Ukraine

Summary of needs

An estimated 9.8 million people will need humanitarian protection services and assistance in 2025. As per the MSNA, 12 per cent of households have extreme humanitarian protection needs, higher than in any other sector. The following protection risks are driving the severity of protection needs of affected people:

• Restrictions to freedom of movement, forced displacement and induced returns
• Compounding risks that threaten children’s physical and psychosocial safety and well-being
• Gender-based violence (GBV), with heightened risks of sexual violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, trafficking, sexual harassment and other forms of GBV linked to the impact of the war
• Presence of mines and other explosive ordnance
• Impediments and/or restrictions to access to legal identity, remedies and justice

Full analysis is available in the Protection Analysis Update 2024. Additional analysis can be found on the Protection Cluster website.

Response strategy

In 2025, Protection Cluster partners aim to reach 1.1 million internally displaced people and 1.52 million non-displaced war-affected people (56 per cent women, 44 per cent men, 15 per cent children, 54 per cent adults, 31 per cent older people, 16 per cent people with disabilities). These include returnees, people in collective sites, LGBTIQ+ people and people in areas occupied by the Russian Federation as access allows. This will involve engaging women’s rights organizations, organizations of people with disabilities (OPDs), organizations of older people (OPAs), LGBTIQ+ organizations and councils of internally displaced people, ensuring a tailored protection response that incorporates an age, gender and diversity lens. The three pillars of the response are:

1. Delivering critical specialized protection services and targeted social support to internally displaced people and non-displaced war-affected people, while advancing localization efforts through partnerships with government service providers, civil society organizations (CSOs) and volunteer networks, particularly in eastern, north- eastern and southern Ukraine.
2. Reinforcing community capacities to develop inclusive protective mechanisms for all people in and outside of collective sites, reducing negative coping mechanisms and contributing to social support services, while enhancing self-reliance and access to rights.
3. Complementary strengthening of the protection environment, focusing on advocacy and free legal aid, social services and internal displacement policies to ensure that the most vulnerable internally displaced people and non-displaced people affected by the war can meaningfully and safely access public services, while their rights are protected, respected and fulfilled.

These three pillars will be underpinned by

1) Accountability to Affected People in all stages of protection programming; and 2) revamped protection monitoring and analysis with a strong gender-age-diversity lens.

In areas with unhindered humanitarian access, the life-saving protection response will include targeted social support to access public assistance and provision of specialized protection services, complemented by strengthening of the protection environment through advocacy, focused support to service providers for service continuity and skill-building for local authorities and humanitarian partners. The response will be implemented with robust and inclusive community-based approaches, through activities including case management, social accompaniment and facilitation, and referrals by humanitarian actors and through community spaces and mobile teams. Limited individual protection assistance, cash and in-kind, will be provided following individual risk assessments as a modality complementing protection service provision to address the immediate protection needs of those most at risk, support their recovery from protection violations and prevent them from resorting to negative coping mechanisms.

Focused primary and secondary legal assistance will be provided to secure identity, birth registration and other types of documentation allowing the most vulnerable internally displaced people and war-affected people to exercise their rights, including freedom of movement, applying for government assistance and services and social protection schemes, and accessing remedies. Legal aid to restore Housing, Land and Property (HLP) documentation for internally displaced people and war-affected people will be provided to enable them to file compensation claims for damaged or destroyed property based on compensation law and by-laws.

Internally displaced people will also be supported to ensure the security of tenure in collective sites and rented accommodation. With this more focused approach to legal assistance provision, internally displaced people in need of legal assistance in other types of cases will be referred to the free legal aid centres or recovery actors.

To address trauma and psychosocial distress, the response will offer individual and group psychosocial support services, focusing on level 1, 2 and 3 interventions of the MHPSS pyramid. They will promote community-based approaches, in particular up-to-standard structured community and family support, and provide basic psychosocial support, counselling, psychological first aid, conflict resolution and focused non-specialized support for war-affected people.

