A new report shows the challenges of people living in front-line areas and of the NGOs and volunteers trying to serve them. The report is the result of a monitoring mission in Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine organised by Vostok SOS and Austausch in which Libereco cooperated.
In November-December 2022, Libereco joined our Ukrainian partner Vostok SOS and the German organisation Austausch on a monitoring mission to assess and document the humanitarian and evacuation needs and the human rights situation in the Kherson, Mykolaiv, Donetsk, and Kharkiv regions, where many villages and towns have recently been liberated.
The monitoring team visited decimated communities that face regular shelling, live in densely mined territory and have limited access to electricity and phone connectivity. Information about evacuation trains spreads slowly. Beyond the trains, which are organised nationally, most evacuation organisation as well as humanitarian support are coordinated by NGOs, which often face challenging daily reality and unrealistic demands of international funders at the same time. The report calls for increased international aid to meet the challenges winter conditions will pose for people especially as supplier run out.
The mission resulted in the report “A Trail of Death and Destruction. Russian War Crimes, Human Rights Violations and the Evolving Needs in Ukraine”, which concludes that there is ample evidence for considerable Russian war crimes, including deliberate attacks on civilian targets. Vostok SOS, Austausch, and Libereco express concerns and lay out challenges for the long-term reception of large amounts of refugees in Western Ukraine. The three organisations have already been on a joint monitoring mission in Ukraine in May 2022.
