While the war in Ukraine began a month ago, Frédéric de Saint Sernin, deputy director general of the NGO ACTED, returns for Paris Match to the humanitarian situation for Ukrainians, refugees, displaced or under bombs.
Paris Match. What is the latest news you have received from your teams on site?
Frederic de Saint-Sernin. This is alarming news because the flow of displaced persons and refugees continues: we have exceeded ten million people who have left their homes, of whom six million – even if the counts are not easy to make – have left their homes and are remained in the country. They left for areas in the center and west of the country. We can compare the four million refugees, in 25 days, to the last major migration crisis which was in Syria: there were six million Syrian refugees, but in ten years.
We have been present in Ukraine since 2015, particularly in the Donbass and in the East, where we are working to address several concerns, including basic needs, causes of deindustrialization and environmental damage. From now on, we are responding to a generally very difficult situation for a good part of Ukrainians.
Interview: “In Ukraine, the places where the suffering is the greatest are not accessible”
How many employees work on site?
We have 200 employees there and, like in many other countries, we work with civil society organizations, local NGOs, 75 in total. We have a fairly strong network in the country, which allows us to be as efficient as possible, even if people are on the move, to provide needs to people in need.
It’s been a month since the war started. How many people has ACTED supported?
We are around 25,000 direct beneficiaries in Ukraine. That’s not counting those we took care of on the other side of the borders, in Poland, Romania and Moldova. The Polish and Romanian authorities manage to cope with the influx of refugees, but it is harder for Moldova which is a poorer country, which is not a member of the European Union. We have recruited dozens of employees there who do a lot of work with these refugees.
Historically, we are in the Donbass so we continue to work where we were, but our main office is now in Lviv and no longer in kyiv. We also work in Kharkiv, where we distributed hot meals at the station every day. We don’t work in Odessa because there aren’t really any needs, it’s not currently a city at risk unlike many others like Mariupol, which is completely cut off. We had a contact office there with about twenty employees. We have one employee left in Mariupol, who gives us information on the situation, and the others have left the city. They work from other cities: many of Acted’s employees are also displaced.
“No one had anticipated the gravity of this war”
What are the main challenges they face?
There is a very important need for information to anticipate risks and reach populations without harm. That’s why in a country at war, you need to listen to the information, know how far you can go without taking any risks. We are used to these situations, we are present in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, so working in difficult terrain and the main thing is to be mobile and ready to intervene or not.
What are the specificities of the Ukrainian conflict compared to the other fields in which you intervene?
The peculiarities of the drama experienced by the refugees is probably that no one had anticipated the seriousness of this war, nor its outbreak. We work in countries that have been at war for years or others that survive despite climatic disasters, with people who are often on the road to reach water points or flee conflict. They have learned that it may be necessary to travel to save their life, so they travel as a family and take everything they have, even if it is sometimes very little. In Ukraine, it’s very different: these are people who never imagined being in a situation of war, they often left with very little and families are rather broken up. A few women, but mostly the men, stayed to fight. On the ground, among the displaced, we see women, children, the elderly, but hardly any men.
Psychologically and materially, things could not be prepared. When you leave with a suitcase, leaving behind you a loved one, a husband, a brother in the country, you imagine that the return is soon. But we are going to reach the fourth week of conflict, which unfortunately does not seem to fade, while people left thinking that a peace would be signed more quickly.
It’s surprising compared to what we’ve seen elsewhere for decades: a gigantic flow like never before since the start of the Second World War, families without men for many and who leave lightly because they acted quickly with amazement and thought they would come back quickly.
Read more about ACTED’s actions in Ukraine on their website