Dedicated community-based protection activities implemented through a mix of modalities will be key to ensuring no one is left behind, both in urban and rural areas, strengthening communities’ self-protection capacities and resilience to war-related shocks, promoting inclusion of vulnerable people in their full diversity and reducing social tensions. Interventions will be geared to ramping up communities’ self-reliance and linking people with public service providers (such as Departments of Social Policy, Centres for Provision of Administrative Services, Resilience Centres), so at-risk people can access services and exercise their rights. This will be achieved by engaging with councils of internally displaced people and other community-based structures, working with CSOs (including OPDs and OPAs), supporting community centres and spaces, and social facilitation and accompaniment.

In the implementation of the protection response, strategic and operational partnerships with Child Protection, GBV and Mine Action Areas of Responsibility (AoRs) will be prioritized, with integrated protection programmes offering a comprehensive package of protection services, while intersectoral interventions will be promoted jointly with CCCM, Shelter/NFI, Health and FSL clusters.

In front-line areas and areas occupied by the Russian Federation, the protection response will remain adaptable to access limitations and security challenges. The capacity and protection knowledge of local partners and volunteers will be strengthened to enhance protection-sensitive responses, while leveraging their expertise to reach vulnerable communities remaining close to the front lines, including non-displaced, internally displaced people and returnees. Engagement with existing coordination centres led by local organizations and national authorities will reinforce localization efforts.

Protection monitoring at community and household levels will identify risks and rights violations, informing evidence- and rights-based advocacy and AAP efforts. It will also aim to foster a more targeted protection response, contribute to protection-sensitive humanitarian programming at the operational level and advance the centrality of protection on a more strategic level.

Targeting and prioritization

In 2025, Protection Cluster partners aim to reach 1 million internally displaced people and 1.52 million non-displaced war-affected people (56 per cent women, 44 per cent men, 15 per cent children, 54 per cent adults, 31 per cent older people, 16 per cent people with disabilities). This includes returnees, people in collective sites, LGBTIQ+ people and people in areas occupied by the Russian Federation as access allows. The protection response will focus on raions with severity levels 4 (critical) and 5 (catastrophic), mostly in the east, north-east and south of Ukraine, and will aim to reach 83 per cent of internally displaced people and 95 per cent of non-displaced war-affected people in these prioritized raions. Limited response capacity will be maintained in the remaining raions,¹ mostly in the west and centre of the country, to respond to pockets of higher severity of humanitarian protection needs, focusing on vulnerable internally displaced people in collective sites who may be at risk of evictions or who require transitional case management, vulnerable newly displaced people and those affected by attacks. Critical protection assistance and services in the raions outside severity level 4 and 5 areas will be implemented with a strong community-based protection lens and accompanied by strengthening of the local protection environment to ensure responsible transition. Compared to 2024, the number of people to be assisted has increased by 38 per cent for raions with severity level 4, and by 14 per cent for raions with severity level 5, while they have decreased by 66 per cent and 18 per cent for raions with severity levels 2 (stress) and 3 (crisis) respectively.

Cost of response

The total cost of protection and HLP activities in 2025 is $172 million. The cost was calculated based on average unit costs from the 2024 HNRP, factoring in inflation, indirect costs and the higher implementation costs in hard- to-reach areas, which may include procurement of security equipment and monitoring. The cost-per-activity was validated through consultation with partners and the Protection Cluster Strategic Advisory Group. Some people are targeted with multiple activities, and are costed and monitored accordingly. The increase in the Protection Cluster envelope for 2025 is due to increases in planned reach for three core activities, namely case management, psychosocial support and protection counselling. The Cluster also factored in an additional 30 per cent towards support costs (both direct and indirect support costs). Based on limited input from partners, the Cluster indicated the maximum, average and minimum cost of activities. Certain activities targeted and costed as a bulk (e.g. advocacy) were based on an estimation of the costs of human resources in different locations.