Aid agencies struggle to reach besieged cities in Ukraine

Humanitarian aid agencies bend over backwards to reach the besieged cities of Ukraine where there are thousands of trapped people who urgently need assistance, officials from the World Food Program (WFP) explained on Saturday.

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“The challenge is to reach the cities that are surrounded or about to be surrounded,” Jakob Kern, WFP’s emergency coordinator for the crisis in Ukraine, told AFP. The situation is “catastrophic,” he stressed.

The lack of humanitarian access makes it virtually impossible to deliver emergency food aid to the fenced-in port of Mariupol (southeast) and to the cities of Kharkov and Sumy in the northeast. It is a “siege” tactic that is “unacceptable in the 21st century,” Kern said.

The WFP, a United Nations agency based in Rome, had to start filling Ukrainian warehouses “from scratch”.

Replacing supply chains destroyed by fighting is a “giant task”.

The agency hopes to reach 3.1 million people in Ukraine, but efforts to get products such as pasta, rice and canned meat to them are hampered by difficulties in finding “volunteer truck drivers,” he explained.

“The closer we get to these cities, the more they worry about their safety. And that means we don’t have the ability to reach people in Mariupol, Sumy and Kharkov, cities that are almost or completely surrounded in the case of Mariupol,” Kern added.

More than 3.25 million refugees have fled Ukraine to date, but many people remain trapped, including “hundreds of thousands of women and children,” he stressed. “They can’t get out and we can’t get to them.”

– Serious consequences –

Kern, who worked for the WFP for three years in the Syrian war, explained that the siege tactic used in Ukraine is similar, but with more serious consequences due to the larger size of the encircled cities.

“Two days ago, a convoy of a few trucks managed to enter Sumy with food for about 3,000 people for a few days. But these are big cities and regular access is needed, on a much larger scale,” he lamented.

“Almost a daily convoy would be needed to provide basic food to a population of half a million or a million people. This implies establishing a permanent humanitarian corridor with these cities”, she detailed.

However, in Ukraine, as in Syria, even a small amount of help can psychologically sustain those who are locked up in terrible conditions, because “for the people surrounded, it is very important to see that they are not forgotten,” the coordinator stressed.

Ukraine is historically a breadbasket of wheat for the world. Before the war, the WFP bought almost half of its wheat needs there.

Currently – with the closure of Ukrainian ports and the freezing of Russian wheat purchase contracts due to sanctions – 13.5 million tons of wheat and 16 million tons of corn are blocked in Russia and Ukraine.

Rising food and energy costs, exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have increased the cost of WFP’s international operations by $70 million a month, and the agency is urgently seeking donations.

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Source: Elcomercio

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