The Long War #7
ZAPORIZHZHIA—If Zaporizhzhia has become a city of IDPs—with reported figures of more than 130,000 refugees coming to a city with a prewar population of 700,000— then Dnipro, 65 kilometers north, is set to become a city of NGOs. Lviv held that title in the first months of the war, as professional organizations and anybody willing to help set up in a place that was the only reasonably safe city in Ukraine, while also being conveniently close to Poland.
But the threat of missile attacks subsided and, further to the east, the frontline stabilized over the summer. For humanitarian groups, the center of gravity shifted. Many organizations are currently setting up camp in Dnipro, a city both relatively safe and situated at more-or-less equal distance to the Donbass and Mykolaiv regions, two critical points of the frontline.
Ukraine is on track to become a country utterly and inextricably dependent on humanitarian aid and the foreign money that finances it. It is another consequence of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and it is not something that can, unfortunately, be avoided: as winter looms, the need for humanitarian help is going to be huge.
This also means that Ukraine is witnessing an unprecedented influx of foreign humanitarian workers. Interestingly, I have heard in the past few days several stories of cultural clashes between Ukrainians and foreigners more used to the Middle East than to Eastern Europe. One Western humanitarian worker with excellent knowledge of Ukraine told me how some of their colleagues expected to land in a “third-world country” and were astonished to discover the lovely cities of Lviv or Kyiv. A Ukrainian humanitarian worker in Dnipro gave me another, much more specific example: western colleagues asked them to make specific, text-free versions of their presentations so that they could be used by illiterate people—not realizing that Ukraine’s literacy rate is nearly 100%, one of the highest in the world. These are very, very anecdotal stories of course, and they might not be representative of the general situation, but I’m curious to see how things will evolve on that front.
Something to read
(OCCRP) The Banality of Brutality - 33 days under siege in Block 17, Bucha, Ukraine (maybe the most heart-wrenching report I have read about the occupation of Bucha by the Russian military)
(Graty / in Ukrainian & Russian) The KGB veteran from Lviv who, according to the SBU, helped Russia strike the region (Most trials and investigations into people accused of collaboration or of working for the Russian secret services are kept secret, making this a rare peak into a crucial topic)
(Zaborona) What do Ukrainians want: a strong leader, or democratic institutions? (some good context on a poll that made the rounds recently, and a call to defend decentralization that might be difficult to heed for Ukraine—the fight for survival making state centralization much more likely, despite the parallel and real development of activists, volunteers and non-state capacity. Yet, there is a good argument that decentralization helped foster pro-Ukrainian feelings, an argument that Brian Milakovsky makes convincingly in this great piece about the Russian occupation of the Luhansk region)
(Ukrainska Pravda) The three longest days of February. The beginning of the great war which no one thought would come (a story full of fascinating details written by two of Ukraine’s most well-informed political journalists. One question that remains frustratingly unanswered is when Zelensky understood the war was about to happen—the story makes it feel like he didn’t believe in it even on the evening of February 23, which can’t be right.)