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.

Publications

Involving civil society on the conflict resolution process in Donbas

The report on the results of the strategic seminar «Involving civil society on the conflict resolution process in Donbas», which was held in Warsaw on June 26-28, 2017 and was organized by DRA in cooperation with the Civic Solidarity Platform (CSP).

Languages:

English

Russian

Ukranian

French

Year of publication: 2017

Armed conflict in Donbas in Russian newspapers

The monitoring results of selected articles in the period from April 1 to June 30, 2017.

Language: Russian

Year of publication: 2017

Actions

1. Strategic Retreat „Civil Society Engagement in Conflict Resolution in Donbas“, Warsaw, 26-27 June 2017

The international NGO meeting, which was attended by more than 40 representatives of civil society organizations from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Belarus, the Czech Republic and other European countries, was prepared by the Civic Solidarity Platform (CSP) and DRA e.V. in co-operation with the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and funded by the foreign ministries of France and Germany. More

2. Side event “Enhancing civil society’s impact in Donbas” in the framework of the HDIM conference of the OSCE 2017, Warsaw, 15 September 2017  

NGO-representatives from Ukraine, Russia and other European countries presented their views on how to enhance the contribution of independent civic actors to the reestablishment of rule of law in Donbas and to a peaceful conflict transformation. More