As the WHO’s emergency coordinator for the Ukrainian refugee response, Paul Spiegel, MD, MPH recently returned from 6-and-a-half weeks in Europe, where he visited 4 countries hosting Ukrainian refugees—Slovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic. 

Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Humanitarian Health, shared some reflections with GHN on the many ways that the Ukrainian emergency differs from other humanitarian crises, including the response’s strengths—and concerns like the West’s failure to treat emergencies in all parts of the world equally.