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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Today and tomorrow on the show will take stock of the war in Ukraine, as next Friday will be one year since Russia invaded. There is no end in sight, despite the clear, good, and evil involved, giving Ukraine almost the whole world sympathy, but sympathy doesn't win wars.

We will do this one year, taking stock in two discrete segments tomorrow, on the military state of the war with Fred Kaplan from Slate right now on the humanitarian crisis that Russia's invasion has created, which tends to fall out of the headlines except to note that Russia keeps committing war crimes by continually bombing civilian targets as a central part of its military strategy. We will talk now about Ukrainian refugees and suffering inside the country as well with Marysia Zapasnik, Ukraine Country Director for the International Rescue Committee.

She is in Kyiv, the IRC, just for background, known mostly for its work with refugees, was founded by Albert Einstein in 1933, is now headed by former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who comes on the show from time to time. It describes itself as helping people affected by humanitarian crises to survive, recover, and rebuild their lives. Marysia, thank you so much for coming on. Hello from New York. Welcome to WNYC.

Marysia Zapasnik: Thank you very much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I'll be honest, Marysia, I expected to see your literature focusing on Ukrainian refugees because refugees is what we talked to your president, David Miliband, on this show about frequently but it looks to me like the humanitarian crisis you're working against might be more about the Ukrainian still in Ukraine. How much would you say that's the case?

Marysia Zapasnik: Well, we're working here in Ukraine since March, Brian. We have five offices currently in the country. We're focusing most of our humanitarian efforts in the east and southeast of the country, where currently the fighting is the heaviest, and where the humanitarian needs are the greatest. I'm very happy to tell you more about that in the course of today's show, but yes, you're absolutely right. We are also working with refugees in Poland and in Moldova and in also in other parts of Europe and in America.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk more about inside the country first, you identify in the literature that you sent us four main ways that you're helping people inside the country, cash, provisions for winter health and medicine, and physical protection. Can you talk about provisions for winter? First, how much is the war depriving people of heat in their homes or other ways of keeping warm?

Marysia Zapasnik: Yes, there's been a lot of damage to civilian infrastructure since October last year. The war in Ukraine significantly escalated with systematic and repeated attacks targeting water, electricity, and gas supply systems. This means that there are millions of people who are living without any, or with limited access to power, gas for heating, gas for cooking, any source of heating for their homes, water supply, and electricity.

Brian Lehrer: Can I just linger on that for a second? Did you say millions of people living without power and those other things you just mentioned?

Marysia Zapasnik: Yes. There are regular missile attacks throughout the country. It's impossible to be able to anticipate where the next missile attack, it can happen anywhere at any time. Currently, the attacks are being focused on civilian infrastructure that is providing power, water, electricity, heating to the civilian population. After such an attack, there are very often power blackouts in large parts of the country while the local authorities try desperately hard to fix, to patch up the electricity supply, and to fix the damage that has been caused in the explosions.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, [crosstalk] oh, go ahead. Finish the thought. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Marysia Zapasnik: Yes, I just did want to say that the damage to infrastructure is really most widespread. They're in the east and southeast of the country. That's where essential services are extremely limited or lacking and where the power blackouts last longer and where people really have been living for in some cases, days, some cases weeks, and other cases months without power, gas, electricity, water, and heating.

Brian Lehrer: Your website mentions delivering 15,000 quilts, 15,000 sleeping bags, 1,000 heaters, emergency fuel stoves, and other heating equipment, and also emergency window and roof repairs. Just an indication of what's going on inside Ukraine in the middle of February. Now, listeners help us report this story if you are Ukrainian or have any ties to Ukraine or to Ukrainian refugees.

Our last segment, we asked for people with ties to South Carolina. Now it's people with ties to Ukraine or Ukrainian refugees. We welcome your phone calls and tweets. Help us report the story of the state of the humanitarian crisis. The war has spawned. Before we go on and tomorrow show to the state of the military battle, who do you know and how are they doing?

Anything else you want to say or ask our guests from the International Rescue Committee? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet at @BrianLehrer. I want to go on to the category of aid that you call protection. We might think of that as what the Ukrainian military's job is, protecting the population from Russian attacks. What does the International Rescue Committee mean by the protection that you can provide?

Marysia Zapasnik: The protection we're providing is split into three categories. We're working a lot with children and we're providing children with psychological support. Parents and children are reporting problems with sleeping concentration, socializing. It's months upon months of stress, anxiety, trauma and it's having a devastating impact on the lives of children.

We have opened safe healing and learning spaces where children can socialize with other children and they can have specialized technical support to help them cope with really quite distressing things that they're living through in their early lives. We're also providing women with protection. Again, we're providing women and mothers with psychosocial support. It's a huge strain.

