Our Clarifying Moment: A Global Call To Action
Ensure Robust Funding to Address the Crisis in Ukraine
International and bilateral donors must urgently fund programs that support the current crisis in Ukraine. An estimated 17.6 million people in Ukraine will require humanitarian assistance in 2024. As of February 2024, there are nearly 3.7 million people internally displaced and nearly 6 million Ukrainian refugees scattered around Europe. Approximately 4.5 million Ukrainians have returned to the country after initially fleeing the conflict. These displaced communities show a decreasing willingness to return due to the untenable security situation and concerns over lack of access to livelihoods and housing. Furthermore, one-in-12—more than 600,000—Ukrainian children who were displaced by the war and returned home now face “extreme needs relating to their family's livelihoods, health, and threats to their safety.”
While many countries and donors have made robust commitments to support Ukraine, the amount of aid actually provided is much lower. The United Nations 2024 humanitarian response plan seeks more than $3 billion to assist Ukrainians urgently in need of aid and protection. As of February 2024, only $345 million (around 11%) of the appeal has been funded. $273 billion has been committed in assistance to Ukraine, mostly by the U.S. and European Union (EU). EU institutions and members have pledged $155 billion to Ukraine since January 2022. However, EU institutions and members have only allocated $83 billion, with the amount delivered much less. The U.S. has delivered 87% of its pledged $73 billion. In a major win for nonmilitary assistance for Ukraine, after overcoming resistance from Hungary, the European Council took the final step in February 2024 to approve a pledged $54 billion for Ukraine through 2027 for reconstruction and macro-financial aid.
Unfortunately, as the Russian military targets civilians and large swaths of the Ukrainian population remain displaced, humanitarian suffering will continue. While humanitarian assistance is vital, peacebuilding programs and ensuring the delivery of aid through a conflict-sensitive lens are equally critical.
Immediate actions needed:
Given the continuing nature and massive scale of humanitarian need in Ukraine, UN member states must quickly increase and sustain their contributions to answer the appeal to support 2024 humanitarian response plans and the urgent needs of the Ukrainian people.
President Biden must ensure that a significant portion of U.S. assistance supports peacebuilding, nonviolent civil resistors, human rights monitoring, atrocities prevention and documentation, combatting mis/disinformation, as well as psychosocial, gender-responsive, and trauma-informed programming—not just security and humanitarian needs.
Integrate support and resources for peacebuilding, conflict and atrocities prevention, and holistic social cohesion programming—beyond merely security and humanitarian efforts—within the pledged €138 billion from the EU and its member states.
Donors must follow through on their commitments made at the Ukraine Recovery Conference and utilize the committed assistance to advance peacebuilding practices and programs, as well as tackle humanitarian suffering. Donors should enhance funding for democracy, governance, and movement-building programming, as well as cybersecurity and countering mis/disinformation efforts in Ukraine, regional governments, and civil society. Donors should invest in data security mechanisms to assist in the collection, preservation, and authentication of potential evidence of war crimes and other atrocities. Donors must also support quality independent media and journalist protection efforts, both of which are vital.
Donors must fully support and fund the Framework of Cooperation between Ukraine and the UN and its implementation plan to prevent and respond to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Ukraine to help strengthen national policies aimed at addressing CRSV, protection measures for displaced persons, and survivors support services. UN Member States should also fully fund and support the UN’s Team of Experts on the Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict’s efforts to train and provide operational support to the specialized unit on CRSV in Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General. Donors should also support initiatives like JurFem: Support and the Survivor Relief Centre in Chernivtsi, which offers assistance to sexual and gender-based violence survivors.
Donors must continue to address the displacement-induced human trafficking and exploitation, particularly of women and children, and provide support for immediate measures to prevent and respond. Resources should be utilized to train governments, law enforcement and immigration control, civil society, and volunteers working at the borders and in resettlement to recognize the signs of human trafficking and how to report and respond to it through a survivor-centered, trauma-informed, and gender-sensitive approach. Donors should also support information dissemination to refugees about the threat of trafficking.
With women and children comprising the majority of Ukrainian refugees in Europe, accounting for 47% and 33% of the total population respectively, donors must fund efforts to provide safe and quality education. These efforts should also support refugee children struggling to adjust to school in new countries, assist children with special needs, and work through schools and community centers to help children process the impacts of the conflict on their lives.
Donors must work to support those who are unable or unwilling to evacuate, including populations with disabilities and the elderly. Specifically, donors should provide dignified aid, including facilitating humanitarian aid access, to the elderly and people with disabilities, especially livelihood support specific to individual needs.
Donors must work to meet the unique needs of returnees to Ukraine and those in communities liberated from Russian control, including housing, heating appliances, electricity, installation of glass for broken windows in war-torn regions, fuel, cash assistance, and medicine and health services, especially mental health services. Donors must scale up support to address the severe winterization needs and ensure the provision of blankets, heaters, and other infrastructure to ensure health and safety. Additionally, donors must continue to address the needs of those affected by the Kakhovk Dam collapse and subsequent flooding, including need for access to safe water, sanitation, and rebuilding of infrastructure.
Social cohesion assistance—such as language training, facilitating engagement of refugee and displaced populations with local and municipal government structures, employment training, and refugee/displacement-focused government agencies—must also be integrated to support both refugees/displaced persons and host communities to relieve the impact on host communities, prevent tensions, and promote social cohesion. A major source of tension is often related to misinformation and fears of economic costs—to combat this, host communities can organize joint activities between host populations and refugees/displaced persons so they can get to know each other, as well as share positive stories on social media to counter misinformation.
Donors must provide flexibility in new and existing funding streams for organizations currently operating in Ukraine and the region to address the evolving crisis, including evacuation, relocation, and protection, and scale the availability to small grant mechanisms for civil society.
Donors and aid groups must work to decentralize aid and humanitarian assistance efforts in the region to ensure that neglected regions of Ukraine receive sufficient support.
All donors must ensure support provided to address the conflict and regional implications is additive, not reallocated from other conflict-affected and fragile states or global crises.
Governments should consider the use of a Multilateral Asset Transfer to redirect the roughly $350 billion in frozen Russian assets to support Ukrainian reconstruction and reparations for Russian-perpetrated atrocities, which the Biden Administration has reportedly been exploring as of early 2024.