What is the job of a UN Coordinator?When I get asked what a Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator actually does, I answer that the job consists of two main responsibilities. One is representing the UN Secretary-General to Ukraine's authorities and to society at large. Resident Coordinators are the ambassadors of the SG, his eyes and ears on the ground. The second is coordination: persuading more than 20 UN agencies working in this country to pull in the same direction. My team and I do not run the UN agencies or implement projects; our duty is to encourage the UN to work as one in support of national priorities and the most vulnerable populations.Coordination sounds bureaucratic. It is not. There is an African proverb I come back to often: "If you want to run fast, run alone; if you want to go far, walk together." This captures the logic of this job in one sentence, and also its central paradox. Large, well-resourced organizations are often tempted to move alone, convinced it is faster.Colleagues have told me plainly that coordination meetings slow them down. They are not wrong. But experience shows that going it alone rarely gets you as far as is needed and desirable. Is coordinating UN work different in a war-torn country?Ukraine has strong public institutions that have continued to function and deliver vital services despite the pressures of war. This is not always the case in war-torn countries, and in many ways it makes it easier for the UN to provide support in Ukraine. Close to 3,000 personnel work for the UN here, three-quarters of them Ukrainian, people who know the language, the history, and the country far better than any international staff could.  Among the international personnel are experienced humanitarian and development practitioners who bring relevant experience and practices from across the globe.Together national and international UN personnel have established a track record I have witnessed firsthand while traveling the country: cash, material and service support for people who stayed near the front line, evacuation support for those who left, rapid response after strikes, and more specific help for those most at risk of being left behind.And we support government at all levels to continue and improve the delivery of essential services for instance in education, health, social protection and energy.  What makes it hard?The challenges are just as real. Let's start with the uncomfortable fact that this war was launched by a permanent, veto-holding member of the UN Security Council, the body meant to prevent and end wars. In my engagements with young Ukrainians, some have asked me directly what the UN has done, since 2014, to prevent or stop this. It is a fair question, and one I do not have a fully satisfying answer to it. One of the realities of working as UN civil servants is that our actions are governed by the collective decisions of Member States in the General Assembly and the Security Council. This means that when UN Resident Coordinators speak out about documented violations, advocate for peace and justice, and take the side of the victims of conflicts and wars, they must do so within the frameworks agreed by Member States. As Member States consider the reform of the United Nations, I hope they will strengthen the Organization's ability to uphold the principles of its Charter and ensure more effective accountability when international law is violated.Regrettably, we are witnessing among Member States across the globe an erosion of belief in solving problems together. Many conflicts and wars, as well as challenges resulting, for instance, from climate change or economic upheaval, do not stop at borders. Yet we are unfortunately living in times where the urge to act alone, nationally, unilaterally, is stronger than the instinct to act together. That worries me not just for the UN as an institution, but for what would come after it, if it were to collapse. Then there is the issue of insufficient financial resources: shrinking humanitarian and development funding puts real strain on the system, and that strain has consequences beyond the balance sheet.When resources are scarce, every organization must work harder to sustain its own programmes. Many UN organizations are entirely dependent on project funding and have little choice but to scale back or close when funding dries up. It is precisely this pressure that makes coordination harder, but also more necessary: the tighter resources get, the more deliberate we must be about working together rather than drifting apart. How we build alliances and partnershipsConversations with external UN partners must be mainly about issues that are genuinely of concern and relevant to all involved, and where increased understanding and alignment can lead to greater impact especially for those at risk of being left behind. It is always very rewarding when a partner tells me, after a meeting, that they had not thought about something I raised. Meaningful relations in Ukraine, as elsewhere, must go beyond those perceived as the traditional donors of the UN. Some ambassadors from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa are deeply engaged here and provide valuable insights about where this country is headed. Relations built over time based on trust and common interest, eventually open the door to impactful cooperation, including funding. Preparing for the day afterLike every Ukrainian, my team and I long for the day when the guns fall silent. We also carry a profound sense of responsibility, determined to support Ukraine as it enters a defining chapter, recovering, rebuilding and shaping its future. We have real expertise on the team, for example in mine action, conflict-related sexual violence, and recovery planning. The Resident Coordinator's Office also has access to greater capacities across the UN system, in and outside the country, and the ability to pull them together as well as to convene relevant dialogue. Analytical, convening, and facilitation skills are what we need most, notwithstanding that it is hard to create the space for "day after" planning when Kyiv is being heavily and relentlessly bombed. To Ukrainians…My consistent message to Ukrainians, including those living under temporary Russian occupation, is that what has been happening to Ukraine since 2014, encompassing the full-scale invasion since February 2022, the violations documented in various UN reports on conflict-related sexual violence, civilian casualties, human rights violations and massive internal displacement, is wrong, and in contradiction of the UN Charter itself. Our UN human rights team is documenting what is happening precisely because accountability and justice require evidence. In my statements and discussions, I attempt to consistently reflect our Secretary-General's calls for an unconditional, immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, we will continue, with determination, the humanitarian and recovery work already underway across the country. And when the guns do fall silent, we will be there for what comes next too.  

