The United Nations has called for conditions to safely deliver humanitarian aid to Ukraine’s breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions to be ensured. The border checkpoints of the two areas have been closed since March 2020 in an attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19 thus leaving hundreds of thousands of people without any support from the government-controlled Ukrainian regions and international organizations.
UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, has stated that the closure of the checkpoints has reduced by 97% the number of people able to cross the “contact line”, “dividing families and exacerbating their conflict-induced depression, anxiety and stress”.
“After 12 months of stringent movement restrictions, it is clear that the conflict-affected people are reaching a breaking point. They desperately need humanitarian assistance to hold on until life can return to some form of normality,” Lubrani said in a statement.
Osnat Lubrani called on all relevant actors “to facilitate the transit and delivery of humanitarian relief”. She voiced the hope that aid delivery would not be politicized and that “all urgently needed critical assistance that is ready to be delivered, including life-saving health supplies, is permitted to reach those in need in accordance with International Humanitarian Law.”
As many as 1.67 million people residing in the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk regions need humanitarian aid, including 340,000 internally displaced people living in undignified conditions there, according to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The situation in Ukraine’s self-proclaimed eastern regions has been continually worsening since 2014 when a territorial conflict broke out, taking the lives of over 10,000 people, leaving thousands injured and reported missing, and forcing millions to flee their homes.