Attachments
Background
The escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 led to massive waves of displacement inside the country and a large outflux of refugees across its borders. As of September 2023, 3.7 million people remained displaced inside Ukraine while 6.3 million people were refugees as of December 2023. As of September 2023, the frontline stretched for over 1200km, with approximately 18 percent of the country’s area beyond the control of the Government of Ukraine. The war has created large-scale humanitarian needs. The humanitarian situation close to and beyond the frontline is of particular concern due to the persistent security threats and access constraints that both drive needs and impact the ability for humanitarian actors to respond.
This brief is done within the frames of the Ukraine Multi-Sector Needs Assessment (MSNA) 2023. The MSNA is a broad multi-sectoral assessment, requested by the Humanitarian Country Team and led by REACH in partnership with WFP, which aims to build an evidence-base for improved humanitarian programming. The brief presents summarised assessment findings from areas of the country that were inaccessible for direct data collection, e.g. areas close to and beyond the frontline. This includes areas currently not under the control of the Government of Ukraine, i.e. occupied by the Russian Federation, with the exception of areas beyond the control of the Government of Ukraine since 2014. In these areas, interviews with residents are not an option. Instead, the so-called Area of Knowledge (AoK) approach – where respondents were asked about settlements which they have knowledge of through friends or relatives living there, or because they have themselves recently lived there – was combined with qualitative expert key informant (KI) interviews, and review of secondary data sources. Data was collected between August and October 2023 by WFP and covers 14 raions of Donetska, Zaporizka, Luhanska and Khersonska oblasts. For secondary data review, in particular the Humanitarian Situation Monitoring (HSM) carried out by REACH has been used to compare and triangulate findings, with specific emphasis on the HSM rounds conducted in areas outside the control of the Government of Ukraine. The mixed methods approach helped to establish a comprehensive overview of the humanitarian situation. It is important to note that due to the inability to collect data directly with residents, findings are of an indicative nature. Nevertheless, the findings from the qualitative, quantitative and secondary data review components tend to converge to a coherent picture of the situation, giving confidence in and validity to the findings. See page 9 for the detailed methodology.