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DISASTER

Ukraine Humanitarian Crisis

March 4, 2022

Overview

After months of posturing while simultaneously denying any plans to attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assaults on multiple cities in Ukraine began overnight on Feb. 24 and have continued day and night since then.

The Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s (CDP) response to this crisis is focused on humanitarian needs that arise, particularly among internally-displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees. We are not looking at the conflict itself except in how it affects population movement and humanitarian needs. To that end, this profile is not providing detailed updates about the status of the war as we believe that is better done by news media.

Putin stated that Russian forces were targeting Ukrainian military infrastructure, not people or communities. However, images and stories from Ukraine paint a different picture, including numerous civilian casualties and injuries.

This latest attack is part of a multi-year crisis stemming back to 2014 and beyond.

CNBC reported:“Heightened fears of a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine have been present for some time, and eastern Ukraine has been the location of a proxy war between the two countries. Soon after Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, pro-Russian separatists proclaimed two republics in the eastern part of the country: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic — much to the Ukrainian government’s consternation. Since then, there have been ongoing skirmishes and fighting in the region, which is known as the Donbas, between Ukraine’s troops and separatists.”According to World Population Review, Ukraine’s current population is 43.3 million people. It states, “Since the 1990s, Ukraine’s population has been declining due to high emigration rates, low birth rates, and high death rates … Many people leave the country because Ukraine is the second-poorest in Europe, is in conflict with Russia to its east, and is beset by corruption. The population is currently declining at a rate of 0.59%, a rate has increased every year since 2015. The United Nations estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly one-fifth of its population by 2050.”

From Feb. 24 to March 3, 2022, 1,209,976 refugees had left the country according to UNHCR. Almost 100,000 more from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions moved to the Russian Federation between Feb. 18 to Feb. 23. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced within the country.

Impact

On March 3, Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said, “In just seven days, one million people have fled Ukraine, uprooted by this senseless war. I have worked in refugee emergencies for almost 40 years, and rarely have I seen an exodus as rapid as this one. Hour by hour, minute by minute, more people are fleeing the terrifying reality of violence. Countless have been displaced inside the country. And unless there is an immediate end to the conflict, millions more are likely to be forced to flee Ukraine.”

The exodus of people from Ukraine is Europe’s fastest migration since the 1990s. It has been predicted that as many as five million people will leave as the war escalates. This would also make it one of the largest refugee crises in the world.According to Statista: “In 2020, the UNHCR counted 6.8 million internationally displaced refugees and asylum-seekers from Syria, meaning people who had not yet gained full legal status in another country. The second largest crisis identified by the U.N. was that of displaced Palestinians followed by those who left their home country due to the crisis in Venezuela – both counting around 5 million people in dire situations. Refugees and asylum-seekers from Sudan and South Sudan numbered 3 million while those from Afghanistan abroad were 2.8 million strong in 2020, the latest year for which data was available.”

Source: Statista

There were nearly 80,000 foreign students in Ukraine at the beginning of the conflict. Many are Indian or African (mostly from Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria) and both groups are reporting stories of racism and discrimination at the border in trying to leave the country. They have been forcibly removed from trains, denied access to buses and forced to walk miles in the cold.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) issued a summary of humanitarian needs on Feb. 17, which indicated that while 2.9 people were in need, the humanitarian community’s call for support was focused on the 1.8 million people most directly affected by conflict. In eastern Ukraine, seven years of conflict have left shelter, health, protection and water, sanitation and hygiene and other basic needs in an acute emergency phase.

UN OCHA adds: “The effects of COVID-19 continue to create additional pressure on the struggling civilian population and ageing infrastructure – on top of the ongoing hostilities and protracted humanitarian crisis. As a result of COVID-19 restrictions, conflict-weary people have been dealing with severe obstacles to freedom of movement for almost two years. They have been unable to travel more freely across the 427-kilometre-long [265 miles] “contact line” that splits eastern Ukraine into Government- and non-Government-controlled areas (GCA and NGCA), as only two of the five official entry-exit crossing points (EECPs) have been partially operational since March 2020. The majority of current crossing restrictions are applied by the NGCA side. As a result of the partial closure of the “contact line”, in 2021, there has been a 95 per cent reduction in the number of crossings observed compared with the year before the pandemic: from a monthly average of 1.15 million crossings recorded in 2019 (pre-COVID-19) to 59,000 in 2021. Restrictions on movement have left hundreds of thousands of people, particularly the elderly living in NGCA, with limited access to social benefits and entitlements, essential services, as well as have torn them apart from their families and friends. As a consequence of their increased isolation and the abrupt loss of access to services and livelihoods, the severity of needs of those already vulnerable people has increased.”

