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International aid took too long to reach Ukraine. Here’s why [1]

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Date: 2022-06 

Four months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s clear that local volunteers and organisations in the country have borne the brunt of the humanitarian response.

Ad-hoc groups and more established Ukrainian organisations came together to evacuate people from towns and villages affected by the invasion, and get food, medicine and other vital supplies to people who needed them.

Soon Ukrainians – and foreigners who had come to help at the border – started asking the same questions: why were international NGOs absent on the ground while their fundraising drives for Ukraine seemed particularly active and successful across the world?

During the same period and following continued engagement with Russian leaders, the International Committee of the Red Cross saw itself engulfed in a neutrality row marked by claims it had been supporting the evacuation of civilians to Russia.

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A new report by Humanitarian Outcomes, a team of specialist consultants who advise aid agencies and donor governments, confirms that local groups performed virtually all humanitarian aid in the first six weeks of the Russian invasion. These groups remain, with local authorities, the principal providers of aid in Ukraine today. The report was commissioned by the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub, which is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

openDemocracy spoke to Varvara Pakhomenko, a consultant who contributed to this report, about why international aid organisations were absent.

oD: Who has done most of the humanitarian response in the months following Russia’s invasion?

VP: Ukrainian non-governmental organisations, or, on a greater scale, volunteer groups or individual volunteers [some of whom mobilised in 2014 during the conflict in the Donbas].

Ukrainian volunteers would just go to conflict areas with humanitarian assistance which they had gotten from local businesses, or had bought using their own money, and then evacuated people on their way back. Almost all the funding for this came from private donations.

There was some assistance coming from religious groups, foreign NGOs and some donors supporting human rights or democracy promotion, mostly to Ukrainian organisations.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-international-aid-ngos-slow-humanitarian-outcomes/

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