The humanitarian response in Ukraine: reconsidering ‘our’ principles and models

A different context which implies different ways of working

When humanitarian actors arrived in Ukraine, many were surprised by how active state actors from Ukraine and neighbouring countries were, and particularly by the large numbers of extremely active volunteers. International aid organisations were rapidly faced with the major question of how to work with Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian and Moldavian civil society, as well as local municipal authorities and institutions.

Ukrainian civil society (citizen and volunteer-based groups, NGOs, churches and diasporas all over the world), decentralised institutions (such as municipal authorities) and state institutions immediately joined the general movement to resist the Russian invasion and were fully mobilised to assist the huge numbers of displaced persons, combining solidarity, humanitarian aid, civic action and support for defence efforts. This combination destabilised a certain number of international aid organisations who are used to working in contexts where the state is generally weak, services are dysfunctional and local NGOs are looking for funding. The Ukraine context also revealed serious misunderstanding between, on the one hand, an international humanitarian ‘industry’ that is very attached to its humanitarian principles, and on the other, the effervescence of a civil society that is mobilised as much to meet the needs of people in distress as to support the war effort. Every Ukrainian had a brother or sister, a mother or an uncle, on the front and was trying to assist them in different ways. There were three parallel aid processes: the first concerned assistance from diasporas, aimed at family members; the second was broader and aimed to provide assistance near combat zones where vulnerable people were faced with considerable difficulties; and the third concerned providing appropriate assistance to displaced families. Existing measures within the international aid sector to control aid and mitigate the risk of diversion (due to the fear of corruption and misappropriation by mafia groups) made it all the more complicated to work with a very dynamic, but very disparate and unorganised civil society. In response to the bureaucratic demands of donors in terms of screening partners, procurement procedures, beneficiary registration, etc., Ukrainian actors invented numerous innovative accountability measures: file exchanges, taking photos of the beneficiaries receiving their parcels, and, above all, extensive use of the Diya system (meaning ‘action’ in Ukrainian), a digital application established by the government for civil status, social benefits (pensions, social assistance), taxes, etc.

Mobilising resources and assessing needs are at the heart of conventional humanitarian aid processes, with Flash Appeals, Humanitarian Needs Overviews and Humanitarian Response Plans. Yet, these processes do not take into account either endogenous dynamics, rooted in inter-personal solidarity networks, nor those related to social networks (Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) that irrigate the Ukrainian community within the country and abroad. Indeed, it is much more common for needs to be identified and requests for assistance to be made via these endogenous mechanisms than via those that the international aid sector is used to, with its questionnaires, its vulnerability analyses, its beneficiary classification systems, etc.

With this war in Europe, which was caused by a clear act of aggression and has led to colossal humanitarian needs, very significant resources have been mobilised: first, by the Ukrainian population and diaspora who have collected, sent and distributed considerable quantities of food, basic goods and medicines; and then, by European and North American civil societies, who have sent in-kind and cash donations. Unfortunately, it is difficult to quantify this huge effort of solidarity, but two things are certain. First, this aid has been, and continues to be, considerable, even though it appears to have decreased since July. Second, it was very quick to arrive at the beginning of the war (February-March 2022), both to help those on the road to exile, particularly in border areas, and inside the country, in response to ‘needs assessments’ carried out by international aid organisations. This ‘classic’ institutional international aid (UN agencies, major international NGOs and the Red Cross Movement) has also been considerable, reaching levels that had never been reached before¹, based on needs analyses carried out by the humanitarian cluster mechanism and the tools of the REACH initiative. And yet, a significant proportion of needs have been under-funded. These concern what is normally the responsibility of municipal systems, a sector that is all the more critical given the systematic Russian bombing of ‘critical infrastructure’: electric power plants, urban heating systems and water supply networks.

The ‘traditional’ international aid system’s lack of agility

This context has brought major challenges due to the variety of operational contexts, including calmer zones in the west and centre of Ukraine, and zones where there is active conflict, and due to the constant changes in the way hostilities are conducted, including the recent mass bombings of civilian areas and infrastructure. International aid actors have needed to be, and still need to be, as agile as possible. But their agility is compromised by the procedures that they have to respect.

