The UN and humanitarian organizations have more than doubled their request for aid to Ukraine devastated by Russian military aggression to $2.25 billion, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
According to the updated Ukraine Flash Appeal, released this week, it has been extended until August 2022, and the amount indicated is required to help 8.7 million people, more than half of whom are women.
"The conflict has caused the world’s fastest growing displacement crisis since World War II, with nearly 13 million people uprooted in less than two months," the document notes that the total number of people in need has reached 15.7 million.
According to maps presented in the document, the most people in need of assistance are in Donetsk region (2.2 million), Kyiv (1.9 million), Luhansk and Kharkiv regions - 1.5 million each, Sumy region – 821,000, Kherson region – 766,000, Dnipropetrovsk and Chernihiv regions – 681,672, Zaporizhia region – 633,000, Kyiv region – 569,000, Lviv region – 511,000, Odesa and Mykolaiv regions – 483,471.
Estimating the total number of internally displaced persons at 7.7 million, the UN estimates that there are about 2.9 million in the West, 1.8 million in the Center, 1.5 million in the East, 1.3 million in the North, 228,000 in the South and 114,000 in Kyiv.
According to the UN, the number of people helped more than tripled to more than 3.4 million between March 24 and April 21.
As noted in the updated Ukraine Flash Appeal, these funds are planned by humanitarian organizations, in particular, to deliver humanitarian aid to the most inaccessible places. As of April 24, UN-led interagency convoys had delivered supplies five times (twice to Sumy, once to Kharkiv, Severodonetsk, and Chernihiv, respectively). Additional convoys will be scheduled in the coming weeks and months.
Another measure is the payment of funds for various purposes: if on March 31, they received only 18,500 people, on April 23 – 263,000. According to the document, about $600 million are needed for these purposes, and all payments should cover 2 million people.
It is noted that it is necessary to adhere to a strategy of providing assistance as close to people in need as possible: from supporting bakeries to continue producing bread to delivering vital medical supplies to hospitals.
The UN points out that Ukraine currently has 207 of its humanitarian partners, more than half of which are Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations.
