine following the
invasion, those responses fell short of what was needed to build infrastructure that would protect
the Ukrainian people.
She writes in The New Humanitarian, “Perhaps it was a mistake we all made, of optimism, or of
naive hope and belief that humanitarian principles can prevail….For eight years, as the conflict
between proxy Russian forces and the Ukrainian army simmered in the Donbas region, the
international aid development communities prepared steadily for peace. In the course of just a
few weeks, almost all their gains have been erased, as Ukraine has been engulfed again by war.
“Even with all the aid infrastructure and capacity they had built since 2014, international
agencies were caught utterly flat-footed when it came to being ready to address the massive,
urgent needs caused by Russia's full-scale invasion. Russia now looks set to concentrate all its
forces on capturing Donbas, and there are no international organisations left on the ground in the
east to provide desperately needed assistance.”10 11
Osata's could have been a character in Hyde's story. It suggests that this absence of political will
to which Osata referred, kept stakeholders within the international aid and development
communities from seeing the big picture and understanding what was needed to rebuild a more
secure Ukraine.
11
Ibid
https://www.cfr.org
10 https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2022/04/11/international-aid-Ukraine
9 https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/how-msf-responding-war
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Hyde continues. ”East Ukraine in summer 2014 was my first experience of war. I was
completely, woefully unprepared for it, shocked by the indiscriminate killing and by the total
collapse of essential services. I visited frontline towns like Mariinka and Krasnohorivka that
were being devastated by ongoing shelling. There was no gas, electricity, or water. People were
living in dank basements, cooking what little food they had outside on fires. I felt as though I'd
gone back to some primitive Dark Ages.
“I travelled with local volunteers – mostly from Protestant churches – who were evacuating
civilians and delivering bread, cheap pasta, and diapers.These aid efforts were often chaotic and
inefficient, and the volunteers took horrendous risks. But they were there, and international aid
agencies were not. That's when I got my first glimpse of how long it takes an international
emergency response to get off the ground.That, too, shocked me.
“The volunteers took horrendous risks. But they were there, and international aid agencies were
not. Within a year, after all the assessments had been done, every aid organisation I'd ever heard
of was in eastern Ukraine. Water tanks were provided to the schools and administration building.
Second-hand clothes donated from all over piled up in the town's House of Culture (a Soviet-era
community centre). Organisations provided firewood, cash assistance, medicines, and legal and
psychological counselling – even the Pope got involved, donating solid fuel stoves.
“But the attention didn't last. By 2016, the annual aid budget requested for eastern Ukraine by
the UN's emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, was underfunded by over 50 percent – a
trend that continued into 2021. Donors, as well as news editors, were less and less interested in
the ongoing suffering of the largely elderly population living without healthcare, public services,
or transport near the line of contact that separated territory held de facto by Russia from that
under Ukrainian control. The conflict in Donbas became “Europe's forgotten war.”
Perhaps one of the lessons learned from Hyde's tale is that amidst the war's heavy collateral
damage and the deplorable lack of funding needed to continue rebuilding her country, the
Ukrainian people have continued to demonstrate their resilience and strength to resist Russia's
domination.
“Actually, Ukraine is showing miracles of resilience these days,” said Volodymyr Dubovyk,
professor of international relations at Mechnikov National University in Odessa, Ukraine. “If
everyone expected it to be unraveling or falling apart — maybe in Moscow they thought that
Ukraine would just fall apart within two or three days of invasion — something contrary
happened to it. I mean, Ukraine is opposite of what you might call a failed nation. Everyone is
doing their job. You know, the government is showing up for work. The military is doing some
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miracles, and others…And what we are seeing here, people are gathering together, helping each
other in times of need.”12
Hyde continues. “Along with humanitarian agencies and donors, the Ukrainian government and
civil society were also starting to think beyond the war and about recovery and peace…The way
to reunite the country was to rebuild a prosperous, peaceful, and free Ukraine as an alternative to
life under Russian control.
“Even in early February 2022, as the warnings became increasingly dire, I mostly witnessed a
sense of surprise from international agencies that the world was finally taking notice of Europe's
“forgotten war.”
“While the aid response stayed underfunded, development banks and foreign government
development agencies put huge funds towards repairing roads and medical, educational, and
social facilities in eastern Ukraine. Organisations and donors coordinated with the Ukrainian
government and local authorities to plan a complete overhaul of regional water supply networks
and a new railway line.
“By 2021, OCHA and the humanitarian clusters had started preparing to withdraw from Ukraine,
looking to hand over programmes to local authorities and community initiative groups they had
nurtured. Donors like USAID and the EU funded multi-year economic and social development
strategies for cities like Mariupol and Kramatorsk, seeking to position them away from Russia
and within the European and global economy.
“No one talked much publicly about conflict escalation and how to prepare for it. Even in early
February 2022, as the warnings became increasingly dire, I mostly witnessed a sense of surprise
from international agencies that the world was finally taking notice of Europe's forgotten war,
accompanied by frustration that the interest was overwhelmingly focused on military
developments, and not civilians.
Erased
“Since late February, 2022, that infrastructure in Donbas that was repaired by humanitarian
programmes, and those buildings that were rebuilt and equipped by development grants, have
been under constant bombardment. The revived and boosted essential services have collapsed.
People are once more sheltering in basements and cooking the little food they have over open
fires. A hospital in Vuhledar had just got new windows when Oleh, the volunteer who first took
me to Mariinka saw them all blown out by a cluster munition on 27 February, killing four
medical workers and wounding six others.
12 https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/14/volodymyr_dubovyk_russia_ukraine_war_invasion
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“While war is now affecting the whole country, the situation in towns in Donbas is worse than it
was in 2014. And the international aid agencies are not there. They halted field programmes in
eastern Ukraine within days, even hours, of the new invasion. Staff who remained in offices in
Kramatorsk, Mariupol, and Severodonetsk are being shelled and blockaded. From new offices
hastily set up in west Ukraine, or over the border in Poland or Slovakia, agencies with an
eight-year history in Ukraine are scrambling to respond to the massive new crisis.
“I recently managed to speak to Oleh. He has been displaced from yet another home by war, but
is still careening along roads under shelling, delivering bread, pasta, and diapers – as if it's 2014
again. After the attack on the hospital in Vuhledar, he helped pick up the corpses. Recently, his
van was nearly hit by shelling.”
“Mariinka is being wiped off the face of the Earth,” he told me. “Eighty percent of what you
know there has gone.”
“Looking back over the aid response in Donbas, it's easy to wonder how we misread the signs.
It's easy, too, to be disappointed that even with all the expertise and infrastructure built over
eight years, the UN and the major agencies proved so unready for today's crisis.” 13
No matter how long it takes to end this war, Osata's words ring clearly: if we are to protect
Ukraine's people, the international community must address the political problems that fuel The
country's humanitarian crisis. To do this, they will need to champion Ukraine's efforts to achieve
a lasting peace with Russia, as well as robust efforts to blend just refugee policies, humanitarian
assistance with development work. Is the world ready to mobilize this political will?
13 https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2022/04/11/international-aid-Ukraine