Source: United Nations (video statements)
“Being here, you also see that the nature of war has changed,” UN Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Alexander De Croo said from Kyiv, Ukraine. “You see that civilian infrastructure is in a deliberate way being attacked.”
Briefing reporters in New York by video link from Kyiv with Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) behind him, De Croo continued, “You see today that a bus stop is being attacked. You see today that infrastructure such as a petrol station is being attacked,” De Croo told journalists on the second day of his visit to Ukraine.
Minutes before the briefing, a drone struck a business centre on the other side of his hotel, the UNDP chief said. “It is clear that this is a deliberate attempt to make life in Ukraine and life in Kyiv completely impossible. This is not in line with international humanitarian law. Even in war there are rules to be followed.”
Energy is UNDP’s largest area of work in Ukraine, where the agency is helping 6.6 million people keep access to electricity.
“Unfortunately, we are heading into the fifth winter of this, of this conflict, and we see that the energy infrastructure is relentlessly being targeted by attacks, and going into the winter makes it even more dramatic, because we know that the winters here in Ukraine can be incredibly harsh on the population,” De Croo said.
In his words, “Having access to electricity keeps the school open. Having access to electricity keeps the hospitals open.”
Asked whether others were stepping in, he described the scale of the damage. “Today approximately half of the energy infrastructure in Ukraine is being impacted by attacks. And these are attacks, with absolutely no doubt, that these attacks are being conducted by Russia.”
Other UN entities are also working on the issue, De Croo said, but “it’s quite clear that at this moment it is never enough.”
A day earlier, De Croo visited the Chernobyl site. There, he went inside the protective structure over reactor four, which was destroyed in the 1986 disaster, and saw where the structure had been hit in a drone strike.
“Anyone who is attacking those protective structures, and those protective structures around a nuclear structure, is really gambling with the safety of millions of people. A nuclear installation can never be a target. There can absolutely be no excuse. There can absolutely be no ambiguity. This has to stop,” the UNDP Administrator said.
Asked whether attacks had increased, he replied, “Yes, quite clearly, over the past two weeks, the attacks have increased. The only moment where there were no attacks was when the American envoys were here for the talks that they have had with Ukrainian authorities.”
“But unfortunately, since then the attacks have increased again,” De Croo said.
Ukrainian authorities have chosen to keep schools open, and UNDP has joined a shelter coalition built on Ukraine’s work with Finland.
“Fortunately, there are shelters, but there are not enough shelters,” De Croo said. “Now, creating shelters is expensive and it takes time.”
Over the last four years, UNDP has raised 1.3 billion dollars for Ukraine, making it “the largest operator of the UN family” in the country. Its biggest donors are Norway, Japan, the European Union, Sweden and Denmark.
The World Bank and UN organizations put the cost of repairing war damage at more than 600 billion dollars.
“I mean, these are gigantic amounts of money,” De Croo said. Full-scale restoration, he said, can only happen “if the war would stop.”