It is no surprise that the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for oxygen and critical medical supplies to safely reach those who need them in Ukraine and moving to establish safe transit for shipments through Poland. But nor is the call new. We’ve been here before.

Central Asia and the Russian Federation face a major intra-regional migration flow, home, as it is, to one of the largest labor migration corridors in the world, with hundreds of thousands of migrant workers moving from Central Asian countries to the Russian Federation and to Kazakhstan each year.[1] This migration flow of further concern given migrants’ increased vulnerability and poor access to HIV and TB prevention and care in host countries.

The road to Donetsk from Kramatorsk, the last city in mainland Ukraine before the internal border, is beautifully lined with frosted trees. But its beauty belies the harsh reality of actually reaching Donetsk.

On a recent visit to Belarus, I was thinking about the country's multi-cultural heritage arising from its shared history with Lithuania, Poland and Russia, together with its more recent Soviet past. The geographical reality is however that over two thirds of its borders to the South and to the East are with either Ukraine or the Russian Federation, with the latter continuing to be Belarus' major political and economic partner.

After recently returning from a ministerial conference on tuberculosis (TB) and multi-drug resistant TB held on the initiative of the Latvian Presidency of the European Union, I am encouraged that our political elites are eventually deciding to commit to eradicate—rather than to only “control”—TB, the world biggest killing curable disease.

Few young doctors in my own country France would currently wish to specialize in phtisiology. Actually, and for over 30 years, the word "phtisiology" had disappeared from the letterheads of lung diseases divisions in hospitals. The focus of pneumology these days is on chronic lung disease and cancer much more than on tuberculosis (TB).

I was in Brussels earlier this week delivering a speech at the European AIDS Conference and coming on top of the visit to Romania last week, it's given me some valuable time to reflect on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region a year or so into the job as the UN Special Envoy for the region.