Families are returning to their communities, children are returning to schools, farmers are restoring their land, women are challenging stereotypes in the labor market, and local leaders are working to create safer and greener futures. Recovery is ultimately a story about people.Back to school, back to childhood In the frontline village of Bezruky in the Kharkiv region, the war brought education to a standstill as tanks roared nearby. The local school took a hit and had to close its doors. Yuliia then learned that UNOPS would replace windows and ensure structural integrity of her school as part of the EU-supported school repair project. When she later learned that the school’s basement would be turned into a shelter, she was elated.“You just cannot imagine the change,” says Yuliia, walking down the brightly-painted underground corridor that she turned into an art gallery. Above are the ventilation, alarm systems, and communication lines – visible, but unobtrusive. Children can now come here for extracurricular activities, and their parents have peace of mind knowing that their children are safe. Little Kateryna learned to read and write here. Mykhailo, a year older, talks about the many friends he made here. And Kamila, about to leave primary school, says she can finally do gymnastics – something she couldn’t do at home. Thanks to this project, implemented by UNOPS with support of the European Union, over 15000 children can now return to in-person learning. Teachers in Ukraine are creating better futures for children  For 20 years, Yurii Tkalenko has been helping students learn and grow in the Cherkasy region. In 2025, he joined a UNESCO training programme, funded by the Global Partnership for Education and supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, to strengthen the New Ukrainian School reform. "Learning never stops. The new curriculum focuses on the child, adapting education to their needs," Yurii says. Teachers like Yurii are helping shape the future of education in Ukraine by bringing new ideas into classrooms and supporting every child's learning journey. Mothers who bring new hope to life In wartime Ukraine, bringing a child into the world takes extraordinary courage. For women like Anastasiia from Donetsk region, the journey to motherhood meant leaving home and travelling to Kharkiv to access specialized medical care. There, in a protected maternity ward, she safely gave birth to twin boys despite the challenges and uncertainty caused by the war.  "I was afraid to give birth. But life goes on," Anastasiia says. Her words reflect the courage of countless women across Ukraine who continue to choose hope, even in the midst of war. “The doctors truly brought us through,” she adds. Across frontline regions, safe maternity facilities are helping women give birth while dedicated healthcare workers support mothers and newborns through difficult circumstances. UNFPA in Ukraine, in partnership with the European Union, continues to support this crucial work.How the “Nanny School” is helping women in labour market   For many mothers in Ukraine, reliable childcare can open the door back to work. It means knowing their children are receiving professional care while they rebuild their careers and support their families. Through the ILO’s “Nanny School,” 80 women have qualified to care for children aged 0 to 3, with nearly half finding jobs soon after certification. The programme helps women move from informal work into more secure employment, while giving parents confidence that their children are in qualified hands. Now expanding through a nationwide network of trainers, the programme is creating decent jobs for women, supporting mothers’ return to work, and improving care for young children across Ukraine.On the road for her community  After completing training through the She Drives project supported by UN Women, Oksana works as a driver at the municipal enterprise, transporting passengers across Kryvyi Rih, the city with the longest roads in Ukraine.Before joining the programme, Oksana worked as a cargo and baggage receiving clerk. She had always enjoyed driving but never imagined herself operating large vehicles. When she saw an announcement about the She Drives project on social media, she decided to try, even though she doubted she would pass the selection process. Now, Oksana drives one of the city’s longest routes and continues to build her professional confidence. "For many passengers, it’s still unusual to see a woman driving a bus, but their gratitude motivates me," she says. "If you want to do something, don’t be afraid to try. I wanted to change my life, and I did."“It’s important to know we’re not alone”  In frontline Zaporizhzhia, hospital director Hanna Makarenkova has faced some of the war’s darkest days — from treating complex blast injuries to caring for countless civilians evacuated from Mariupol and other devastated towns. Since the full-scale invasion, her team has provided help to more than 25,000 patients, often working under bombardment and power outages. “My colleagues give me the strength to keep working,” Hanna says. “Their tireless work, their dedication to the cause, is what motivates me.” With support from the EU and UNDP, the hospital received new independent power units that keep life-saving equipment running even when the grid fails. For Hanna, this support brings more than electricity — it gives her and her colleagues the sense that their work is appreciated, and that in their struggle to save lives, they are not alone.Restoring strength and hope  “Movement is life,” says Nataliia as her husband, Oleksandr, learns to use a wheelchair with support from a physical therapist. The couple lived in Kostiantynivka, where Oleksandr cared for their household and helped neighbours. One morning, he was injured in a drone strike. Oleksandr lost both legs and one eye. For three months, Nataliia has stayed by his side, caring for him through surgeries and helping him relearn everyday tasks. At first, Oleksandr could barely move and lost motivation. Then he began working with Illia, a physical therapist who taught him to balance and transfer into a wheelchair. “I think everything will be alright for us,” Nataliia says. “We’ll live and enjoy life. Because life goes on.” With financial support from the European Union, WHO is helping train rehabilitation professionals across Ukraine to assess, fit, and adjust wheelchairs. More than 300 specialists have completed the training, and nine have become certified trainers. The experiences of these people and millions more reflect both the challenges caused by the war and the immense efforts they put into rebuilding their lives. The United Nations, jointly with partners, is set to help them. The overview of the work the UN has done jointly with the partners in 2025 to support people is available at the link. 

