When Compassion Runs Dry: Ukraine and the Problem of Donor Drought

By Matthew Parish

Friday 4 September 2026

Wars have two clocks.

The first measures events on the battlefield: offensives, retreats, bombardments, casualties, ruined cities and territorial changes. The second measures the attention span of people far away. The first clock may run for years. The second often runs for weeks. This discrepancy creates one of the least discussed problems in humanitarian action: donor drought. A catastrophe occurs. Television screens fill with images of destruction. Newspapers dispatch correspondents. Governments announce emergency packages. Charities receive an avalanche of donations. Volunteers appear. Warehouses fill with clothes, medicines and food. Then something peculiar happens. The catastrophe continues but the money begins to disappear.

Nothing necessarily has improved. Indeed circumstances may have become substantially worse. The wounded still require treatment. Refugees still need accommodation. Children remain displaced. Houses continue to be destroyed. Yet the psychological event that caused people to give has passed. Disaster has ceased to be news and become background.

Ukraine is becoming one of the most important contemporary examples of this phenomenon.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, an extraordinary mobilisation of public generosity followed. Europeans drove vans full of humanitarian supplies towards the Ukrainian border. Families offered spare bedrooms to refugees. Restaurants became collection centres. Churches organised convoys. People who had never previously visited Ukraine transferred money to Ukrainian charities, purchased generators or medical supplies and supported organisations assisting displaced civilians.

Ukraine was everywhere. Four and a half years later, Ukraine is still at war. Yet familiarity has changed the international response. A missile strike that would have dominated European television news in March 2022 may now receive a few paragraphs unless the casualty figures are particularly terrible. Destroyed apartment buildings have become visually familiar. The names of towns under attack merge into one another for people who have never visited eastern Ukraine. This is not because Europeans have suddenly become callous. It is because human beings are not psychologically designed to experience an emergency indefinitely.

The half-life of compassion

There is a cruel paradox at the centre of humanitarian fundraising. The moment at which donations are easiest to obtain is often the moment at which the victims have the greatest reserves. Immediately after a disaster, people may still have savings. Buildings may remain habitable. Families may possess vehicles. Municipal infrastructure may continue functioning. Local businesses may have stocks of food and fuel.

Years later those reserves have been consumed. A family that survived the first year of the Ukraine war using savings may have none left by the fifth. A pensioner whose damaged roof could initially be patched may eventually find the entire building uninhabitable. A volunteer organisation may have exhausted its vehicles after hundreds of journeys along atrocious roads. A municipality that once maintained emergency generators may struggle to replace them after repeated Russian attacks upon the electricity system.

Need accumulates while sympathy depreciates. There is empirical evidence for the relationship between attention and giving. Research into donations following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami found a substantial relationship between the intensity of media coverage and charitable contributions, while also finding evidence of donor fatigue. This accords with common experience. People respond more readily to events than conditions.

An earthquake is an event. Poverty is a condition. A missile destroying a children’s hospital is an event. Thousands of elderly people living for years in damaged houses near a front line is a condition. The first generates headlines. The second generates invoices. Yet humanitarian organisations must pay both.

Ukraine after the headlines

The numbers reveal the strange divergence between diminishing novelty and continuing need. In 2024 the United Nations estimated that 14.6 million people inside Ukraine required humanitarian assistance. Its humanitarian plan sought approximately $3.1 billion and ultimately received about $2.26 billion, leaving some $850 million unmet.

By 2026 the humanitarian system had been forced to narrow its ambitions dramatically. The UN estimated that 10.8 million people still required humanitarian assistance, but planned to reach only 4.1 million of the most vulnerable and appealed for $2.3 billion. The reduction reflected not the disappearance of suffering but increasingly severe resource constraints and prioritisation.

The global environment has meanwhile deteriorated. Preliminary OECD figures show humanitarian official development assistance from DAC countries falling by 35.8 per cent in 2025. Bilateral ODA to Ukraine itself fell sharply, although increased flows through European Union institutions meant that Ukraine’s aggregate official development assistance remained exceptionally large.

This distinction matters. Ukraine has not simply been “abandoned”. Enormous sums continue to flow to the country, particularly through European institutions and in the forms of military assistance, loans and macroeconomic support. Indeed the scale of official support remains historically extraordinary. But a government can receive billions while a charity cannot find €10,000 for an evacuation vehicle.

These are different financial universes. Military assistance purchases interceptor missiles, artillery shells, drones and armoured vehicles. Macrofinancial assistance keeps the Ukrainian state solvent, pays salaries and stabilises public finances. Humanitarian assistance buys wheelchairs, repairs roofs, accommodates displaced families, pays for evacuation vehicles and provides food, medicines and heating. One cannot automatically substitute for another.