The war is having a huge strain on women. The constant needs to be mentally strong, to look after family members, to take on employment that perhaps wasn't their role in the past and to look after children who are no longer attending school. Most of the schools in Ukraine are now online, which means that children stay at home. I've seen really every time I go down into the public shelter when there's another area alarm, I see mothers trying to stay as positive as they can and to make being in the shelter a fun experience for children.

All of this is having a huge strain on the mental health and well-being of many of the women that we're working with. Also, under the protection activities, we are providing legal assistance to people who have lost important identity documents. Many times when people flee their homes after shelling or during shelling attacks, they take just one small bag of items and really have to flee.

Identity documents are lost. Sometimes they're destroyed on purpose. Without these documents, it's very hard for people to be able to access the services that they have entitlements to access. Three ways we're helping child protection, women protection, and also providing legal assistance.

Brian Lehrer: That's a lot and very clear. Thank you for all that. By the way, listeners, if you're hearing what seems like a little delay between when I speak and when she speaks and then when she speaks and I speak, there is a little delay on the line with this connection all the way to Kyiv with Marysia Zapasnik Ukraine Country director for the International Rescue Committee. The area of health and medicine, we have to mention this. Another of the four main categories that you list that the IRC is involved with, dealing with the humanitarian crisis inside the country. I can't even imagine where you begin. Where do you begin?

Marysia Zapasnik: The healthcare system is under a huge amount strain in Ukraine at the moment. We've been since March now, providing essential medical items, equipment, and pharmaceuticals to healthcare facilities across the country. Now we are focusing most of this effort on the east and southeast where the needs are greatest. We also have mobile medical teams who travel to remote parts of the east and Southeast, very often closer to frontlines where the teams work, and they can hear the sound of shelling in the distance.

They provide consultations and treatments to patients who have no other access to any sort of healthcare and they haven't for months now. Most of the people who those teams are visiting are elderly people with mobility issues and housebound people. They have not been able to flee and go to other safer parts of the country. They're staying at home with very little access to essential services.

That's why it's vitally important for our mobile medical teams to be able to drive, to reach them, and to provide them with the healthcare that they need. Many of them have chronic health conditions and need constant follow-up with physicians and constant medication, which they haven't been able to have for a number of months now.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM, 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJU 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio at 2 minutes before 11:00 and livestreaming@wnyc.org. A few more minutes with Marysia Zapasnik, Ukraine, Country Director for the International Rescue Committee. We're in the first of two segments about the invasion of Ukraine as it approaches one year tomorrow at this time on the military state of the war right now on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Let's take a phone call. Here's Ron in Lynbrook. You're on WNYC. Hi, Ron.

Ron: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call this time. I was going to say my wife works for the Rabobank. I think they're based out of Switzer and what they're doing, they're an agricultural bank and they're sending food and aid to the Ukrainian people, plus all the employees are giving personal money their own accounts to the people of Ukraine. I hope that helps out and it shows some humanitarian Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Ron, thank you very much for that. In fact, Marysia, I noticed that besides the specific categories of winter provisions, health needs, and protection that the IRC is involved with, your literature says cash to Ukrainians and country is a priority. We hear Ron talking about how that bank is providing some cash. Why cash rather than things to meet specific needs in those cases?

Marysia Zapasnik: Yes. Thank you very much. It is heartwarming to hear from your previous caller that the huge support for humanitarian activities, including funding from across the world including the US. Why cash? Cash enables households, families, individuals to make choices to have control over what it is that they most need and be able to buy those items. Perhaps they have a blanket already at home. They don't need a blanket, but what they really need are some warm shoes for their children's feet. The cash enables families to really be able to choose what is it that they most need, and then to be able to make that choice with dignity and purchase those items themselves.

When we speak to the families after distributing the cash to them and we ask them what they've spent the money on. Many of them are reporting that they're spending most of the cash programming at the moment on winter items. They're also spending money on food that they desperately need to top up on hygiene items, healthcare, and also items for the children. In certain cases, we can't provide cash, and that's in places closer to the frontlines where shops have been completely damaged, destroyed, where shops markets are no longer functioning.

In those cases, yes, we do these distributions of essential items because distributing cash wouldn't be the right course of action in that circumstance because there's nothing for people to buy in shops. However, if we are responding in an area where markets are functioning, where shops are open and where items are readily available, then we do prefer a cash distribution program because as I said, it gives the families the dignity to choose exactly what they want. It also helps the local shopkeepers because it means that they have a livelihood. People are coming to the shops and buying the items from them.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Hala in East Brunswick. You're on WNYC. Hi, Hala?

Hala: Hi. Thank you very much for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for making it. You are Ukrainian, right?

Hala: No, I'm actually from Moscow.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sorry about that.

Hala: I came to United States as a political refugee in '89.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to say?

Hala: The thing is that I'm a pediatrician and I'm working with the families that come to United States as refugees. I am helping children and families to adjust, it's not just giving shots and feeling paperwork, but helping families to meet their psychological needs, their cultural needs and all those things. It's a tough work. I'm working with the there are quite a few non-for-profits around here that are helping families too with food, with money, with advice, with navigating American social system, medical system, and all those things.

