Leading Ukrainian politicians have accused the UN’s refugee agency of being unprepared for the war and withdrawing staff from hotspots, while the International Committee of the Red Cross was said to be “impotent” in protecting refugees.
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said the major humanitarian organisations appeared “disoriented” by the conflict. The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, claimed they initially just watched “with concern over wine and coffee”.
“Unfortunately, not a single foreign or international NGO was ready for the war in Ukraine to start despite the fact that six months ago everyone was talking about that and everyone was warning everyone that the war was going to start,” Sadovyi said.
He claimed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had prioritised the safety of its own personnel over the lives of Ukrainians facing the worst of the Russian shelling.
Sadovyi’s deputy, Serhiy Kiral, said he had been surprised when officials in the UNHCR described their own staff as “refugees” during conversations with him in the early stage of the conflict.
About a million people have transited through Lviv, and the city’s population has risen by 200,000 since Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February.
Kiral said: “In the first two weeks what they were actually telling us here [was] that they were like refugees themselves because they were busy with evacuating their staff personnel from Kyiv, looking for places for them to stay, making sure that they are safe and then psychologically [well]. You know, you don’t expect that from them.
“As far as the major ones like [the] UN refugee agency, it took us a week probably to get through to the leadership just to find a person to talk to. Then another week there was the head of the Ukraine country office here meeting the mayor and the deputy mayor talking about the needs and we have laid out what we need, like, you know, humanitarian aid, foodstuffs … there were a lot of promises and commitments and then all the way up till today, nothing is happening.”
A spokesperson for the UNHCR said it had moved staff from Mariupol, Severodonetsk and the capital, Kyiv, to safer areas of the country but that its overall staffing levels in the country had increased.
He said: “No one was prepared for an emergency of this scale and speed. Even the Ukrainian government criticised international media for creating fear before the war, saying they did not expect an invasion.
“The safety of our staff is of course a priority, but this has not led us to reduce our presence in Ukraine. Most of our staff based in Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Kyiv have been temporarily relocated to safer areas, such as Dnipro, Lviv and Vinnytsia, and at the same time UNHCR has increased the number of staff in country over the past weeks by some 50 individuals (to 154 currently) and continues to recruit more staff to scale up our capacity to deliver a significant emergency programme.”
A spokesperson for the ICRC said some staff with young families had left the country but it had about 80 more people in the country than before.
The ICRC has, however, faced heavy criticism for the repeated failure of agreements on humanitarian corridors out of cities such as Mariupol on the Azov Sea.
Only one such corridor has been successfully organised, between the northern cities of Sumy to Lubny, leading Ukraine’s deputy prime minister to describe the organisation as “impotent” in an interview in Kyiv.
Vereshchuk said: “We give them a task: Chernihiv or Kherson, the places where it’s difficult for us. Where we can’t negotiate with the Russians, we say just go there yourselves and evacuate people, take buses and go and get people, and they can’t do it.”
An ICRC spokesperson said it could only “facilitate” the establishment of safe passage for refugees and that the warring parties needed to come to agreements.
He said: “We have had discussions with the Ukrainian and Russian authorities for weeks now. This is up to them to agree on specific terms when it comes to humanitarian corridors or safe passage
“They need to be very concrete on the terms of how, when and what needs to happen: agreeing on the road, the timing, for how long it will last, all these guarantees. And from there the ICRC can be requested to facilitate.
“Unfortunately, it is up to them. We can only facilitate. We need to maintain our neutrality. This is the difficult role of the ICRC and at the moment it is why we face a lot of criticism coming from all sides.”
The ICRC chair, Peter Maurer, visited Ukraine a week ago and was in Moscow on Thursday meeting the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. “Neutral, impartial, [the ICRC] is mandated to speak with all sides of a conflict to advocate respect for the laws of war that protect civilian life,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, photographs of apparent bonhomie at the meeting angered many Ukrainians, and on Sunday Ukraine asked the ICRC not to open a planned office in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, saying it would legitimise Moscow’s forced deportation of Ukrainians.