The result is one of the peculiarities of contemporary Ukraine. Enormous figures circulate in Brussels, Washington and Kyiv while small organisations working near the front struggle for sums that are microscopic by comparison. A government may debate a billion-euro package while a volunteer wonders how to find the money for diesel. Both things can be true simultaneously.

The geography of sympathy

Donor drought is also geographical. The further one travels west from Ukraine’s front lines, the easier it becomes for the war to turn into an abstraction. In Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, Kherson or the towns of Kharkiv Oblast, war is physical. Windows shake. Air-raid alerts interrupt sleep. People discuss which roads remain safe. Elderly residents decide whether finally to abandon homes in which they have lived for forty years. Volunteers calculate how many people and animals can fit into a vehicle.

In Warsaw or Berlin the war is principally political. In London or Paris it competes with domestic politics. In New York it competes with the entire world. This is inevitable. People pay greatest attention to events immediately around them. Yet modern humanitarian action depends upon persuading people thousands of kilometres away to care about people they have never met. That requires storytelling. And storytelling becomes harder as wars grow old. The photograph of the first destroyed apartment block shocks. The thousandth photograph may not. The first refugee family crossing a border becomes a symbol. The millionth becomes a statistic.

This is one of the darker properties of the human imagination. Suffering does not necessarily become more emotionally compelling as its scale increases. Beyond a certain point it becomes incomprehensible. One frightened pensioner sitting beside a suitcase may generate more empathy than the phrase “3.7 million internally displaced persons”. Human beings understand faces better than spreadsheets.

Competition between catastrophes

There is another problem. Humanitarian crises compete. The world does not maintain a separate reservoir of compassion for every catastrophe. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, displacement in the Sahel, earthquakes, floods, famines and refugee emergencies all compete for overlapping pools of governmental money, charitable donations, media attention and public concern. The humanitarian system therefore operates within an attention economy. A new catastrophe does not merely create new needs. It changes the relative visibility of existing ones.

Ukraine herself demonstrated this principle in 2022. Its extraordinary prominence inevitably affected international aid priorities elsewhere. The OECD has observed that the huge mobilisation of assistance for Ukraine had secondary consequences for aid available to countries suffering high and extreme fragility. Now Ukraine experiences the other side of the equation. New emergencies appear. Cameras move. Correspondents leave. The war remains.

This does not imply that one catastrophe deserves assistance more than another. A starving Sudanese child is not less deserving because a Ukrainian pensioner also needs help. Humanitarian morality cannot sensibly become a competition between victims. But humanitarian finance often does. There is only so much money in government aid budgets and only so much attention available in the public imagination.

The professionalisation trap

Long wars create another difficulty. During the first months of an emergency, improvisation is tolerated. Someone purchases a van. Friends fill it with supplies. Money arrives through personal networks. Nobody expects elaborate organisational structures because everything is obviously urgent. Over time donors become more demanding. They want accounts, reports, safeguarding policies, photographs, impact measurements, procurement procedures and evidence that money has been properly spent. Much of this is entirely reasonable. Humanitarian organisations must be accountable.

But it produces an irony. Just as donations become harder to obtain, fundraising becomes more expensive. Small organisations can therefore become trapped. They need professional staff to satisfy increasingly sophisticated donor requirements, but donors prefer their money to be spent directly upon beneficiaries rather than administration. The organisation must somehow acquire accountants, fundraisers, lawyers, communications specialists and project managers while assuring everyone that virtually every donated pound or euro goes “straight to the front”.

The arithmetic is impossible. Good humanitarian organisations have overheads because competent humanitarian work requires administration. A vehicle needs insurance. A driver needs accommodation. Accounts need preparing. Equipment breaks. Websites cost money. Volunteers require coordination. Fuel receipts must be recorded. Donors need reports. The romantic image of humanitarianism consists of handing a blanket to a refugee. The reality contains a surprising amount of Microsoft Excel.

The danger of the dramatic appeal

Donor drought encourages organisations to become ever more dramatic.

This too has dangers. If ordinary suffering no longer attracts donations, fundraisers are tempted to find extraordinary suffering. Images become more graphic. Language becomes more apocalyptic. Every appeal describes an unprecedented emergency. Every donation supposedly stands between life and death.

Eventually donors become sceptical. If every week is the final opportunity to avert catastrophe, catastrophe itself becomes a marketing slogan. Ukraine presents a particularly difficult version of this problem because genuinely terrible things happen constantly. There is no need to exaggerate Russian attacks upon Ukrainian civilians. But repetition diminishes their communicative power.

The solution cannot be endlessly escalating rhetoric. It must instead be intimacy. People give when they understand what their money does. €20 buys this. €100 repairs that.