Brian Lehrer: Who needs what, Hala, if people want to help locally?

Hala: Who needs what? Definitely volunteers. Definitely money, definitely helping with just being for those people because especially kids are going to school very quickly, so they're adjusting really well. Elderly, I wouldn't say elderly, mature people coming in. They lost their houses, they lost their position in the world and everything. Now there nobody is sitting in four walls very often not having any opportunity to go somewhere.

Just being a volunteer and helping people to adapt to the new environment, to learn language, to go out and to see some places that's very, very important. When we came 33 years ago I had a volunteer actually helping my parents to learn English and everything. That was greatly, greatly helpful. Okay, so all this help is highly needed and very well appreciated.

Brian Lehrer: Hala, thank you for your work in the community in that way with the refugees. Thank you for sharing it with us and calling in today. Marysia, we spent all of our conversation until Alice call about the humanitarian crisis within Ukraine. Now, let's talk a little bit more about the refugees. Do you have a rough number of refugees from Ukraine now living in other countries since the war began? Do you have a rough number?

Marysia Zapasnik: Yes. Rough estimate is about 8 million people.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Marysia Zapasnik: There are 8 million refugees across Europe. If we then also think about displaced people, so people who've had to flee their homes, but who've stayed within the borders of Ukraine, that's almost 6 million. Then if we zoom out of it and try and see how many people inside Ukraine are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, then we get to almost 18 million people, 18. To put that in perspective, that's about 40% of the country's population. The humanitarian needs here in Ukraine are huge and they really are acute.

Something also that I wanted to point out is Ukraine has recently become the most heavily landmine country in the world. This means that agriculture sides of roads are heavily mined. This is impacting the access that we have to be able to reach people in need because we need to follow only the tarmac roads because it's simply too dangerous to drive off-road now in the East and Southeast and other parts of the country and really hearing harrowing stories now in the winter.

I was speaking with an elderly man who was saying that normally he collects firewood to burn in his solid fuel stove in his house to keep himself and his wife warm in the winter. He has no money. He's spent all of the savings that he has as many Ukrainians already have also and now he has this really difficult decision. Either he goes to the forest, which he knows has landmines in it, to be able to collect firewood or see his simply has nothing to keep himself and his wife warm throughout the winter months. Winter here in Ukraine stays until the end of March. We're expecting below-zero temperatures and snow right until the end of March. There are still many, many weeks to go.

Brian Lehrer: In New York, we wonder where went to went. Now we know it went to Ukraine, the worst place for it to be right now really probably in the whole world. I'm curious for you with the International Rescue Committee if you have any impression of the reception that Ukrainian refugees are getting around the world. We have this big backlash in the US right now against people seeking political asylum in large numbers from Latin America and the Caribbean. How varied is the open arms, closed arms reception for Ukrainian refugees, to the extent that you know?

Marysia Zapasnik: It's not my area of expertise, Brian. My focus is here inside Ukraine but I do know that Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed in many countries around the world. What we as IRC are really asking is for refugees to be welcomed, no matter which country of war they're fleeing from.

Brian Lehrer: Then let me ask you this as a closing question since you're in country, you're in Kyiv and this is a political question. Do you get any sense from people you're aiding that there is a growing hunger for political compromise with Russia, even if it means giving up some territory that Russia does not deserve to have to stop the killing? Do you have any sense of any change in that over the course of a full year of death and destruction and cruelty now?

Marysia Zapasnik: What I'm noticing most Brian when I'm traveling to our field locations, especially there in the eastern South East is the extraordinary resilience of civilian people here, who I'm every day inspired and in awe of the things I see. People continuing their lives, really under very difficult conditions, under heavy shelling. I spoke to an elderly man in Kherson who said he's staying there in the city, he's not moving because he has a cat and he needs to stay to look after his cats.

Now, it does sound a slightly silly reason to stay but it really does show when the resilience of the human spirits, and when people do realize that that there is a reason for them to stay and they want to stay in and they can just get on with their lives in really the most difficult conditions. We have a lot of volunteer groups who are helping out. They're also incredibly inspiring and also our local partner organizations. We're working with local Ukrainian NGOs or charity organizations.

They all have inspiring brilliant and dedicated staff who are really ready to help continue work as we are, as the International Rescue Committee we're determined to stay and to continue providing support to people in need for as long as it's needed.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that's our conversation about the humanitarian crisis that the invasion of Ukraine has spawned as the war reaches one year. Tomorrow, we'll talk about the military state of the war. For today, we thank Marysia Zapasnik, Ukraine Country Director for the International Rescue Committee in Kyiv. Thank you so much for your work and for sharing it with us.

Marysia Zapasnik: Thank you very much, Brian.

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