For more than 30 days, it endured active fighting and life under occupation. It was liberated in early April, but the scars of war remained. At the local gymnasium, shells that landed nearby shattered the windows and damaged the sports hall. Because of the destruction and the constant danger of repeated attacks, children had to switch to online learning.Later, with funding from the European Union, UNOPS repaired the gymnasium building, allowing the school to reopen its doors. However, another challenge remained: although the old basement provided shelter during air raid alerts, it was not suitable for prolonged stays. To restore comfort and safety for children, UNOPS later fully renovated and equipped the basement. It now has everything needed to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of learning.The renovation was completed in mid-May 2026, allowing students to finish the school year in person.    “I’m glad we now have a shelter. We’ve already gotten used to it: whenever the air raid siren sounds, we immediately go downstairs and continue our lesson there. Every class knows where to go, so everything happens very quickly,” says Illia, an eighth-grade student at the gymnasium. Even now, during the summer holidays, children come to school for additional subject consultations, and they sometimes have to go down to the shelter, as air raid alerts are frequent in the region.“After the ninth grade, I plan to enroll in college. I understand how important it is to attend school now so I can prepare better. Sometimes a lot of drones fly over our village, but when I’m at school, I know I’m safe in the shelter. And it gives my parents peace of mind too,” says Sofiia, a ninth-grade student. For the gymnasium, the renovated shelter became much more than a technical solution. It made it possible for the school to remain a school—a place where friends come together, where life goes on, and where learning never stops.   About the projectThe Schools Repairs in Ukraine project, funded by the European Union and implemented by UNOPS, aims to repair educational facilities that have been damaged during the ongoing war in Ukraine. This $30 million initiative is being implemented in the regions of Chernihiv, Kyiv, Sumy and Kharkiv, focusing on schools requiring light to medium repair work.The primary objective of the project is to provide access to repaired school facilities, which will increase the proportion of children receiving face-to-face education. By rehabilitating more than 70 schools, the project will help restore facilities to a safe and welcoming environment where children can continue their education without interruption.

Mine action is not as simple as "mines bad, clearing mines good." Every hectare we clear, and every hectare we choose not to clear, carries an environmental cost, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the donors, governments and communities we serve. If we want mine action to take the environment seriously, we first have to be honest about the trade-offs, and about what taking it seriously would actually cost.A Sector Touching Every Part of RecoveryMine action touches every aspect of life in a mine-affected country. You cannot rebuild a school, build a hospital, drive down a road or plough a field if there is a concern about mines. It is also, whether we have treated it that way or not, an environmental issue.In Ukraine, one proposal has been to issue a green bond to put wind farms into minefields: clear a small area for a turbine at minimal cost, let the turbine generate power and revenue, and use that use that revenue to fund clearance of the rest of the field one turbine at a time. It is a genuinely green project, with  sustainable energy paying for mined land to be cleared while building a independent green source of sustainable energy.At the other end of the scale, when the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed on 6 June 2023, in what Ukrainian officials at the time described as an environmental catastrophe, the collapse released roughly 18 cubic kilometres of water from the reservoir in a matter of days, flooding towns and farmland downstream along the Dnipro River and displacing thousands of people. The rushing water tore through riverside positions and former front-line areas, dislodging landmines and unexploded ordnance and carrying them, along with fuel, agricultural chemicals and military waste, into areas that had never been mapped or cleared. The environmental damage it caused, toxic chemicals and debris swept downstream, became far harder to address precisely because the areas affected were either already contaminated, or suspected of contamination, with mines: teams could not safely reach flooded land to assess or remediate it until it had also been checked for explosive hazards. Explosive ordnance itself, particularly the more complex items, over time leaches chemicals into the ground so for as long as it sits there contamination is occurring. Even our standard method of destroying old ammunition, open burning, means putting toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to remove a hazard from the ground. The Case for Restraint: Zone "Rouge" and the DMZHowever not all contaminated land needs to be cleared, and some of it may be better left alone. After the First World War, France declared parts of its former battlefields a Zone "Rouge", too dangerous or too costly to clear, and left them. At the time, that zone covered more than 1,000 square kilometres; today it has shrunk to roughly 100 sq km, and that remaining land is now among the most biodiverse in the country. The Korean DMZ tells the same story: decades free of human disturbance, because it is mined, have made it one of the most biodiverse strips of land anywhere in the world. Clearing the mines will almost certainly