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The volatile situation in eastern Ukraine has been further compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, creating heavy socioeconomic pressure on people affected by the continuing eight-year-long conflict. The disproportionately older populations living in isolated settlements in GCA along the contact line are one of the most vulnerable groups that cannot access the State social protection apparatus. Access constraints experienced by the residents of NGCA are further exacerbated by the COVID-19 induced restrictions on crossing the contact line. The monthly crossings number dropped by 95 per cent compared to the pre-COVID-19 period1 . For NGCA residents, this made access to pensions, social payments, and other essential services even more difficult.
Facilitating access to state administrative, social and judicial services for NGCA and GCA contact line residents has been the major focus of humanitarian legal aid providers since the beginning of the conflict. Lengthy bureaucratic procedures, system’s arbitrariness, errors of human judgment, and physical isolation between people and service providers have been the major reasonsfor the prolonged presence of substantial humanitarian legal aid services in the conflict regions.
In the past, government agencies, were often responsible for the generation of legal disputes on the mass-scale. The waves of the arbitrary suspensions of pensions and the series of restrictive executive orders are reminiscent of the early post-conflict period where legal aid providers struggled to content legal disputes generated by government actions.
The situation dramatically reversed in the past few years when policymakers started to take notice of the peculiar needs and vulnerabilities faced by the conflict-affected people. This, coupled with increased state interventions on decentralization of services, has created a new beginning with the prospects of conflict-affected people directly accessing state services without the interventions of third-party intermediaries, i.e., legal aid providers. These developments look increasingly promising.
The outbreak of the COVID pandemic has caused insurmountable obstacles for many conflict-affected people, particularly the NGCA residents, towards accessing state services. However, the tragic disruption has created strong impetus both among the people and the government to look for digitalization as a solution to the access problems.
Obviously, digitalization cannot be a solution to the access problem for everyone in society, particularly in locations with poor internet access and a high concentration of the older population. However, its appeal comes from the prospect of autonomously resolving a mass volume of access issues, creating an opportunity for government and humanitarian actors to prioritize resource allocation for those who are digitally disenfranchised.
To improve the situation with access to social protection, justice, and other state services for all citizens (incl. NGCA residents), the Ukrainian government introduced a vast variety of public electronic services and registers, such as the Eservices of the Ministry of Social Policy, the web portal of the Pension Fund, the online House of Justice, etc. The majority of these state services are integrated into the so-called new brand of e-governance Diia, and made accessible to the people through a mobile app and a web portal. Launched in 2020, the Diia app allows Ukrainian citizens to use digital documents (such as ID-card, driver's license, IDP certificate, student ID, COVID-certificate, and others) on their smartphones for identification and sharing purposes. The Diia portal provides access to over 50 governmental services.
Through this portal, Ukrainian citizens, inclusive of IDPs and NGCA residents, can register a place of residence, apply for a pension, generate a COVID certificate, apply for a housing loan for IDPs, obtain a certificate of birth, sign documents, submit a single taxpayer declaration, apply for unemployment benefits, register a real estate ownership, attain extracts from the registers, apply for utility subsidy, get in an electronic queue for visiting administrative bodies and many more, all of it online. By 2024, the government plans to make all kinds of state-person interactions available through Diia.
Such an impressive and rapid change, however, has not generated an immediate positive response among the conflictaffected vulnerable populations. Instead, it created a potential gap in services for the technologically disadvantaged people. As NGCA residents have little access to information and latest news from GCA, only younger and more affluent population strata have a cut-off level of awareness on the subject through social media and other internet resources.
Populations living near the line of contact, consisting mostly of elderly and ageing individuals, have little-to-no knowledge about the availability or relevance of the online services. The majority do not possess neither electronic devices nor necessary technical skills. The insufficient internet coverage of the buffer zone locations also contributes to the access constraints. On top of that, registration in the Diia app requires having a valid bank ID or an electronic ID passport, while accessing Diia portal is only possible through either bank ID, Diia.Signature (generated upon registering in the Diia app), or QES (e-signature issued by a bank on removable storage media upon submission of a number of necessary documents). Most of the Diia app functions are available for users who have their IDs in the new electronic format, as opposed to the old paper-based ID. According to the Ministry for TOT information, 0.8 million NGCA residents possess such electronic ID. The Ministry for Digital Transformation is currently expanding the functionality of the Diia app for citizens with IDs in the paper form2 .
As a result, a necessity emerged to fill in the hiatus between online services made available by the state and the preparedness of conflict-affected population to use and benefit from these services. To assess the current situation,
DRC conducted a survey focusing on the availability of state electronic services to the vulnerable conflict-affected population. The findings of the survey are expected, inter alia, to become the basis for building an efficient response.