WAR IN UKRAINE 

UNICEF is providing life-saving help to children and their families 

The war in Ukraine poses an immediate and growing threat to the lives and well-being of the country’s 7.5 million children. Humanitarian needs are multiplying by the hour as fighting intensifies. Children have been killed. Children have been wounded. Children have fled for their lives and have been separated from their loved ones. 

More than 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine as families desperately seek safety and protection. 

UPDATE FROM UKRAINE: By March 10, more than 1 million children had fled Ukraine. Most have fled with their families to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova and Romania. Women and girls travelling on their own are especially at risk of gender-based violence. For many others, life has moved underground as families seek safety in shelters, subways, or basements, often for hours on end. Women are giving birth in makeshift maternity wards with limited medical supplies.   

More than 4,300 births have occurred in Ukraine since the start of the war and 80,000 Ukrainian women are expected to give birth in the next three months. Oxygen and medical supplies, including for the management of pregnancy complications, are running dangerously low.

The past eight years of conflict in Ukraine have already inflicted profound and lasting harm to children. Now, homes, schools, orphanages, and hospitals have all come under attack. Civilian infrastructure like water and sanitation facilities have been hit, leaving millions without access to safe water.  

Your monthly gift makes the biggest impact to support UNICEF work.  

UNICEF is working with partners to provide vital humanitarian supplies and to reach vulnerable children and families with essential services, including health, education, protection, water and sanitation. Critical needs are growing every day.  

UNICEF is working around the clock to scale up life-saving programmes for children. This includes: 

  • Ramping up efforts to meet critical and escalating needs for safe water, health care, education and protection. 

  • Providing vital humanitarian supplies. On 5 March, the first batch of humanitarian supplies arrived in western Ukraine, including personal protective equipment to protect health workers from COVID-19 as they respond to the critical health needs of children and families, as well as desperately needed medical supplies, including medicine and first aid kits. 

  • Supporting mobile teams providing child protection services and psychosocial care to children traumatized by chronic insecurity.  

Your monthly donation will help UNICEF to provide health care, nutrition and socio-psychological protection to traumatized children and families.