Humanitarian ceasefires between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Ukraine are not on the horizon, but may be possible in a couple of weeks, the UN aid chief has said. Martin Griffiths made the comments Monday in a briefing to reporters at UN headquarters in New York on his attempts to arrange local ceasefires in Ukraine so that desperate civilians could be evacuated from embattled areas and to provide badly needed assistance.
Moscow’s invasion, the biggest attack on a European state since 1945, has killed or wounded thousands. More than seven million people are estimated to be internally displaced in Ukraine and need help urgently, according to the International Rescue Committee. Griffiths met senior officials in Moscow and Kyiv this month to discuss UN “aspirations” for humanitarian ceasefires and ways to improve a system to notify the sides of evacuation and humanitarian supply movements. Griffiths said he would travel to Turkey this week to discuss with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials the prospects of hosting humanitarian talks between Ukraine and Russia. UN aid officials are planning to dispatch a humanitarian convoy in the next couple of days into the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia-backed separatists declared a republic, and from there aid supplies would go to Luhansk, another separatist region, he said. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities have urged people in the eastern Donbas area to move west to escape a large-scale Russian offensive to capture its composite regions, Donetsk and Luhansk.
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