Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has completed his visit to Ukraine, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and visited the site of the Russian missile strike on a hospital in Kiev last week, as well as Kharkiv in the east of the country. On the agenda of this visit, a new announcement of support from the UNHCR to Ukraine to the tune of $100 million to help cope with the cold this winter. In an exclusive interview for RFI, Filippo Grandi spoke to our Ukraine correspondent Emmanuelle Chaze.
RFI: Is this your sixth visit to Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion?
Filippo Grandi: To be precise, my first visit was before the large-scale invasion. Let’s not forget that the war here started in 2014, and UNHCR, among other humanitarian agencies, has been here since the beginning. At that time, it was possible to cross what was called the contact line. I remember that in 2016 I visited Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk where, at that time, there was a displacement situation.
Everything that happened after 2022 – and that’s when I came five more times – went far beyond the problems we had experienced before. This operation for UNHCR, as for many other humanitarian partners, has become one of the top priorities of our work globally.
You saw the president when you arrived. What were your impressions of this exchange? This is not the first exchange you have had with Volodymyr Zelensky.
A good understanding of views, a lot of collaboration. You know, it hasn’t always been easy, but since February 2022, we have made enormous progress in our collaboration with the government. I must acknowledge, with pleasure, that the government has considerable leadership in the humanitarian sector.
We don’t see this always and everywhere. So, we are very happy to support this primary role of the government which establishes priorities, which helps us to define the respective tasks. We discussed this with the president.
We also discussed two other topics that are important to us. One is the energy crisis, as it is called here. The fact that many electricity installations have been damaged or destroyed by Russian bombing. There is a big challenge, especially in view of a winter that is always very harsh here. And we also discussed the situation of Ukrainian refugees around the world.
During your visit to kyiv, you also visited the site of one of the latest explosions. The one against the Okhmatdyt hospital.I think you were there.
Yes, a few days after this explosion, this attack, this airstrike in fact. I found it deeply shocking. It is not because I have never seen destruction in my life, in 40 years of humanitarian career… But because destroying a children’s hospital seems to me the worst offense that can be made to humanitarian rights, to international humanitarian rights. I have said it several times, but, I repeat, destroying a pediatric hospital, a hospital in which children with congenital heart defects are treated, a very important hospital, one of the most important in Ukraine and Europe in this field, is without justification.
It should be one of the most protected places, the most respected in the sense of humanitarian law. I wanted to go there right away, as soon as I arrived in Kiev, even before seeing the president, to express on the one hand my anger at what I witnessed, but also my solidarity with the children of Ukraine, with the families, with the doctors who work. You know, I’m telling you this because I told it, it shocked me deeply.
The doctor who took me, who showed me the situation in the hospital, told me that at the time of the explosion, operations were underway, where children were, as you certainly know, undergoing open-heart surgery. They had to close up the little bodies of these little children and continue the operations elsewhere. You can imagine the extreme danger that all this represents.
And all this, they had to do in a hurry, while the hospital was hit, damaged, windows everywhere, walls falling down! It struck me. These are stories that we hear today, unfortunately, GazaAt Sudan or elsewhere. But when you see it, of course, it’s very strong.
There is another place, I think, that is particularly close to your heart, and that is the Kharkiv region. You also went there. Can you tell us a little bit about that visit and the work that is being done there to support the local population and the internally displaced people?
This visit to Kharkiv comes six months after my last visit there, to the same city. I found a little less anxiety about the military situation, which nevertheless remains extremely fragile, and despite the fact that the air strikes, there too, have a terrible impact on the civilian population. At the same time, there is a lot of anxiety and apprehension about the coming winter.
Winter seems far away, we are in the middle of a heat wave in Ukraine, but winter is very close… In three or four months, it will be very cold in Kharkiv, as in all of Ukraine. We must accelerate activities as much as possible to prepare for winter. This was the highlight of our discussions with the governor, with the mayor of the city, with the heads of districts and with the affected population. They are very afraid that the winter will be very harsh.
You know, I said this during this trip, UNHCR deals mainly with displaced people, refugees, people who have left their homes. But here, the challenge is quite the opposite. It is to make sure that people do not leave their homes, and therefore, they feel warm and safe in their homes.
So, on security, on safety, there’s not much that a humanitarian organization can do. But on relative comfort, a minimum of comfort in the apartments that they live in, in the houses that they live in, we’re going to try to do our best. I announced it, I told the president that we had $100 million, thanks to our donors, already available for this winterization effort.
So, precisely, we have this situation which is dramatic, which is very worrying in relation to energy throughout Ukraine. And since you went to Kharkiv, I will talk about it again. There is also this situation of internally displaced persons in the city, there are thousands of people.
First, we need to understand this rather unique phenomenon of Ukrainian displacement. Obviously, if the strikes continue in Kharkiv, if winter comes and we are not too close, there will certainly be people who will move from Kharkiv to other areas, perhaps less affected by the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Kharkiv itself receives people from all around who are in fact on the front line.
According to the mayor, with whom I had a long conversation yesterday, there are about 200,000. There is a lot of concern that this crisis could lead to a new refugee crisis towards Europe. I am rather of the opinion that what we risk – and it is not the least risk – is an increase in internal displacement.
What do we do for these people? We mainly deal with distributing cash to people who are in particular need of support. Today we have become the agency, the organization that distributes the most cash humanitarian in the country.
We also have a program, not for reconstruction, because that would be going too far for us, a humanitarian agency, but to help people who have had their apartments damaged, so that they can continue to live there. These emergency repairs are a big program that we have here and that we have deployed throughout the country, at least in the areas hit by the war. We also have a more UNHCR program, if you like, more specific, more ” protection “, which is responsible for providing information to people, whether it is legal assistance.
Many people here have administrative and legal problems related to their situation. We also have a program to help people who have suffered trauma, especially children. Yesterday, I was with a family displaced from the border area with the Russiain Kharkiv.
The children, the grandmother told me, experienced this evacuation of their village in a very traumatic way. Because it took them many days, they couldn’t get out because there were bombings… The children experienced all this in terror. They arrive, they are completely traumatized.
We need – it is a great need in this country – to support people, to help them get out of this trauma. I am only giving you examples, we do other things, but these are very practical operations that we do in the country.
Do we already have a somewhat global view of what has been done in terms of figures? How many people have been signed with a figure? How many people, concretely, have been helped since 2022?
We have helped 30,000 families to repair at least part of their apartment so that they can still live there. 30,000 families is at least 100,000 people – that’s an example. We have helped at least 250,000 people with one-off assistance related to their displacement situation.
We distributed about half a billion dollars, these are dollar figures, half a billion dollars in cash since 2022. I’ll give you the figures, I don’t have the figures for 2014, but in 2022, $500 million in cash which were distributed. Out of a total of nearly $2 billion distributed by the United Nationsa fourth of these operations was carried out by the UNHCR. We are accelerating these operations and we will continue all this. Of course, the needs are much greater than that, but these are not derisory figures. These are figures that make a difference in terms of the impact of humanitarian action, at least to alleviate the most urgent problems of people.
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