Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, Remarks to the UN Security Council on Ukraine, 5 May 2022

New York, 5 May 2022

As Delivered

Linda, Madam President,

Thank you very much indeed.

As we have just heard from the Secretary-General, elements of diplomatic progress are coming into view, even as civilian suffering mounts.

So, I’ll speak briefly today, if I may, about the human toll of this war, and then about what we are doing to address humanitarian needs, including a short update on our latest operations.

And I know that High Commissioner Bachelet will, of course, detail the impact on civilians, so I will be brief.
Just to recap:

The destruction of civilian infrastructure has come to characterize this conflict. Apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in populated areas have been attacked, and they must not be so.Over 13 million Ukrainians have now been forced to flee their homes, of whom 7.7 million are displaced inside Ukraine.

Lives have been uprooted, ripped apart, and never will be the same again. And many others couldn’t run. Often the most vulnerable are simply stuck. The elderly, people with disabilities have been unable to seek shelter from bombs, get out to gather supplies or receive information on evacuations.

And the threat of gender-based violence — including conflictrelated sexual violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, and human trafficking — has, as you will hear from the other briefers, risen hugely since the war began. Allegations of sexual violence against women, girls, men and boys are mounting.

Roads, as we have all seen, are heavily contaminated with explosive ordnance, putting civilians at risk and stopping humanitarian convoys from reaching them.

Madam President,

Let me briefly brief you on what the UN and our humanitarian partners are trying to do inside Ukraine to meet these growing needs.

We have 217 humanitarian partners with whom we are working in Ukraine. And I think we have now scaled up at record speed. We have more than 1,400 staff — UN staff — deployed across the country, operating out of eight hubs beyond Kyiv, with staff, warehouses and supplies in 30 locations, principally, of course, across the east, where the war is happening and the needs are greatest.

We reached more than 4.1 million people with some form of assistance on a daily basis across all the country’s 24 oblasts.

Our humanitarian response has three main aspects.

First, we deliver a great deal of humanitarian assistance and protection services to displaced people, and I know it’s not enough, and I’m sure it’s inadequate, and I know we will hear more on that.

But that’s all across the country, especially where internally displaced people have sought safety, or where people have begun returning — a crucial, crucial new element — to severely damaged communities.

And when I was in Irpin just a few weeks ago, the mayor was describing to us — as he, I think, described to the SecretaryGeneral — how his people are trying to get back to Irpin, but to do so, the reconstruction will take, as he’s put it, a year and a half.

So, restoring basic services necessary to survival is key. And I was very struck by the fact that the International Committee of the Red Cross very, very quickly after the conversation I’d had — but not as a result of that — went in to repair the basic-services element for the population of Irpin to be able to return.

In these areas, injecting cash aid allows civilians to choose what they need and offers a modicum of dignity in these fractious times.

It helps to keep markets open and liquidity and supply chains moving.

We plan to reach 1.3 million people with cash assistance, plugging into Ukraine’s social protection system with top-up payment, working with the Government, working with the Prime Minister and his plans for the distribution of cash to his people to reach families at risk.

This is needed… and is now largely achieved. Cash-based aid will now scale up very, very quickly indeed.

That’s the first part. The second part of our response is working on pre-positioning supplies to forward operating bases and increasing our preparedness in areas to where we think, we imagine this war might move next.

And third, as we heard from the Secretary-General, we engage every single day with parties to the conflict to push for the movement of aid to civilians in areas of active conflict, or to negotiate to help civilians leave for safer areas.

We have been able, Madam President, so far, to stage five interagency aid convoys to some of the hardest-hit areas — operations which required a humanitarian notification system to both parties to allow for those safe passage movements.

They’ve been a lifeline, a small mercy perhaps, to civilians encircled by fighting, bringing in medical supplies, water, food rations, non-food items and so forth. But it’s a beginning, but hopefully it’s not an end.

And as the Secretary-General has described, as a result of his own efforts, we have seen a glimmer of hope in these past days, thanks to his efforts and those of our colleagues on the front line.

As you know, on May 2nd, more than 100 civilians were evacuated from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, including women, children and older people. About 60 more people joined that convoy on the outskirts of Mariupol and were then able to move to safety.

And it was, as the Secretary-General described, a project of the greatest complexity and of constant, constant oversight, and it was an exceptional operation.

And I am especially grateful, and I’d like to record here our thanks to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the leadership of Peter Maurer, as well as to our own highly, highly experienced first responders.

But I must also applaud the authorities, and essentially the respective militaries of both Ukraine and the Russian Federation, for their close and constructive and essential cooperation in making that operation a reality.

It showed us that that can happen. And I believe, though the numbers weren’t great, that a single life saved is worth every ounce of effort.

And as of yesterday, as the Secretary-General said, we were able to move more than 320 civilians out of the Mariupol area broadly, again working closely in lock step with ICRC and with the cooperation of the Ukrainian and the Russian authorities.

And today we have that third operation, which began this morning, and with the intent of evacuating civilians from Mariupol and Azovstal, and as he said, we prefer not to speak about that operation until it is complete.

What I can finally about this is that we’re seeing the fruits of our labour over these past many weeks of establishing a liaison in Moscow, of the visits that preceded the Secretary-General, and which were brought into fruition by his own long and detailed meetings with the leaderships of both sides in this last week.

We are beginning to see now the agreement of the local ceasefires, because none of these movements of safe passage could happen without local ceasefires, pauses, windows of silence.

So, we’re making some progress, we’re building relations and we’re building experience, which we hope we can then broaden to more such operations, and that is the third element of our humanitarian programme.

We’ll keep pushing for more civilians to be able to leave Mariupol, and indeed Azovstal, if they so choose.

And we can now begin, on that basis, to explore options for reaching others where the need is greatest, and where we need a desire to serve the people of Ukraine in their hour of direst need.
Madam President, thank you very much.