Source: EN – Geneva Solutions — Read the original article.
As Russian missile and drone strikes intensify, Ukrainian relief organisations who were in Geneva earlier this week for aid talks say funding cuts are stalling efforts to hand more power and resources to local actors.
With no end in sight to the war, Ukrainian local aid groups continue to play a crucial role in delivering relief to people as attacks from Russia intensify. Yet, funding cuts have affected the geographic scope of their work.
Several of them were in Geneva this week for global humanitarian talks to urge donors and international agencies to honour promises made 10 years ago to localise aid as of the Grand Bargain, the humanitarian sector’s flagship reform plan.
As Ukraine prepares to enter its sixth winter since Russia’s full-scale invasion, aid is running thin. Geopolitical shifts have compounded donor cuts, while the failure of repeated rounds of talks aimed at delivering a ceasefire has led to a further decline in external support. The UN’s humanitarian reset reform initiative, cooked up in 2025 in response to major aid funding cuts, has added another layer to the challenges, “hyper-prioristing” where money is spent.
A recent report by the International Rescue Committee says that the protection of people in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, due to ongoing attacks on civilian infrastructure, a severe energy crisis and the “exhaustion of coping capacity by a population deep in protracted displacement”. It cites issues including reduced aid coverage, deteriorating access to health services and rising civilian casualties.
Agreed in 2016, the Grand Bargain – which aimed to make humanitarian response more efficient and locally-driven – launched a new phase early last week in Geneva, with even greater focus on the lean and the local. But some relief groups in Ukraine warn that the focus on cutting costs comes at a price.
Daria Musienko, director of Humanitarian NGO Platform, a coordination body that unites over 140 national and international NGOs, warned that the plan “risks including only the actors who can deliver quickly and at scale, missing out on smaller actors”.
Since 2022, humanitarian funding has dropped sharply from roughly $4.5 billion to $2.1 billion in 2026, with Ukraine still the second-largest recipient of aid after the Occupied Palestinian Territories, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Limits to local response
Daria Chekalova, director of partnerships and fundraising at Right to Protection, a rights-based organisation which expanded operations when the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014, took the news from donors hard.
“There will be an impact on frontline communities, meaning we will need to triage and prioritise,” she said. “Will it be a person with disabilities, an older person, a family with children or a single person just trying to come out of a dangerous zone? It is really hard to do.”
Despite the rapid growth of local and national aid organisations in the country and their ability to access funds directly from donors since 2022, many still struggle to influence contributors, who have focused on the frontlines to the detriment of other Ukrainian regions affected by the war.
Many described a funding gap that leaves civilians evacuated from war zones without support. “People fall though the cracks in this gap moving from one place to another, because the response is getting narrower,” Musienko explained.
Once people move away to other areas, such as western Ukraine, the lack of resources, access to jobs and even sustainable shelter – which the government struggles to provide – often leaves them with little other choice than to return to high risk areas where they can receive assistance.
“They return to their homes, despite the fact that it’s very dangerous and they can lose their lives. But they don’t have any other options because state assistance is impossible,” said Olena Pashchenko, programme manager at The Tenth of April, an organisation providing legal aid, social support and protection mostly in frontline regions.
One humanitarian worker described “parallel realities” where elderly people trapped on the frontline send assistance to evacuated family members unable to find work in safer regions.
“It’s very important to have the ability to provide people with complex assistance,” said Pashchenko. “And that not only in emergencies because emergencies are temporary, but also recovery assistance that can help people integrate in a new community or find jobs, and be sustainable.”
Conditional giving
As donors and aid organisations prepare for the latest iteration of the Grand Bargain, known as the Collective Action Platform for the Grand Bargain, or CAP4GB, local NGOs were invited for the first time to the group’s annual meeting in Geneva. But aid workers say some major contributors still think they know best where funding should go.
“They would come with a partner (aid organisation) and basically tell us you need to include this partner, even if we know that this organisation is not the best placed there,” Chekalova said, criticising donors for applying the same stringent rules they use for international organisations for local, resource-strapped NGOs.
A 2026 study found that donors tended to work with “trusted” organisations that had established reputations, which streamlined distribution processes.
Chekalova noted that Washington, which is proving to be politically and militarily unreliable for Kyiv, has, as its biggest aid donor, been “super influential” on others. “What they do finds a reflection on how other donors operate.”
Meanwhile, areas such as protection to victims of gender-based violence, have been deprioritised within Ukraine’s aid structure.
Pashchenko noted that her organisation has seen some improvements in accessing flexible funding. Recently she said The Tenth of April was able to hire a lawyer who ran its veterans assistance, an area of growing need that few international organisations are willing to support.
‘They live it’
The support has also helped provide psychosocial support for humanitarian workers, who “don’t simply work in a war-affected environment, they live in it”, according to Pashchenko.
In Geneva, the Grand Bargain discussions focussed on improving risk-sharing, increasing flexible funding and consolidating national-level coordination bodies, called national reference groups, or NRGs. In that context, Ukrainian humanitarians advocated for a duty of care package to mitigate risks to aid workers in vulnerable areas.
Hryhoriy Seleshchuk, programme director of Caritas Ukraine, said donors have failed to provide sufficient resources to help local organisations operate safely compared to what international NGOs receive. Local groups working on the frontlines, where drone and other attacks are most frequent and severe, have been urging donors for support to acquire armoured vehicles to access people in need.
One aid worker recounted having to drive their car to a humanitarian country team meeting not far from the frontline, relying only on a paper map and visual prompts as GPS was jammed “for obvious reasons”, before reaching the venue, where several armoured vehicles were parked. “Do you know how many of them belonged to national organizations? Zero,” the humanitarian commented.
Over the past four years, Seleshchuk noted that even Caritas Ukraine, one of the biggest national organisations, has only recently been able to start acquiring its first armoured vehicles with support from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and Norway’s aid agency, Norad.
“I really don’t have a clear understanding why we still didn’t achieve the goals that the Grand Bargain set 10 years ago,” said Selshchuk. He noted that in Ukraine, NGOs had long been ready to take the lead on aid, coordinating among themselves in chat groups.
“We now have new names for this. Great. But this does not resolving the issue of elderly people living in Kherson on the front-line and those living in Kyiv but that can’t find a job,” he said.