UN OCHA has indicated that the most vulnerable populations in Donetska and Luhansja oblasts are older people. They comprise 30% of the people in need, followed by people with disabilities, women and children.

The conflict is likely to exacerbate world hunger, particularly in countries already facing famine or high levels of malnutrition and food shortages. It will also increase the costs of many products globally. Ukraine exported a number of products that will significantly impact the global food supply chain.

According to OEC:

“The top exports of Ukraine are Corn ($4.77B), Seed Oils ($3.75B), Iron Ore ($3.36B), Wheat ($3.11B), and Semi-Finished Iron ($2.55B), exporting mostly to Russia ($4.69B), China ($3.94B), Germany ($3.08B), Poland ($2.75B), and Italy ($2.57B).” Corn is the most exported product in the country and Ukraine is the fourth-largest exporter of corn in the world. Seed oil is the second most exported product, but Ukraine is the largest exporter of this item globally. Ukraine is the fifth-largest exporter of wheat in the world, it’s fourth-highest exported product.

Tim Prewitt, President and CEO of the Hunger Project wrote in Newsweek, “Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of wheat, corn and oilseeds—staple food goods which are now at risk. Globally, these two countries export 26 percent of global wheat and 67 percent of sunflower seed, cottonseed and safflower oil, according to the International Trade Centre. These are vitamin-rich crops critical to daily nutrition that are used in everything from bread, cooking oil and livestock feed. Both countries are essential food suppliers for low- and middle-income countries in which tens of millions of people are already food insecure. Importing countries in the region are already seeing price surges—a trend that’s expected to continue rippling out into neighboring regions.”

Critical and Ongoing Needs

There are three types of needs in this situation:

• Supporting individuals and families within Ukraine, including people staying in place and internally displaced persons.
• Providing assistance in receiving countries across Europe that are taking in tens and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
• Responding to the global economic fallout, especially as it pertains to world hunger, given the impact on exportation of food products from Russia and Ukraine. The UN has issued a $1.7 billion flash appeal to support humanitarian needs in receiving countries and across Ukraine.

The UN has issued a $1.7 billion flash appeal to support humanitarian needs in receiving countries and across Ukraine.

“The UN estimates that 12 million people inside Ukraine will need relief and protection, while more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees may need protection and assistance in neighbouring countries in the coming months … The Flash Appeal asks for $1.1 billion to assist 6 million people inside Ukraine for an initial three months. The programme includes multipurpose cash assistance for the most vulnerable people, food assistance, water and sanitation, support to health care and education services, and shelter assistance to rebuild damaged homes. The plan also aims to deliver support to authorities to maintain and establish transit and reception centres for displaced people and prevent gender-based violence.

Aid groups will need safe and unimpeded access to all conflict-affected areas according to the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and operational independence. With more than half a million refugees having fled Ukraine to neighbouring countries in the past five days alone, and many more expected, support is also required to meet the critical needs of those seeking protection outside the country. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said: ‘We are looking at what could become Europe’s largest refugee crisis this century. While we have seen tremendous solidarity and hospitality from neighbouring countries in receiving refugees, including from local communities and private citizens, much more support will be needed to assist and protect new arrivals.’

An inter-agency Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRP) for the Ukraine situation asks for a preliminary $550.6 million to help refugees in Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, as well as in other countries in the region in order to help host countries provide shelter, emergency relief items, cash assistance, and mental health and psychosocial support to those who fled Ukraine, including people with specific needs, such as unaccompanied children.”

The 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan for Ukraine launched on Nov. 30,  2021, was already looking for $190 million to protect the most at-risk populations and for the provision of humanitarian aid.

The existing Plan, drafted before the current escalation in the conflict, has three strategic objectives:

• “Provide emergency and time-critical assistance and ensure access to basic essential services for 1.8 million people affected by the conflict.
• Respond to the protection needs and strengthen protection of 1.4 million conflict-affected people, including IDPs.
• Ensure implementation of an international humanitarian exit strategy in GCA from 2021 to 2023.”

The Humanitarian Needs Overview from February 2022 indicates that:

• 252,000 people have educational needs.
• 1.1 million people have food security and livelihoods issues.
• 1.5 million need health supports.
• 2.5 million people require protection.
• 158,000 require support for shelter and non-food items.
• 2.5 million people have ongoing water, sanitation and hygiene concerns.

The scale and urgency of needs will continue to increase. We do know that any family forced from their home needs help with shelter, food, clean water – the absolute basics.

It is also winter in Ukraine, with temperatures regularly below zero. Many families living in the conflict zone already don’t have enough food to eat or clothes to keep warm. With the current escalation, even more will be exposed to the elements and forced to find shelters.

Source: Ukraine Humanitarian Needs Overview Feb. 2022