€500 accommodates these people. €5,000 keeps this vehicle operating for a defined period.

The smaller the humanitarian organisation, the more important such concreteness becomes.

Large institutions can sell abstractions. The European Union can announce a €90 billion financial programme. A small charity must explain why it needs four tyres.

From emergency charity to permanent solidarity

The deeper solution to donor drought is to stop treating prolonged wars as endless sequences of emergencies. Ukraine no longer needs merely emergency philanthropy. It needs institutions of solidarity. That means converting occasional donors into recurring donors. A person who gives €20 every month may ultimately be more valuable than someone who gives €500 after seeing a particularly horrific television report and never gives again.

It means building relationships between communities. A British town might support a Ukrainian municipality. A school might maintain a permanent relationship with a Ukrainian school. A company might finance one evacuation vehicle for a year. A church might adopt a shelter. A professional association might support Ukrainian colleagues. This is less exciting than an emergency appeal.

That is precisely the point. Humanitarian support must become boring enough to survive.

Governments discovered this principle long ago. States do not finance armies by holding charitable appeals whenever ammunition runs low. They create budgets, taxation systems, procurement programmes and multi-year appropriations. Protracted humanitarian crises require something similar: predictable funding rather than recurrent emotional mobilisation.

The challenge is particularly acute as Ukraine approaches another winter. The UN’s 2026–2027 winter response seeks $358.4 million to assist 2.1 million people with heating, shelter repairs, healthcare, food, protection and cash assistance. The plan concentrates particularly upon people near the front, newly displaced and evacuated populations and those affected by attacks upon civilian infrastructure.

None of these needs is surprising. That is why they are difficult to fund.

The forgotten people

Donor drought ultimately raises an uncomfortable moral question. Does suffering matter less because it has lasted a long time? Obviously it should not. Yet much of humanitarian finance behaves as though it does. A person evacuated from Donetsk Oblast in 2026 has lost a home just as surely as someone evacuated in March 2022. An elderly woman whose apartment loses heating after a Russian attack this winter will be just as cold as she would have been four winters earlier.

From her perspective there is no such thing as donor fatigue. There is only winter.

This is perhaps the most important fact for those of us who live in Ukraine and watch the war continuing around us. The international news cycle measures novelty. War measures endurance.

The two are fundamentally incompatible. Russia understands endurance extremely well. One element of its strategy has always been the expectation that democratic societies will eventually become tired: tired of expenditure, tired of refugees, tired of sanctions, tired of military assistance and ultimately tired of Ukraine itself.

Humanitarian donor drought therefore has a strategic dimension. The Kremlin does not necessarily have to persuade Western societies that Russia is right. It may be sufficient to persuade them that Ukraine is old news. That is why sustaining humanitarian support matters beyond the immediate relief of suffering. Every functioning evacuation network, every repaired home and every displaced family successfully accommodated reinforces Ukraine’s capacity to endure a war deliberately designed to exhaust it.

There is nevertheless an important distinction to preserve. Supporting Ukraine cannot mean pretending that donors possess unlimited resources. They do not. Nor can every humanitarian organisation expect to survive indefinitely merely because its cause is worthy.

Scarcity demands efficiency. Projects must demonstrate results. Organisations should cooperate rather than duplicate one another. Administrative costs should be proportionate. Technology should reduce overheads. Local Ukrainian organisations should receive greater responsibility because they frequently possess knowledge and networks that large international institutions cannot reproduce.

Most importantly, donors need evidence of consequences. Not merely photographs of suffering, but evidence of what happened next. This family was evacuated. This generator kept a shelter warm. This vehicle travelled 30,000 kilometres. This building remained habitable. This village retained drinking water. These are modest achievements compared with winning a war. But wars are endured through millions of modest achievements.

After the cameras leave

There will eventually be another great international emergency. There always is. Television crews will arrive. Governments will announce assistance. Charities will launch appeals. People will open their wallets because they have seen something terrible and feel compelled to act. Ukraine will then move another few centimetres down the world’s screen.

But the elderly will still need evacuation from frontline towns. Displaced families will still need somewhere to sleep. Vehicles will still require fuel. Damaged houses will still require repairs. Children will still require schools and medicines. Volunteers will still drive east. The moral test of humanitarianism is therefore not how generously people respond during the first week of a catastrophe. Human beings are remarkably generous during first weeks. The test is what happens in the fifth year. Compassion triggered by horror is an emotion. Solidarity sustained after the horror has become familiar is a principle.

Ukraine increasingly needs the latter. Because donor drought is not principally a shortage of compassion. It is a failure to transform compassion into institutions capable of surviving the inevitable decay of human attention. The bombs do not become less destructive because the world has seen them before. Neither should our willingness to help.