It’s 4 a.m. in Kiev when the nagging alarm sirens sound over the sleeping city. In the hotel room, a loudspeaker invites us to descend into the underground shelter.
The next morning, I’m at the Okhmadyt hospital, which was hit by a Russian missile a few days ago, on July 8. Sergii Nagoriansky, advisor to the director, takes us on a tour of this paediatric referral hospital, the equivalent of the Necker Hospital in Paris.
He testifies “That day, one of the missiles destroyed the dialysis building. Amid the flames and smoke, the parents of the hospitalized children and neighbors immediately began rescue operations, with Victor Liashko, Minister of Health, arriving on the scene”.
Hospital 0khmadyt comprises 16 buildings, one of which was destroyed and 5 others damaged. 300 people were injured, including 90 children who were immediately evacuated to other hospitals, with children undergoing surgery. The grandfather of one child was killed, as was a young nurse, Svitlana Loukyantchyk, 29. Since February 24, 2024, these bombardments have been a daily occurrence, and can strike at any time, anywhere.
On the famous Maïdan square, in the center of Kiev, there’s a forest of flags and photos of soldiers killed at the front since 2014. Maïdan, the square where it all began in 2014 with a massive opposition movement to the pro-Russian power in place.
A few days ago, I was in Lviv, a city close to the Polish border. There, in a library on the Rynek’s central square, we came across civilians making camouflage netting for soldiers at the front. In the nearby church, hundreds of photos of slain soldiers bear witness to the fact that an entire society is in mourning, and that every family is confronted with a war that has now been going on for 10 years!
On Monday August 26, 2024, another 200 missiles and drones rained down on Kiev and fifteen other regions, destroying thermal and hydroelectric power stations. Without electricity, water pumps stop working, there’s no running water and no sewage disposal. Ukraine has already seen 27 gigawatts of its production capacity destroyed, leaving only 9 GW, while demand will be 18 GW this winter.
Humanitarian aid is more important than ever in a country of 43 million inhabitants which, according to OCHA, has 6.5 million refugees, 3.548 million displaced persons and has seen the return of 4.5 million people, many of whom need support to resettle elsewhere.
Today, the war is raging in the east of the country, where 70% of the military forces are concentrated, and where the Russians are advancing steadily to seize the town of Pokrovsk, which has a population of 60,000. Their aim is to take complete control of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as Kherson and Zaporijjia, which they have already declared to be part of Russia. As I write these lines, the population is being asked to evacuate Pokrovsk, where the Russians are only a handful of kilometres away.
Will the Ukrainian army’s successful surprise offensive in the Kursk region of Russia itself, which took Moscow’s army by surprise on August 6, be enough to relieve the main Donetsk front, or will it create a new front? Will this dazzling action, which took everyone by surprise, have consequences for the famous “red lines” concerning the use of Western weapons in Russia, and for the Kremlin’s threats to retaliate?
In Lviv, I met Première Urgence Internationale (PUI) mission leader Nicolas Ben-Oliel, who has been in Ukraine for more than two years, and Iryna, a Ukrainian, who is the coordinator in Lviv. Première Urgence Internationale has been present since 2015 with 200 people spread over four bases in Lviv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Kiev.
The association is particularly active in the field of health, especially mental health, and protection, as well as in cash aid, shelter rehabilitation and non-food basic necessities. Première Urgence Internationale coordinates a consortium of NGOs (Solidarités International, Action Contre la Faim, Triangle Génération Humanitaire, Handicap International) for a total of $100 million over 27 months.
In Ukraine, there are some 600 NGOs, mainly Ukrainian, and over a hundred of them, half Ukrainian and half international, are members of a coordination platform run by a committee of 5 NGOs, including PUI. Nicolas notes a drastic reduction in humanitarian funding, despite the fact that emergency needs are still very much present, particularly for hospitals, while there has been a sharp increase in structural funding mechanisms involving the state and companies.
With some fifteen years’ experience in humanitarian aid, Nicolas is working with the Humanitarian Country Team in conjunction with UN clusters to improve coordination mechanisms for humanitarian response at local level (Area Bases Coordination). Another major concern is the provision of heating and electricity for the population during the harsh winter here, with temperatures dropping to minus 20 degrees in the upcoming days.
A priority shared by Mathieu Nabot, Country Director in Ukraine for the NGO Solidarités International. Mathieu and his team have been preparing for months for the distribution of heating equipment in October.
Solidarités International has been working in Ukraine since March 2022, in particular in the fields of water and sanitation and shelter from its bases in Mykolaïv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Kiev, with 110 people on the ground. Like Nicolas, Mathieu has noticed a sharp drop in humanitarian funding as the war continues, with populations under bombardment and having to be evacuated. This is the role that an Advocacy Working Group has set itself as part of the NGO Platform, to remobilize the institutions that fund humanitarian aid.
At the same time, Solidarités International is engaged in a major Nexus-type program coordinating emergency, reconstruction and development with the Crisis and Support Center (CDCS) of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Development Agency (AFD) and the VEOLIA Foundation and its engineering firm, with a strong training component in the water and sanitation sector.
What clearly drives Mathieu is the desire to pursue humanitarian aid as close as possible to the front lines, to make the Nexus a reality and to refocus increasingly on an integrated, qualitative geographical approach.
In Ukraine, I met a lot of people who told me, “We’re very grateful for your help. But we need more support to get through. And humanitarian aid is no exception. According to OCHA, while the United Nations has appealed for $3.1 billion to help 8.5 million of the 15 million Ukrainians in need of aid this year, by the end of June it had raised only 28% of the sum needed! How can we act effectively with so little predictability, at a time when all the humanitarian actors involved are seeing a drastic reduction in the resources needed to help the victims of a high-intensity war? We need to take a leap of faith to save every possible life at risk.
I’d like to conclude by sharing with you a reflection that takes its place in historical time. I am speaking in a personal capacity on the basis of historical facts. In Ukraine as in Poland, in the Baltic States as in the other countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union for almost 50 years, the mood of the people is not the same as that of public opinion in countries on the western side of the European continent, such as France.
In Poland, we always think of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which in 1939 saw Hitler and Stalin invade, divide up and suppress a country and martyr a people. A visit to the Warsaw Uprising Museum on August 1, 1944, and the Jewish Museum are a must.
In Ukraine, the famine organized by Stalin in 1932-1933, which deliberately killed millions of Ukrainians, is still fresh in the minds of the survivors of subsequent generations. For these people, today’s history is the continuation of that past history, which they do not want to see repeated. Today, in Ukraine, we are reaching a potentially decisive tipping point for Ukraine and its allies, and particularly for the countries of Europe.
At a time when we are celebrating the 80ème anniversary of the Normandy landings, the Provence landings and the liberation of Paris on August 25 1944, it’s important to remember the history we share with the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, with whom we share a common destiny.
Just as I was about to leave Ukraine, I received a message from an NGO that had put me on its alert list: Attention, two Tupolev 95 aircraft taking off from Engels air base. Arrival on the missile firing line between 4.30 and 5am. Then a new message at 4.05am: “Tupolev 95 missile fire ahead of schedule. Stay in your shelters until the alert is over”.
Alain Boinet.
PS 1/ I would like to thank all those who helped us with this report from Ukraine.
PS 2/ Thank you for supporting Défis Humanitaires with your donation (make a donation).
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