How Covid shaped the Ukraine flare up
THE HUMANITARIAN DISASTER
Covid-19 is affecting the current crisis in Ukraine in significant ways. As Russian troops massed at the Ukrainian border, journalists descended on Kyiv, Twitter pundits took out their crystal balls, and the news machine grew louder. Will Putin invade? Will there be a war? No one had the actual answer.
Meantime, the war, in fact, has been going on for eight years, since Putin invaded in 2014. “It is frustrating,” Mirella Hodeib, from the International Committee for Red Cross, told me on a line from Kyiv. “Suddenly the spotlight is on, but so much human suffering has been happening here for so long.”
Thousands of people have died since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and manufactured a war in the east of the country. Today 2.9 million people in Europe live amid fighting, mindfields, bombed out infrastructure, unheated hospitals and collapsed schools. All of it is now compounded by the pandemic.
Ukraine is home to Europe’s only active warzone and the continent’s worst humanitarian crisis. And yet appeals for humanitarian aid go underfunded. The UN managed to raise just over 50% of its $168 million appeal in 2021. I spoke to several aid workers in Ukraine, all of whom shared Hodeib’s frustration by just how little attention the existing side of this crisis has received compared to a hypothetical war that’s generating all the noise.