Many, if not most, local and foreign volunteer activists in Ukraine hate the big aid agencies, such as the International Red Cross and the various UN organisations. That probably seems bizarre at first glance, but I can start to explain using a simple illustration from my own recent travels. I spent four weeks in Kramatorsk, helping deliver aid to settlements where people are living in ruins with little access to the basics of life. The only sign of aid agency activity in those places was a few branded items such as bags. I then took a train to Kyiv and walked past the highly prominent and largely deserted fancy play space constructed by UNICEF in the ticket hall.

‘Hate’ is a strong word… but arrive from battered Donetsk, stand in the Kyiv ticket hall, and your thoughts about UNICEF might not be warm and fuzzy either. And this is standard across Ukraine: an absence of support for people in desperate need accompanied by eye-catching but largely unnecessary facilities in relatively safe locations that maximise publicity. Here’s a representative opinion from the founder of Front Line Kit, a well-established independent NGO:

The reference to child-stealing refers to the the illegal transfer of children out of Ukraine by the Belarusian Red Cross which led to its suspension from the International Federation of the Red Cross in December 2023.

I suspect a lot of the content of this article would come as a surprise to what you might call the donor in the street. I’ve even encountered people with some degree of involvement with Ukraine who assume that the big boys are doing vital work while smaller independent operators are macho wannabes, deluded at best and a hindrance at worst. And it’s true that in some crises around the world only a large aid agency has the reach, influence and scale needed to help in, for example, a famine in an area with closed borders. However, one size does not fit all.

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional journalist, and am not pretending to be completely impartial. The aim of this three-part article, like most of the blog, is to report personal experiences and highlight perspectives that are often invisible outside Ukraine but need to be seen and understood. I try to make it clear when I’m quoting verifiable sources, and when it’s people I’ve spoken to informally.

So why are aid agencies in Kyiv and not Kramatorsk?

‘PR’ is the cynical answer and unfortunately that is a big part of it. However, there are some other more nuanced reasons.

Talking to a fellow supporter of the BEARR Trust at their conference a few days ago, I said, ‘Aid agencies don’t go to dangerous places.’ She immediately took issue, and pointed out that, ‘Aid agencies go to Ukraine’.

This sharpened the focus on one of the points of confusion. Ukraine is a place, and by one measure a ‘dangerous’ one. From my perspective, a ‘dangerous place’ is somewhere close enough to the front line that it regularly gets shelled and/or attacked by drones.

When I clarified my point, the woman immediately understood. However, aid agencies use the idea that Lviv – a large city in the west occasionally targeted by missiles – and a ruined village under daily shelling are both the same ‘dangerous place’ to obscure what they actually do. At the same time, their operations genuinely are limited by the reality that the village is a thousand times more dangerous.

A big charity is the same as any corporate employer in that it has a ‘duty of care’, which will have different implications in different countries, but is always going to include keeping its staff alive. The Russians often target humanitarian organisations (of all sizes) and some employees of the International Red Cross were in fact sadly killed recently, while operating in a more forward area than I would expect (though they were probably Ukrainians rather than foreign employees).

To avoid incidents of that kind as far as possible, charities have to have extensive rules for what staff can and can’t do or be asked to do. The exact rules are actually hard to find out – you can see why management wouldn’t want to publicise them – but as a standard staff are not allowed to be based, or even to go, within a certain distance of the front line except under controlled ‘mission’ circumstances, and these missions have to be planned well in advance. I’ve heard a number of accounts of UN staff turning up in convoys of armoured white land cruisers in places that are theoretically within shelling range but have not actually been struck for weeks. The ‘mission commander’ asks a few obvious questions then the cruisers head off never to be seen again. That’s both infuriating and hard to avoid if staff just aren’t allowed to go where they’re needed.

Legal limitations apply to local organisations too: when I spoke to a Ukrainian in a senior position in an eastern NGO in April 2023 he told me that regulations forbid groups like his from operating less than 40 km from the front line, sometimes with an exception for large cities. He was clearly frustrated by this and wanted to reduce that distance – an ambition more feasible for Ukrainian than international organisations because they have a detailed on-the-ground understanding of which locations, for example, 15 km from the front line, are relatively safe, and when somewhere 39 km away might actually be more dangerous. But international agencies are inevitably going to have blanket provisions unless someone puts in the effort to make them more specific.

Oleksandra Matvyichuk, head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, one of the two NGOs that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was quoted in an independent report, ‘We Need People who are Focused on the Mission, Not on Rules and Procedures’ in October 2022: “International NGOs evacuated their staff at the beginning of the invasion, when we needed them. […] There are wonderful people working on the ground in these organizations who understand why it is important and understand the mission, but they are led by people who are sharpened to procedures. And these procedures are not designed for such a crisis in which Ukraine found itself."

