Ukraine’s frontline cuts across the country like a jagged scar. Despite a February ceasefire, the fighting hasn’t stopped. In March and April, Kristina Jovanovski had rare access to rebel-held areas to investigate the humanitarian disaster that has unfolded on Europe’s doorstep. Here is our exclusive report on why aid isn’t getting through.
After navigating shattered glass, craters, a burnt-out car and a checkpoint, they stand in line, ready to get onto all fours and clamber down a precarious wall of rubble and crumbling cement in rebel-held eastern Ukraine.
The 20 or so civilians, some of them quite elderly, make their way gingerly across the blown-up bridge that leads to government-controlled territory. More importantly, it will give them access to medicine, money and cheaper provisions.
«When you’re 56 of course it’s hard, but we have to climb because we need money,» Lena Vasilivna tells me after scaling the informal border on her return journey.
A destroyed bridge marks the border between government and rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine
Credit cards, banks and ATMs don’t function at all in the rebel-held east. People are cut off from all the services the Ukrainian state would usually provide, such as pensions and benefits. The government made an official announcement in November, but locals say the funds dried up months before that.
The conflict between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatist rebels has claimed more than 6,334 lives since it erupted 13 months ago, according to conservative estimates from UN relief officials. The Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko puts the death toll above 8,600, including nearly 7,000 civilians.
The war, which holds enormous geopolitical importance for Russia and Europe, grew out of protests by pro-Russian separatists, which escalated after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s southeastern peninsula of Crimea. Russia’s move followed the February 2014 revolution that overthrew pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych.
Separatists took control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and set up the self-proclaimed «Donetsk People’s Republic» (DPR) and «Luhansk People’s Republic» (LPR) in April. Kiev and NATO say the rebels are backed by Moscow, which Russia denies.
“The war’s frontline has become Ukraine’s de facto Berlin Wall, splitting the country east and west, dividing the two populations – sometimes members of the same family even – into haves and have-nots.
Pro-Russian separatist rebels have carved out their own self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine
An untold number of civilians cross the frontline every month to get money and supplies from the west. They can’t afford to stay there and rent apartments, especially with no means of employment, so they return east with whatever they can carry.
Vasilivna lives in the small village of Nikolaevka, seven kilometers from the bridge. When fighting intensified in February, she slept on the floor in the corridor, hoping the extra walls would provide greater protection if a shell hit.
Once a month, she makes her way like hundreds of others across the bridge to the town of Stanytsia Luhanska to pick up her mother’s medication for high blood pressure and her pension from the post office.
In government-controlled territory, Vasilivna has access to cheaper goods. At home, she would pay $5.65 for one kilo of pork fat. Across the bridge, she can get it for $2.11. A box of teabags costs 70 cents on the western side versus $1.65 on the east.
She has to stop at three checkpoints and is never sure she’ll be allowed to pass. Sometimes, the guards say she cannot go through for security reasons. Other times, she is denied passage but given no explanation.
Even when she does make it, difficult trade-offs have to be made: «If we buy medicine, we can’t afford to buy some food,» she explains.
Who is helping?
Most of the estimated 1.2 million Ukrainians in need of assistance in rebel-held Ukraine can’t keep crossing to and fro like Vasilivna to make ends meet. Many have no income at all and are reliant on whatever aid comes their way.
Families spent the winter months living in underground shelters
According to an extensive assessment of humanitarian needs conducted by the NGO Forum in Ukraine in March, of the more than 670,000 people who urgently needed food aid, almost 90 percent were in rebel-held areas.
International aid agencies are struggling to fill the void left by the Ukrainian government, which cannot access the rebel-held east, and by the separatists, who are trying to build their own quasi-state with limited means.
It is an impossible task, especially as February’s truce is a ceasefire in name only.
«There’s a huge population that we will never be able to cover,» Loïc Jaeger, deputy head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Ukraine, tells me.
A limited number of aid convoys do cross quite regularly from the west, but they can’t access certain areas, especially villages in lawless Luhansk region far from crossing points, down minor roads. Some help is provided by the Russian government, but it isn’t clear how widespread or regular this assistance is.
Rebels have been distributing limited amounts of aid
Aid agencies are also hampered by a Ukrainian government policy, introduced in January, requiring people who travel from government-controlled areas into rebel-held territory to formally apply for permission first.
Daniel Bunnskog, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representative in Luhansk, says this bureaucracy means dozens of trucks have been left languishing for days at Ukrainian checkpoints waiting for the correct passes.
«It doesn’t seem to be a unified system where everybody has the same opinion of what’s supposed to happen when you come with your passes and trucks,» he says. «It makes the timely delivery of the assistance very difficult.»
The policy has limited the amount of aid the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) can deliver in rebel territory.
WFP reports officer Ryan Mcdonagh says figuring out how to get past the checkpoints has become a daily struggle because the process is so inconsistent and unreliable.
«It’s really important to get food in now… you have areas that have been cut off for months,» he tells me. «At the same time that we’re trying to get in as much food as possible to some of these (rebel-held) areas, this administrative hurdle becomes an increasingly more burdensome challenge.»
Many people in the rebel-held part of Luhansk region have to rely on soup kitchens run by separatists. Apart from MSF and ICRC, few international aid organisations have a consistent presence here, where the humanitarian crisis is worst.
Soup kitchens, like this one run by the local Red Cross in Luhansk, are the only source of regular food for some
«There are very few humanitarian actors to fill the gap which actually exists between needs and what is available,» Bunnskog says. «The main provider of assistance is (the) so-called LPR government… mainly through the (assistance) it receives from the Russian side.»
