Via The New Humanitarian: COVID-19 turns the clock back on the war in Ukraine, as needs grow. Excerpt:
In the six years Nataliia Kyrkach has been providing assistance in conflict-affected eastern Ukraine, she has seen aid programmes move from urgent crisis response to resilience and development, as people living amidst this ongoing war have slowly begun to rebuild their lives.
2020 had brought some hopes for peace, after Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for talks in Paris in December. But over the last month, as COVID-19 has swept the world, Krykach says the region is tumbling back to the dark days of 2014-15, at the beginning of the conflict.
“The situation is going backwards by 100 percent,” Kyrkach told The New Humanitarian by phone from the town of Sviatohirsk in the eastern Donetsk region where the NGO she heads, Slavic Heart, is based.
In the second half of March, Slavic Heart – which provides a range of humanitarian aid from psychosocial services to food, hygiene items, and medicines – saw a more than 200 percent increase in pleas for assistance on its hotline. This was after Ukraine introduced strict quarantine measures, closing its borders, shuttering schools and all non-essential business, and halting public transport.
Ukraine has yet to see COVID-19 infection figures comparable to the worst-hit countries in Europe – as of 20 April, there were 5,710 registered cases in a population of 42 million, and 151 deaths. However, with a chaotic and underfunded national health system, and as the country’s politics and economy has been weakened by this low-intensity but still deadly war, its fallout is likely to hit hard. And nowhere more so than in the war-torn east, where sporadic clashes continue between government forces and two breakaway regions backed by Russia: Donetsk, and neighbouring Luhansk.
Even before the epidemic, the UN estimated that 3.4 million Ukrainians were in need of humanitarian assistance in 2020. Most live in the so-called “grey zone” – a sliver of territory along both sides of the “contact line” that divides Ukrainian government-controlled land from separatist-run areas.
Adapting aid to the new normal
Sixty percent of Slavic Heart’s clients – mostly women – have lost most or all of their income since quarantine measures were imposed, said Kyrkach.
With already limited public transport in frontline areas now completely stopped, many people are unable to access healthcare or get food and hygiene supplies, and most are rapidly running out of funds.
Already high levels of domestic violence are reportedly soaring. Social workers, reliant on public transport and lacking basic protective equipment, are unable to visit their vulnerable clients.
The contact line – which used to see up to a million crossings each month by people claiming social and pension payments or travelling for work, health, and family reasons – is now closed.
“Families are entirely alone,” said Kyrkach. Her NGO is using its three mobile support brigades for victims of domestic and gender-based violence to deliver food and hygiene parcels, and has moved its support groups online. But many settlements in the grey zone lack internet access.
International aid groups like the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had previously scaled back direct assistance to focus on income generation and infrastructure projects, are also reinstating food and hygiene deliveries – all the while rushing to put their own anti-epidemic measures in place to protect both staff and beneficiaries in a war zone.
