Dialogue for understanding and justice: European NGOs working together for conflict resolution in Donbas

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion against Ukraine, the number of NGO-actors working on issues connected to the violent conflict in Donbas and its consequences for local population, has grown decisively. A lot of work is being done in different spheres of activities – humanitarian aid, human rights advocacy, peacebuilding, others. Besides Ukrainian NGOs, there are also various civil society actors from other countries supporting the process of conflict resolution, Russian among them.

Two overlapping challenges make the civic engagement in Donbas less efficient – a mostly tense relationship between Ukrainian and Russian civil society communities, and an unspecified interrelation between different approaches of civil society work, first of all between human rights advocacy and peacebuilding. A weak link between diplomatic and grass root level of dialogue activities is the third crucial weakness of the conflict resolution attempts.

Since 2015, DRA and other NGOs are pursuing an idea of building trust and uniting an expertise of different methods in order to develop a joint NGO-strategy and strengthen a professional co-operation among different NGO-actors working on resolution of the Donbas conflict or on its follows. The established partnerships already leads to remarkable synergies and result in the development of the European civil society platform CivilMPlus, which is going to be founded in the next weeks. Its name referred to the different spheres of activities of NGOs as Monitoring of Human rights, social developments and international negotiations, Minsk among them, also to Memory, Peace-Making, Mediation and others, necessary for overcoming the violate conflict and its harmful consequences.

Considering the prominent role of civil society as one of the main driving forces for social change, the project strives to strengthen and widen the activities of trust and co-operation in the framework of the European civil society platform CivilMPlus, thus enhancing civil society’s impact on the process of conflict resolution in Donbas.