Operations

In 2014, the region was marked by the conflict in Ukraine, resulting in displacement within the country and across borders. At year-end, 823,000 Ukrainians were internally displaced, and nearly 240,000 applied for refugee status in neighbouring countries.
 
UNHCR made significant contributions to the development and adoption of a law on ensuring the rights and freedoms of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Ukraine, and worked with the authorities to implement and improve this legislation. UNHCR launched an emergency response in order to address the protection and assistance needs of IDPs in the context of ongoing conflict and a very challenging operational environment. The organization played a major role in this response prior to the establishment of the cluster approach, and then assumed responsibility for leading the protection and shelter/non-food items clusters in the inter-agency response established in December. UNHCR has focused on protection monitoring, advocacy, cash grants, life-saving assistance and shelter for the most vulnerable. A series of restrictive regulations and legal barriers including the taxation of charitable aid and strict regulation of foreign currency impacted the delivery of humanitarian assistance to IDPs, and UNHCR’s own resource constraints meant that not all identified needs could be met.
 
In Belarus, a profiling of Ukrainian arrivals was conducted to ensure effective and targeted assistance to the most vulnerable. Proposals for amendments to the law on refugees were made to the Government. With the steep increase in the number of asylum-seekers in the country,  capacity in the accommodation centres is becoming very stretched.
 
In the Republic of Moldova, UNHCR continued to conduct capacity-building for personnel conducting refugee status determination, focusing on quality of decision-making, the application of best practices and exchange of experience between the countries in the region. UNHCR supported the Government’s campaign to issue Moldovan identity documents to those who only owned expired Soviet passports. This contributed significantly to statelessness prevention efforts, with over 160,000 people receiving identity documents.
 
In 2014, more than 400 stateless people were granted citizenship in the Republic of Moldova, and hundreds were naturalized in Belarus (270) and Ukraine (780).  In Ukraine and Belarus, priority attention needs to be given to a comprehensive mapping of the stateless populations and their protection needs.