Red Cross chief says Ukraine will need more support as people return

Humanitarian needs in Ukraine will increase and far greater resources will be required as more people return to the war-torn country, the head of the Red Cross has said.

Speaking during a visit to Ireland, Jagan Chapagain, the secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the need to provide housing, electricity, water, sanitation and health services as part of Ukraine’s recovery and rebuilding effort would be “massive” because of the damage caused to the infrastructure by Russia’s invasion.

“It is quite difficult to plan because the war keeps shifting. Most of the response has been very humanitarian around relief and not on recovery and reconstruction,” he told The Irish Times. “It will take some time to reach that point once the nature of the conflict becomes clearer, hopefully in the weeks to come.”

Mr Chapagain said in his 25 years with the organisation he had not witnessed a conflict impact the civilian population with the “rapidity and scale” as that seen in Ukraine since the war began in February. He expressed fears that Russia would turn its attention westwards towards the strategic port city of Odesa, Ukraine’s third biggest city with a population of more than one million people, if the Kremlin’s forces take Donbas in eastern Ukraine in the current offensive.

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There were, he said, up to eight million Ukrainians displaced internally, which “doesn’t make the news as as much as the Ukrainians crossing the border”, but that their needs and the needs of the hosting families would “significantly grow” as the conflict continued. He said it was “extremely important” that the support given to them was “stepped up”.

While praising the “tremendous solidarity” shown by neighbouring countries to Ukraine in welcoming refugees, he said this had caused resentment among refugees fleeing conflicts in Iraq, Syria and countries in Africa who have not been welcomed elsewhere.

“The war has become a complex thing: what is positive for Ukrainians has been questioned by others who feel that they don’t get the same level of treatment when they were displaced by war. They have the same human rights and needs. It has created a sense that in some countries…that the vulnerable population doesn’t get treated equality, so there is a bit of a sense of resentment.”

Mr Chapagain said that the International Federation of the Red Cross response plan for the Ukraine crisis was about €1.2 billion whereas €38 million was proposed for the food-support programme for the Horn of Africa where there are 14 million people on the verge of starvation.

On a visit to Kenya in early May, he called for massive scale-up of humanitarian assistance to help communities affected by the drought and growing hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa. “I was quite strongly challenged as to why even we were not doing enough – I got those type of questions. There is not a simple answer to that.”

As secretary general of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, Mr Chapagain, a native of Nepal and an engineer by training, oversees 180,000 Red Cross and Red Crescent local units in 192 countries with 14.9 million active volunteers and 650,000 staff employed across the world.

One of the big lessons to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic and Ukraine crises was how “siloed” humanitarian responses, development work and climate action funding were, he said. “When development fails, the humanitarian needs increase but the humanitarian action is not a permanent solution.”

Humanitarian crises such as the food crisis in Africa were directly linked to climate change, he said, and not linking humanitarian and development action to climate change was “not smart”.