On 21 August 2024, the Ministry of Reintegration and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Support to Frontline Communities during the Next Winter Period.
The agreement was signed by Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk and UNHCR Representative in Ukraine Caroline Lindholm Billing.
The Memorandum provides for one-time payments of UAH 21,000 for vulnerable households to purchase solid household fuel.
In particular, vulnerable households in Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Chernihiv regions will be covered by the assistance. First and foremost, it will target households within 10 kilometres of the contact line or the border with Russia.
The total budget of the programme is USD 30 million.
‘I am sincerely grateful to UNHCR for the much-needed and timely assistance to our frontline areas. Together we are holding our humanitarian front. Together we will get through this winter,’ said Iryna Vereshchuk.
‘UNHCR’s priority is to support people who remain in the frontline regions during the winter months, which are likely to be particularly difficult this year given the targeted attacks on energy infrastructure. These people are in an incredibly vulnerable socio-economic situation and therefore most in need of humanitarian assistance to survive and maintain their resilience. I am very pleased that we can build directly on our long-standing partnership with the Ministry of Reintegration to support most of these families through the coming winter, when the impact of the devastating war will be felt even more strongly,’ said Caroline Lindholm Billing, UNHCR Representative in Ukraine.
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The $30 million provided by UNHCR is part of a larger assistance package. The total amount of this package is US$100 million, as announced by UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi during a meeting with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.
