Visit of TGH projects in Ukraine - Dec. 2024

I?was looking forward to this first trip to the field with impatience and a certain amount of anxiety: the desire to better understand the complexity of the conflict in Ukraine and the humanitarian operations carried out by Triangle Génération Humanitaire on the ground, the need to get a real feel for the reality of a war that I have been following closely on the news websites since 2022, and the need to reassure and support the teams who have been working tirelessly on the ground for nearly three years.?

The difficulties start with access to the territory, with Ukrainian airspace closed to all movement. For us, it was a 14-hour bus journey from Warsaw across Poland in a vehicle manned almost exclusively by women, except for a few humanitarians like us. Women whose complex lives, far from their families and countries, are easy to guess. At the border, endless columns of lorries at a standstill to supply the country and a customs clearance in 2 hours, which seems to be quite fast.

We didn't see much of Kyiv, apart from the historic centre with its wealthy middle-class buildings, richly decorated Orthodox churches, a few pretty official buildings with massive but rather neat Soviet architecture and a few relics of the war, like these Russian tanks destroyed in the column advancing on Kyiv in March 2022. Indeed, the authorities do not necessarily wish to hide this war, but rather to highlight it by glorifying the army and the flag in order to galvanise the population and remind them that soldiers are dying in the trenches when city dwellers might feel protected from the conflict. In fact, life seems to be flowing almost normally in Kyiv, with its trendy restaurants, its shops that are always in stock and its traffic jams.?

There is still the midnight curfew and the bomb warnings that resound in mobile phones every night. You wake up with a start the first few nights, then get used to it and go back to sleep, waiting for more information.?Indeed, every night, and more rarely during the day, Russia sends out dozens of Shahed, the Iranian suicide drones, setting off alarms and saturating Ukrainian air defences. Their destructive capacity remains limited, but they can kill by crashing into buildings. In addition, cities are also subject to the risk of bombardment by ballistic missiles. It's this danger in particular that the Triangle security team is monitoring, led by Revaz, a solid Georgian, accompanied by Kateryna, a young prosecutor converted to security. Because alarms are so frequent, it is not possible to go to a shelter every time (only the rare schools in service follow this strict rule, which makes education very disruptive).?

It is therefore necessary to identify the danger using the many websites and social networks that monitor the information provided by the intelligence services on the take-off of MIGs or tactical or strategic bombers in Russia, their trajectory, the dropping of missiles (via communications monitoring) and the possible target. Depending on the weapon used, the protective measures are adapted: either you just have to stay away from the windows or you have to go down to the shelters. Revaz and Kateryna provide us with this type of information immediately after each shrill mobile phone alarm, whatever the time of night, which is very reassuring (I called them my guardian angels).

It is therefore necessary to identify the danger using the many websites and social networks that monitor the information provided by the intelligence services on the take-off of MIGs or tactical or strategic bombers in Russia, their trajectory, the dropping of missiles (via communications monitoring) and the possible target. Depending on the weapon used, the protective measures are adapted: either you just have to stay away from the windows or you have to go down to the shelters. Revaz and Kateryna provide us with this type of information immediately after each shrill mobile phone alarm, whatever the time of night, which is very reassuring (I called them my guardian angels).

In Dnipro, a charmless southern industrial town on the banks of the river of the same name, where the few historic buildings have not withstood the invasion of large Soviet blocks and then more modern buildings, the war is not felt too much either, apart from night-time alerts and a few buildings hit by missiles. Traffic jams are just as common here, with trendy restaurants alongside the latest tech shops.?

And yet, as I was able to see with our teams, the population is on edge, with many people displaced by the war and the occupation of part of the territory by Russia, families whose husbands are at the front, anxious for bad news and waiting for a drip-drip permission, male colleagues worried about a possible forced conscription, which could take them to the front in less than 24 hours.

As soon as you move away from the city, however, particularly towards the south, the war becomes more palpable: stretches of motorway transformed into emergency landing strips for fighter planes, deep trenches being built along the roads with the famous Dragon teeth to stop armoured vehicles, numerous military convoys, but above all a huge number of civilian cars, particularly 4x4s, hastily repainted khaki green, a GPS that panics because of jamming and, of course, numerous checkpoints controlling all land movements.?

The closer you get to the front line, the more soldiers there are on the roads and in the small villages, sometimes in abandoned houses to avoid large concentrations and the risk of bombing. We even came across a group of English-speaking soldiers: recruits from the Ukrainian Foreign Legion who had come to fight against the Russian army. Of course, we stayed away from the artillery and FPV drones, 40 km from the line of contact, but we could hear the cannons roaring in the distance as the town of Pokrovsk came under constant Russian fire and was methodically reduced to ashes.?

It was at Slov'Yanka that I met Tatiana, who had been alone at home since the death of her son in the war. Winter has descended on the country and the inhabitants of the villages near the front line are trying to cope with the first snowfalls. The social misery of the inhabitants of these rural areas is obvious, and provides a violent contrast to the cities. The houses look the same, made of bricks and tin, with a chimney in the middle showing that they were heated by a stove. The children are dressed in torn clothes, in multiple layers to combat the cold. The whole place looks miserable.?

The teams from Triangle Génération Humanitaire (TGH) come to bring this old woman, whom they affectionately call Babushka (or Babusya in Ukrainian), solid fuel briquettes, produced locally from sunflower seed waste. This is vital help for heating the stove and coping with the cold, while the fighting just a few dozen kilometres away is restricting movement.

Thanks to this support, more than 800 households, identified by the local authorities and our social workers, are now receiving this "solid fuel" thanks to a "winterisation" project funded by the American Office of Humanitarian Aid and the United Nations.

You can see the distress on the faces of the people we met, but also in the tears of Tatiana when she spoke of her son. I was also struck by the harshness in the eyes of the children who had lost their innocence all too soon. I came away from this visit to the field shattered, but proud of the work done by the TGH teams in a complicated war context. Well done to them for preserving this humanity and restoring hope in the midst of the violence of war.?

Stanislas, 8 December 2024?