Ukraine
Project HOPE is implementing a highly coordinated, comprehensive humanitarian response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our team is on the ground in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Moldova actively delivering medicines, medical supplies, mental health support, trauma care trainings, and other urgent assistance.
In the first four months of our response, Project HOPE has delivered more than 300 pallets of badly needed medicines and medical supplies inside Ukraine, including trauma supplies, insulin, needles, hygiene kits, and more. Outside the country, our multi-country refugee response is helping refugees access the care they need, including children and those needing mental health care.
About Ukraine
Ukraine is in eastern Europe and is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia. Ukraine borders Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Russia, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Azov. Ukraine was a part of the former Soviet Union and only gained full independence with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.
Ukraine has been divided among regional and ethnic lines since its independence and has experienced multiple conflicts. The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing Donbas War in eastern Ukraine have led to an ongoing humanitarian crisis that has impacted some 3 million people. More than 10,000 civilians had been killed or injured and 1.4 million people internally displaced before the 2022 Russian invasion began.
The 2022 Russian invasion
Conflict broke out across Ukraine after a Russian military incursion began on February 24, 2022. Thousands of civilians have been killed and more than 12 million Ukrainians have fled home seeking safety, including 5 million who have left the country as refugees.
Russia’s invasion has devastated Ukraine’s health care system, especially in places that have experienced heavy fighting. In the early days of the conflict, Kyiv’s mayor warned that the city was at the “border of a humanitarian catastrophe,” and that the infrastructure to deliver food and medicine had been destroyed. Pharmacies and stores in hard-hit cities have been emptied, and many hospitals and health facilities have been targeted, damaged, and destroyed.
Russia’s incursion has had a profound impact on neighboring countries that have taken in large numbers of refugees, especially Poland.
Project HOPE’s impact in Ukraine
In the first four months of our response, Project HOPE:
- Supported 50 health facilities in Ukraine
- Delivered $4.7 million in pharmaceuticals and medical commodities
- Provided trauma care trainings for more than 1,200 health care workers in five health facilities
- Distributed more than 20,000 hygiene kits
- Provided mental health support or services to more than 8,300 people
- Provided direct patient care to more than 2,300 refugees in Poland
- Rehabilitated health facilities in four cities and launched three mobile medical units
- Opened a mental health and psychosocial support center for refugees in Poland and two refugee child playrooms in Moldova
- Opened four in-country offices in Dnipro, Kyiv, Lviv, and Odessa
Project HOPE was also awarded a 12-month program by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which will reach 1.25 million people and 24 health facilities over the next year.
Our history in Ukraine
Project HOPE began working in Ukraine in 2002 with a life-skills program focused on drug use prevention, HIV prevention, and education for children in primary schools. In 2007, Project HOPE began a five-year, USAID-funded HIV/AIDS Service Capacity project in Ukraine focused on community mobilization for the country’s most at-risk populations.
From 2012-2017, Project HOPE helped improve the health of Ukrainians by enabling the Government of Ukraine to decrease the burden of TB and lower TB morbidity and mortality.