The Ukrainian state is organised and continues to be operational. Its administration is characterised by a mixture of cumbersome features inherited from the Soviet era and an impressive level of modernisation, with the digitalisation of its procedures. This modernisation has also been embraced by a large part of Ukrainian society. Given these features, the international aid sector had difficulty knowing how to approach this context. This was made worse by the uncertainty about how the conflict would evolve, security problems and the variety of situations on the ground. NGOs with their own funds, or who have access to flexible donors, were able to quickly adopt a ‘no regrets’ approach. This is an approach that accepts that, due to the seriousness of an emergency context, decisions can be made with a relatively large margin of error. It is important here to point out the significant differences between organisations in terms of managing security and operational risks. This reflects the distribution of traditional aid actors that has already been described in other contexts². There is a ‘centre of action’ where there is a high concentration of needs and where it is relatively easy to provide assistance in a controlled manner. And there is the periphery, where it is more dangerous, needs are more dispersed, and there are more significant logistical and operational constraints. These are areas where, for a long time, only a limited number of actors were able to conduct operations (ICRC, MSF and a few other, particularly French, NGOs – ACTED, Solidarités, Première Urgence Internationale, Triangle Génération Humanitaire, etc.). In Ukraine, a great deal of aid can only be implemented thanks to interaction with Ukrainian actors, and particularly with groups of volunteers. What is more, given the volatility of the context, it is essential to maintain dialogue with donors in order to increase the agility and pertinence of operations. However, much of this room for manoeuvre is decided when contracts are negotiated and it depends on a relatively flexible definition of needs, types of beneficiaries and operational methods. Such flexibility limits the need to amend contracts, which is always very time-consuming.

Close dialogue with donors to keep them informed of needs and changes is also essential³. One of the original aspects of this context is the absence of a system of humanitarian flights due to the fact that there is no air traffic control and the risks from the countless drones and missiles in the Ukrainian sky⁴. In the absence of UNHAS, all trips are by train or by car and therefore take a lot of time. As a result, work is done as much as possible by video-conference, which has numerous advantages, but makes ‘field truth’ exercises and negotiations about necessary adjustments much more abstract.

A very specific aid combining urban environments and war zones

The very specific contexts of Ukraine, and the countries that have taken in refugees, bring numerous technical challenges for aid organisations who are more used to working in rural areas in developing countries. The last time aid was delivered in contexts similar to Ukraine was in the Balkans and Chechnya (and, in terms of the urban question, in Syrian cities). There was very little past experience, particularly concerning how Ukrainian society functions, to help establish the most appropriate operational methods and many humanitarian organisations had to revise their practices.

Despite the efforts that have been made in recent years, the traditional humanitarian aid system continues to have difficulty working in urban contexts where needs of a collective nature, such as electricity, water, heating and telecommunications, are just as significant as individual needs (food, hygiene, etc.). NGOs who had run canteen programmes for elderly people during the war in the Balkans or in the Caucasus, such as ACF or PUI, or who had used these methods in response to social crises in their own countries (such as World Kitchen), very quickly put them into practice in the Ukrainian context, working with local restaurants. As a result, canteen systems were set up in many cities in Ukraine, as were delivery systems like ‘Deliveroo’ to bring meals to elderly people who were unable to move. Contracts were established and supply lines were created with private restaurants. In these contexts, both the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘cash transfer’ concept were apparent. In many parts of the country, meeting basic needs involved complex and shifting equations between what could and should be done with cash (unconditional cash transfers) and what had to take the form of in-kind aid. National cash transfer systems (Diya, Ipo-Pamaga) were under-used by aid actors in Ukraine who set up their own mechanisms, leading to considerable transaction costs (according to interviews with members of the Cash Working Group, it cost hundreds of thousands of euros to set up systems like ‘RedRose’). Due to these parallel systems, after six months, there was a complex process to harmonise the sector and find ways for the national systems and those set up by the international aid sector to converge. As for in-kind donations, it is important to point out that these are very useful when they are related to clear requests (for example, lists of equipment and medicines validated by the health services). On the other hand, sending too many very generous but inappropriate donations (obsolete biomedical equipment, out of date medicines, etc.) leads to stock congestion and high destruction costs. There have nevertheless been original experiments with in-kind aid that met clearly identified needs. For example, diaspora NGOs managed to respond to requests for hearses from municipal authorities in heavily bombed areas where the morgues have been partially destroyed and who need to transport a growing number of bodies.

Protection and coordination challenges

The war in Ukraine and the displacement that it has caused has led to numerous protection problems: violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), sexual exploitation of women and children during the exodus and settlement in neighbouring countries, psychosocial problems due to fear, the loss of loved ones, exile, etc.

Many humanitarian agencies tried to meet these protection challenges, but the international community is still faced with major violations of IHL in the context of an international armed conflict, with attacks against civilian areas, urban warfare practices with the bombing of entire areas (Mariupol), massacres such as Bucha, the mistreatment of prisoners, the systematic destruction of critical infrastructure that is essential to civilian lives, etc. In this difficult context where information is very easily manipulated, there needs to be total support for the ICRC, particularly as it is caught between the distress of the Ukrainians and Russian intransigeance. Given the risks of human trafficking and gender-based violence, many organisations, such as UNICEF, HCR and numerous NGOs, particularly national ones (Right to Protect) have been very active both in Ukraine and in neighbouring countries. It has also been crucial to restore the administrative identity of those who have lost everything in the war. Municipal authorities, NGOs like DRC and Ukrainian human rights associations have done a great deal to help people with procedures to recuperate the official documents that they need to have access to services and aid.

