Humanitarian Coordinator Denise Brown is starting today a three-day mission to eastern & central Ukraine to see first-hand the humanitarian impact of the war and the response.
Six months since Russia’s invasion, nearly 18 million people, around 40 per cent of the country’s entire population, need humanitarian aid.
‘Constant’ negotiations
Having met people uprooted by the war, Mrs. Brown said “morale and hope was still there”. While internally displaced people told her they are grateful for support from the UN and NGOs, they “still want to go home”.
The UN aid coordinator also warned that winter is fast approaching in Ukraine and that she did not believe that vulnerable communities in the east and south had what they needed to survive.
Ms. Brown also said that she had no way of confirming what relief items, “if anything”, Russia had reportedly sent to non-Government-controlled areas. Aid organizations “just have no reliable way of crossing the frontline”.
She is currently on a three-day mission to eastern and central Ukraine (Kryivyi Rih, Kharkiv and Dnipro) to assess the humanitarian situation first-hand.
Fearful winter ahead
Ms. Brown told reporters in Geneva that the UN was “constantly negotiating” for access, “up and down” the line that divides those fighting the war stemming from Russia’s invasion on the 24 February, in the south and east.
This is her first visit to the east since she assumed her role in late July.
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On a positive note, the Humanitarian Coordinator pointed out that the war has not prevented the humanitarian community from delivering: “Since the start of the war, we’ve reached over 12 million people,” providing “cash transfers, health care, shelter… access to clean water, protection, rehabilitation”.
“Winter is coming,…[and] all we want to do [is] provide insulin to the hospitals, provide blankets, provide mattresses…it’s not complicated”, said Denise Brown, the Resident Coordinator for the UN in Ukraine.
Humanitarian community delivering
Regarding OCHA’s plans for winter, Mrs. Brown explained, “we will have to work differently …we can only assume” that people caught in a war “do not have what is necessary to make it through,” the season, “which starts early and lasts long”.
But she said that she was “hopeful that the Russian Federation will provide the security guarantees that we require to go across”.
Many elderly people were living in damaged houses and the lack of access to gas or electricity in large parts of the east “could be a matter of life or death” if people could not heat their homes, Mrs. Brown said in a statement.