Rules are one limitation. Another is the flawed perceptions on which rules can be based. Senior managers who may have never visited Ukraine make sweeping judgements that shape the behaviour of whole organisations. According to the Aid Worker Security Report 2022 conducted by the consultancy group Humanitarian Outcomes, one veteran NGO security expert noted that ‘“there are a number of organisations in Ukraine […] that will not go further east than Dnipro, and others that remain in Lviv or across the border, to avoid the risk of collateral violence”’. Other NGO managers were quoted anonymously as saying, ‘“Really nowhere in Ukraine is totally safe. No matter where people are, they end up spending a lot of time in bunkers.”’ And, ‘“The reflex is not to go, because of the randomness of the risk and lack of indicators to help you plan and mitigate.”’

It's easy to see how this situation comes about. In some areas the situation in Ukraine is genuinely difficult to judge by day-to-day. And the moral calculation involved in, for example, evacuating three people from a location where the lives of your driver and translator are at significant at risk as well the evacuees', is different to that involved in taking trucks of rice to thousands of people struck by famine. However, when the large agencies are trying to persuade ordinary folk to fork out their hard-earned cash, for some reason they don’t use a picture of their fancy office in Poland on the promotional material, or mention that they don’t send their salaried staff within 100 km of the front line (Dnipro), let alone not sending them into the country at all(!)

Meanwhile, unpaid volunteers who genuinely risk their lives and save others’ on a daily basis – such as the international group Universal Aid Ukraine whose convoy was hit by a drone while evacuating civilians from a front-line village this August, nearly killing two members of the team – are often in a condition of wondering how to pay for fuel, vehicles, survival gear (body armour, drone jammers) and general running costs from month to month. Base UA, a Ukrainian NGO with paid staff and volunteers, suffered a similar attack which they describe in detail here while on a similar mission just a few days before the publication of this post.

Volunteers and employees of Base UA and UAU understand the risks every time they head east, but the contrast between the often unarmoured pickups and minibuses that such groups use, and the armoured UN land cruisers that are famous in the Ukraine volunteer community for hardly ever leaving Kyiv and Lviv, is inevitably galling.

Where’s the money going?

‘They’ve taken all the fucking money so why don’t they just fuck off with it and get out of the fucking way?’ – the founder of a small foreign NGO on reading an appeal from a large aid agency a year or so ago.

Finance isn’t my area of expertise, and I haven’t unearthed recent figures specific to the question of charity money flowing ‘to Ukraine’ and how it is allocated. But a report by Charity Intelligence Canada from May 2022 (and updated a number of times afterwards) did a close examination of figures and found that, for example, between 27 May and 6 July of that year, the International Red Cross raised C$522m in funds for Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Red Cross C$16m. Only C$58m in total had actually made its way inside Ukraine. The report concludes of some money the IRC received in July: ‘a lot of funds are probably sitting in a Geneva bank account’.

More positively an article originally from Forced Migration Review and published on the Refugees International website in November 2023, Breaking the Cycle – Localising Humanitarian Aid in Ukraine, found that while less than 1% of the $3.9 billion aid tracked by the UN in 2022 went directly to local actors within Ukraine, nearly half of the $70 million allocated by the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund (a UN body) in March 2023 was to go to Ukrainian NGOs, and none to international agencies. So there has been some change on that score – though the report does not cover how that planned allocation actually panned out. Actual interfacing between large donors and local organisations remains fraught – more on that below.

Jane Ebel has conducted academic studies of aid and assistance programmes in the former Soviet bloc. She told me over lunch in September: “In about 2000, 2002, I started to look at how social work was developing as a new academic study in Russia post-collapse of communism. I looked at all the different countries that were introducing their social work model into Russia. Countries like Canada, Holland, the UK, USA and Denmark, all delivering different models. So I was mapping that across Russia then also looking at Western assistance programmes that were coming in. Small programmes and very large programmes, and I was looking at whether this was beneficial or whether it was actually hampering Russia’s development.

“I came to the conclusion that probably small is beautiful and the very large development programmes with a lot of money thrown at them encouraged the wrong people to sign up for them. Since then I’ve spent a lifetime delivering small projects in Moldova and Tajikistan, My, sort of, strapline is small is beautiful and you can do a huge amount with 2,000 to 5,000 euros but with 500,000 euros it becomes a completely different animal and it doesn’t always provide the right level. I think it’s just that it attracts the larger organisations and they all have offices and a fleet of cars and a cadre of employees that have to be funded.”

There’s a simple and obvious message here: bigger organisation = more money spent on bureaucracy and management. Once again, this issue won’t go away, but nor can it be ignored.

And there’s a further problem with the money: where it goes within Ukraine. An experienced independent volunteer told me in Kharkiv in May 2024, ‘I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation and worked out that about 10% of the aid directed to Ukraine makes it to the east.’ But that’s a whole separate can of worms, which I periodically open and poke elsewhere in this journal.

Part 2: Why don’t the big agencies co-operate more effectively with locals?