Every day, the Foundation’s evacuation teams operate in areas of active hostilities. While most of our requests come from the Donetsk region, we also assist civilians in the Sumy, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv regions. People in these areas have been enduring persistent danger, the stress of ongoing shelling, and a diminished ability to accurately assess the threats to their lives and health.
Our teams continuously emphasize the critical importance of evacuating to ensure the safety of their lives and the lives of their relatives – children or elderly family members.
A key factor contributing to people staying in highly dangerous areas is the regular provision of humanitarian food aid and reasonable uncertainty about receiving similar assistance in safer regions. Often, in our interactions with local residents, we encounter the belief that only those at the frontline can receive support and humanitarian aid.
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We are confident that modifying the approach to food security programs by providing food parcels or cash assistance in safer areas would help reduce the number of people choosing to remain in their often destroyed homes, exposed to daily shelling, bombardment, and the risk of being trapped under rubble or temporary occupation.
Providing food to areas where forced and mandatory evacuations of children have been declared can unintentionally encourage people to stay in dangerous conditions. Children left in these areas are particularly at risk. As of August 13, 2024, Serhii Honcharov, Head of the Civil Protection Planning Department of the Donetsk Regional State Administration, reports that 2,235 children in the Donetsk region require urgent evacuation. Some districts in the Donetsk region have already been restricted to search for families hiding children due to the extreme danger in these areas.