impact this balance. That is not an argument for abandoning clearance. It is an argument for asking, area by area, whether leaving land uncleared would in fact produce a better environmental outcome than clearing it, and building that question into how we prioritise. In Ukraine, a tool like GRIT, a national digital platform developed by Ukraine's Center for Humanitarian Demining and Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture with UNDP support, could in principle be extended for this purpose. GRIT already draws on more than thirty layers of date from state and commercial datasets, including minefield records, soil & forestry data, satellite imagery & population movement, using AI/ML models to rank clearance priorities by their impact on people, agriculture, infrastructure and economic recovery. Extending that same logic this same data could be used to flag which areas make sense as long-term "red zones", rather than absorbing scarce clearance resources for marginal gain, would be a natural next step.The Damage We Do While Trying to HelpDemining machines, flails, tillers and combinations of the two, dramatically improve the pace of clearance. They also pulverise the ground, destroy root systems and soil structure, release stored carbon and can permanently alter the biomass of a site. I have seen fertile land in Afghanistan effectively destroyed this way, when topsoil loosened by a machine was blown down an entire valley by the wind.None of this means we should stop using machines. It means machine use needs proper planning around soil type, season and weather, and it means the sector should be thinking harder about remediation: something as simple as fertiliser, seed and fast-growing cover crops sprayed behind a machine to help soil recover, rather than leaving pulverised ground exposed. We do not yet have good answers here. We should be looking for them. The Missing Fourth Dimension: TimeMine action is not static, certainly the environmental risk and benefit from it is not and treating it as a single snapshot in time misses the point. Some contamination is leaching into soil or water right now and needs an urgent response. Other munitions will not degrade for another thirty years, some will never cause significant contamination, which raises a genuine question: is it better to clear a complex, with resulting high-impact to the environment site today, or to wait ten years for demining technology, very possibly including autonomous systems, to do the job with a fraction of the environmental and human cost? The same logic applies to human risk. Every task assigned to a deminer carries both a financial cost and a real chance that the person doing it will be killed or lose a limb. Weighed against a five-year wait for safer, cheaper, autonomous alternatives, that is not a comfortable calculation, but it is one we owe it to our operators to make it honestly rather than by default.Climate Change Is Already Changing the Risk PictureExtreme heat and extreme temperature swings accelerate the degradation of explosive items and can cause some explosives to separate into more unstable compounds. But the larger risk is movement: flooding and landslides shift contamination from known, marked and understood areas into places nobody is expecting it. In Ukraine, where light plastic items like PFM-1 "butterfly" mines are present in large numbers, floodwater can carry them well beyond any mapped hazard area, as we saw with the Kakhovka Dam. That is arguably the single biggest climate-linked risk mine action now faces: not that hazards get more dangerous where they are, but that we lose track of where they are at all. Vision, Then Resourcing, Not the Other Way AroundNone of the above is worth much unless the sector is honest about cost. If the United Nations' mine action work decides that environmentally conscious programming should be standard practice, that is a legitimate choice, but it is not a free one. Ten per cent of a programme manager's time redirected to environmental considerations, multiplied across twenty-odd country programmes, is not a rounding error; it is real money, on the order of hundreds of thousands to a million dollars a year. A modest upfront investment in better data and planning tools could, over time, cut that ongoing cost substantially, but someone still has to choose to make that investment, and someone has to tell donors, clearly, that a higher environmental standard comes with a higher price tag.We tried a version of this a decade ago with an initiative called Greening in the Red. It produced good intentions and very little else, because it was never built into strategy or given a budget. The lesson was simple: a memo asking people to try harder is not a policy. Not a Simple StoryI say this as someone who has spent thirty years in this sector: nothing here is as simple as "mines bad, clearing mines good." A fenced, marked anti-personnel mine on a former front line poses little risk to anyone today. The same mine, still active in twenty years once the fencing has gone, the trenches are filled  and the front line is a memory, is a very different problem. But again a handful of scattered mines on land that will never be used again may do less environmental harm sitting in the ground than the fuel burned and the machinery deployed to remove them. If mine action is serious about the environment, that seriousness has to show up in three places: in the vision the mine action sector in Ukraine sets for itself, in the strategy that follows from it, and in the resources allocated to deliver it. Anything short of that is a good intention without a plan to deliver a clear outcome, and in this sector, as in most others, good intentions without a solid justification and a plan tend not to survive contact with a budget review committee.