“We set off last Saturday (8th) and drove through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Poland in a convoy of 12 4×4 pick-up trucks and an estate car. Our Dortmund to Gliwice in Poland leg was around 800km. It’s a big place Europe!
We crossed into Ukraine on the 10th at a minor crossing point – Budomierz. This avoided the huge queues of lorries on the main routes. A few hours of bureaucracy and border checks was followed by a couple of hours driving to Lviv. Here we spent two days meeting hospital staff, handing over aid and six vehicles. We also visited a hospital, a drone factory, a camouflage netting site, a veterans’ rehabilitation centre and a very moving visit to the military cemetery. However, overall Lviv felt very normal and bar one air raid warning life seems to go on as you’d expect in any modern European city.
One lighter aspect was when we visited a Lviv restaurant. They had incorporated a shooting range into the venue and here you could take pot shots at a target with Putin’s face on it. Very satisfying.
We then left half the team behind who were returning to the UK and the remainder of us, seven vehicles and aid then headed east c500km to Kiev. Here we had a chance to wander around Maidan Square, where the revolution began and St Michael’s Church which has a memorial wall covered with the names and photos of those who had died in the fighting since 2014. Kiev again felt very normal, a bustling modern city. We stayed overnight in a small town east of Kiev and then drove east c300km to Sumy, slowed up at various checkpoints as the military traffic increased.
Into Sumy, which is about 40km from the Russian border.
Meeting the Ukrainian soldiers east of Sumy was very sobering. Some had been fighting for nearly three years. Most had lost friends. We stayed with them in an abandoned house in the brigade rear area, out of range of FPV drones and most artillery. We could hear the rumble of Russian artillery in the distance and the Ukrainian air defences quite close by trying to shoot down incoming Shahid drones. It was very cold, minus10-15 degrees at night, minus 3-5 during the day. A tough place to fight in.
Thank you again for your donation. It really does make a difference. One thing that we hadn’t thought of was that, just us being there, let them know that people far away care.
We told them that although there weren’t many of us on the team, over 2000 people had donated to support us and thus them, on this trip alone. They were quite emotional; they feel very alone in this fight.
We cheered them up by cracking open two bottles of whisky and a bottle of rum. They were very hospitable and fed us very well. We had a very good evening with them. Lovely blokes and a very nutty, but great fun female combat medic. Amazing woman who spends her life trying to save the lives of her wounded fellow soldiers.
The reality of this conflict came home when I was sleeping on a mat in the corridor. At 5.00am a group of soldiers trudged past me, picking up their body armour and assault rifles and heading out to the front line in one of the vehicles you helped fund.
Our day with the soldiers reminded us that this wasn’t just something you see on tv. Real people, citizen soldiers, an IT worker and a car salesman amongst others are fighting and dying in this completely unnecessary war. The average life of the vehicles is generally around 3-4 weeks before they are destroyed by drones, more often than not with all on board being killed or wounded. Hence an almost continual need for modern medical aid and replacement vehicles.
What did make us rather proud, in a small way, was that of all the foreign number plates in Sumy, British ones were the most prevalent. Interestingly, followed by those from Latvia, who of course know what it’s like to live next door to the Russian bear.
Once we had handed over all our vehicles and aid we then had a few hours to kill in Sumy before catching a train back to Kiev.
Sumy is poor, like much of Ukraine east of Kiev and our walk was punctuated by air raid warnings and the sound of a hypersonic missile hitting the outskirts. A glide bomb had killed two people the day before and nine killed in the preceding week. The sound of jets overhead made everyone look up rather nervously but we took some comfort knowing they must be Ukrainian as the Russian air force doesn’t cross into Ukrainian air space.
Our train from Sumy to Kiev was straight out of the Soviet era with a babushka delivering tea to each compartment, boiled on a coal stove in her “kitchen”. We grabbed a quick bite in Kiev before catching our overnight train to Lviv. This time a very modern version with comfortable bunks and all the mod cons. A clear indication of the wealth gap between eastern and western Ukraine. On Saturday morning (16th) we then caught taxis from Lviv to the Polish border and spent a cold hour or so standing in the snow as were processed through Ukrainian and then Polish border control.
Once through we caught a very modern and punctual train from Przemysl to Krakow. We stayed overnight there taking in a few sights in what from our brief stay is a very beautiful city. I flew back yesterday morning.
A week I’m unlikely to forget.” Niall Macnaughton 17th February 2025
