OPINION:
The town of Chasiv Yar is 3 miles from Bakhmut, the frontline city where Ukrainians are slowly repelling the invading Russian army. Chasiv Yar once had a population of over 10,000. Today, virtually every building has been hit by artillery or missiles. Rooftops are caved in, and exteriors are charred. There’s no running water, no electricity.
Even more unsettling than the constant sound of artillery is that civilians are still living here and all along the front lines in towns and villages like it. Many are older adults who refuse to leave — they say if they could survive Stalin, they can survive this — but some are younger and have no option.
Last month, I visited Chasiv Yar and five other villages along the front lines in the Donetsk region with Renegade Relief Runners. The Ukraine-based 501(c)(3) organization, known as 3xR, is focusing on delivering aid to isolated villages cut off from the main humanitarian corridors.
World Humanitarian Day is designed to reinvigorate the news of humanitarian crises worldwide, including the war in Ukraine, where Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his army frequently target civilians, bomb schools and hospitals, and use land mines to terrorize the local population.
But there’s a fundamental problem with how the international community thinks about humanitarian aid, which then affects the organizations we choose to support. What has become overwhelmingly clear is that we need to start prioritizing grassroots organizations and civil society over the United Nations and other large international organizations.
Even a year and a half into the invasion, 3xR still finds villages that have yet to receive humanitarian aid.
Part of the problem is that large international nongovernmental organizations and the U.N. often focus on urban centers over these more isolated, high-risk places. These villages are too near the front line, and the Russian army likes to target humanitarian aid missions.
After the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka Dam and flooded the city of Kherson, displacing thousands of people, Russia targeted aid workers to dissuade them from coming. Volunteer aid workers told me that in the weeks following the attack, it was more dangerous to be an aid worker than it was to be a soldier.
Many of these villages are also quite isolated. They’re far from major cities, and the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine are now heavily mined. Roughly 174,000 square kilometers are contaminated by land mines — more than any country in the world — and will take decades to clear.
It can be dangerous for residents to travel to neighboring towns. Even if they wanted to leave, many villagers have no means of transportation because the Russian army stole their cars. One man who lived under Russian occupation told me the soldiers would run over civilians’ cars with tanks when they got bored.
The ones that are most equipped to deliver aid to villages near the front lines are local, Ukraine-based organizations that are familiar with the terrain, as well as specific community needs.
Despite the significantly increased risks these groups face, they receive an unimaginably small fraction of humanitarian funding. Seventy-one percent of international humanitarian funds go to the U.N., and 16% go to the Red Cross and other international NGOs.
The Ukrainian groups doing the most intrepid work receive 0.0003% of funding.
The U.N. reallocates some of this money to local NGOs in Ukraine, but it also does what it does best: It raises bureaucratic hurdles in terms of transparency and reporting that smaller organizations simply can’t overcome.
As a result, the funding continues to circulate among larger organizations that may be doing good work but have limits on where they can go.
The smaller, Ukrainian-based organizations end up scouring Ukraine and nearby Poland for supplies. Many rely on the generosity of friends and neighbors, and word-of-mouth from supporters. Some dip into their personal savings.
Renegade Relief Runners’ mascot is a raccoon armed with a paper towel roll and a trash can lid.
“We’re like raccoons when it comes to humanitarian aid,” co-founder Julia Abratanska tells me. “We’ll take any leftover supplies we come across, and find people who desperately need them.”
3xR and many local groups it works with are determined not to let anything go to waste — especially when they have witnessed firsthand so many villagers near the front lines with nothing. I observed shouting matches over soap and other necessities because there were not enough supplies to go around. Ms. Abratanska and 3xR deliver most supplies within a week of receiving them due to high demand.
Meanwhile, medical supplies and food kits amass, untouched, in warehouses across Europe. This discrepancy has fostered cynicism and burnout.
This is why it’s imperative that we support civil society. Local humanitarian groups, advocates, journalists — these are the people risking their lives to ensure human dignity in Ukraine and protect the country’s democratic future.
Oleksandr Leonidovych Duka, founder of the humanitarian aid group Here & Now, survived the occupation of Borodyanka in March 2022 with his wife and young daughter. He risked his life shuttling food, water and medicine to his neighbors, despite the deliberate killing of humanitarian aid workers by Russian soldiers. Now, he does the same for villagers on the front lines.
“Even before the start of full-scale war, I understood that it was up to each of us,” Mr. Duka told me. “I founded a small movement of like-minded people who are fruitfully working for our victory. Right now, the main thing is to survive and help others to survive, to defeat the [Russian army], and then continue to build a free and strong, and most importantly, independent Ukraine!”
• Elle Ota is program officer for the Human Rights Foundation.
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