I traveled across Ukraine with a U.N. refugee agency. Here's what I saw.
Opinion by Max Boot
February 27, 2024 at 3:00 a.m. PT
Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.
Some criticism is definitely warranted. For example, the Biden administration has suspended funding for the United Nations’ Palestinian-aid group, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), after some of its employees were alleged to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council is a sick joke: Its members include notorious human-rights abusers such as Russia, Venezuela and China. And U.N. peacekeeping troops have become notorious for abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.
But the United Nations also does a lot of important work for which it receives scant credit in the United States. I recently spent a week traveling across Moldova and Ukraine with a delegation of American experts assembled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as the U.N. refugee agency is known, and I came away greatly impressed by UNHCR’s efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis created by the Russian invasion. Its work — which is helping Ukraine and its neighbors to weather the onslaught — deserves continuing U.S. support.
The scale of the refugee crisis is mind-boggling: Two years after the Russian invasion, nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and another 3.7 million are internally displaced. That’s roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population. And, in front-line communities, even many of those who remain in their homes are struggling to survive. In all, some 14.6 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance. Those needs are far beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian government or those of its neighbors to cope with on their own; Kyiv can only fund half its own state budget and requires foreign aid for the rest.
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