Finally, coordination – which is supposed to save lives and livelihoods – proved to be relatively complicated with, on the one hand, the different national and local authorities, and the multitude of volunteer groups, and on the other, UN agencies, NGOs and donors.

Significant effort was made to establish a regular coordination system, with clusters, led by OCHA. A significant number of meetings, groups and task teams were gradually set up, usually via videoconference, unfortunately with Ukrainian government actors and civil society organisations at a great distance. As is often the case, there is still very little ‘area-based coordination’: local, inter-sector coordination, which is linked to municipal mechanisms, and integrated into them as early as possible. This is the only way to achieve the systemic agility that is essential in this complex context where there is a combination of predictable events (military operations in the East and South, energy-related risks with the arrival of winter, etc.) and major uncertainty (where the fighting will take place, what areas will be bombed, etc.). The most responsive and effective way to adapt aid to sudden changes is to implement concerted, local and multi-sectoral analysis and decision-making.

By way of conclusion…

It is very unlikely that the aid sector will emerge unscathed from this war: its main operational principles (such as neutrality) will need to be re-examined; not to abandon them, but to improve the way they are used. They need to be analysed from an ‘operational’ point of view while taking into account the ‘butterfly effects’ that exist in our increasingly ‘connected’ world where information can be manipulated. Discussions about ‘localisation’ continue to be focused on national NGOs who ‘resemble actors from the Global North’. They should increasingly include informal actors, unstructured volunteer groups, local state bodies,⁵ private actors, diaspora networks, etc. To do this, the sector will need to revise the procedures that prevent it from opening up to what is happening ‘outside the system’. There is a need for greater acceptance and understanding of the different types of action that exist in crisis contexts.⁶

Another point that the analysis has highlighted is that the humanitarian sector – in the same way as modern western armies – no longer knows how to take action in high-intensity urban conflict contexts. The sector has also (re)discovered so-called ‘hybrid’ conflicts, where there are multiple angles and methods of engagement, with specific humanitarian impacts. Much of the research that has been carried out in the last twenty years has focused on asymmetrical conflicts in arid environments in the context of fragile, or even contested states. Many of the lessons from the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s, including those related to managing cold winters, had been forgotten and are only now being rediscovered. A new page is being turned regarding research into conflicts and humanitarian practices, legal norms and technical standards. We will need to be creative, open-minded and curious in the face of these challenges, and ‘the violence that is coming’.⁷

*References:

François Grünewald, ‘Real-time Evaluation of the Humanitarian Response in Ukraine’, Groupe URD, July-August 2022 (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Ukraine_RTEReport_GroupeURD_ENG.pdf). See also ‘Key messages for the delivery of aid in Ukraine’, 2022 (https://www.urd.org/en/publication/key-messages-for-the-delivery-of-aid-in-ukraine/) and the video, ‘Ukraine : solidarité, résistance, espoirs’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwwKdJPZJg&t=4s).

1. Ukraine Flash Appeal (March-August 2022) was for 4.7 billion US$ (https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-flash-appeal-march-august-2022-enruuk).
2. For example in Eastern Chad in the 2010s, and in Haiti after the earthquake of 12 January 2010.
3. See Stoddard A., Harvey P. et al., Enabling the local response: Emerging humanitarian priorities in Ukraine March–May 2022, Humanitarian Outcomes, 2022 (https://www.humanitarianoutcomes.org/Ukraine_review_June_2022).
4. UN, Ukraine Flash Appeal (March-December 2022) (https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-2022-flash-appeal-funding-snapshot-8-august-2022).
5. See Courraud M., Dorronsoro G., Quesnay A., ‘Quelle stratégie pour l’aide civile en Ukraine ?’, Études de l’Ifri, Ifri, June 2022 (https://www.ifri.org/fr/publications/etudes-de-lifri/strategie-laide-civile-ukraine).
6. See the following three reports: Grünewald F., ‘Real-time evaluation of the response to Storm Alex in the Alpes-Maritimes region in France’, January 2021 (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rapport-ETR2_Roya_-2021_FINAL.pdf); Grünewald F. et al., « Real-time evaluation after the explosion in Beirut, 2020», September 2020 (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ETRpostblastBeyrouth_ANG.pdf) and Grünewald F. et al., ‘Urgence Beyrouth’ Collective Study (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Key-messages-jointstudyBeirut_-2022_final_ANG1.pdf).
7. As in the prophetic title of the book on modern warfare by Éric de La Maisonneuve, ‘La violence qui vient’, Arléa, 1997.