Delivering Aid to Ukraine / Telegraph Magazine

 Let me start with a vignette. Having driven across Europe from the improbable starting point of Macclesfield we arrive at a supermarket in Zaporizhzhya, a city near the front line of the war in Ukraine. An air raid siren sounds, but nobody takes any notice. We hand over a laptop, iPad and outsized television screen to a burly, fatigues-clad former British soldier named Zak who is fighting with the Ukrainian army.

Zak, 51, was living in Ukraine before the war. He ran an extreme sports company, and has a Ukrainian son. He now commands 30 men who are battling the Russian invaders. He explains that our equipment will be used in a mobile command centre receiving a live feed from drones flying over Russian positions. ‘It will make a huge difference,’ he says.

Zak talks of how this is the first modern war in which one army must go outside the normal military supply chains to procure vital kit. He talks about the conflict’s terrible attrition rate, the incredible ‘Blitz spirit’ of the Ukrainian soldiers, and how contributions like ours boost their morale as well as their fighting capability. ‘They understand what evil is, and they are fighting evil,’ he declares. ‘That’s why I will do everything I can to be here with them.’

I ask how many men his unit has lost. ‘Twenty-seven,’ he replies. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, this seasoned warrior turns and walks away, overcome with emotion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really begins a year ago, when my wife and I agreed to house three Ukrainian refugees – a mother, grandmother and daughter named Svitlana, Nadia and Daria – in our London home. They have been perfect guests – considerate, appreciative and helpful. Daria joined a Ukrainian choir, and in January we attended a concert at a church in Clerkenwell replete with a tear-jerking rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem and cries of ‘Slava Ukraini!’ (Glory to Ukraine!).

During the interval I chatted to the woman beside me. She mentioned a Ukrainian emigre from Brighton, Anton, who delivers aid to his homeland when not serving as an interpreter for the Ukrainian troops training in Britain. An idea took root. Perhaps I could accompany him. Perhaps I could contribute a little more to the war effort by finding a fresh way of writing about a conflict that has been raging for 15 months, by personalising it and making the point that it is taking place not in some distant corner of the world but a mere three-day drive from London. Plus, of course, I was curious to see Ukraine for myself.

I called Anton. He consented. Then I heard about Macclesfield Ukrainian Aid (MUA), a remarkable group of volunteers from that small Cheshire town which had already sent out 72 vans and pick-ups carrying more than £1.5 million worth of medical, humanitarian and military aid. The vehicles serve as ambulances, supply trucks and machine gun platforms.

We agreed to join forces, and thus I presented myself one sunny May morning at a welding company on an industrial estate in Macclesfield for the start of MUA’s fourteenth Ukrainian convoy. Volunteers were packing all manner of aid into five battered old vehicles – a Nissan X-Trail, two Toyota Hiluxes, a Ford Transit van purchased just hours earlier, and a 2004 Isuzu pick-up with 114,000 miles on the clock that had been painted olive green overnight because it was destined for the front. The paint was still wet. Someone had soldered ‘Fuck Putin’ on to the bodywork.

Anne Hancock, a retired nurse, and her son, Tom, the welding company’s owner, set up MUA. Her father was Ukrainian. Aged 17, he was seized from his village as the Germans retreated from Russia in 1943 and sent to work in a field kitchen in France. Liberated by the Canadians, he settled in Britain. His family thought he was Polish until – long after his death – they discovered the truth and made contact with his relatives in Ukraine. 

Horrified by Russia’s invasion in February last year, the Hancocks appealed for aid on social media. Food, clothes, boots, toys, sleeping bags and generators poured into Tom’s premises. Hospitals started donating surplus or out-of-date medicines, bandages, infusion kits, oxygen masks, hazard suits, scanners and an entire operating theatre. It is still coming. ‘We just felt we had to do something,’ says Hancock. ‘The response has been phenomenal. We just seem to go from strength to strength.’

Separately Jonathan Verney, 61, an Old Harrovian businessman from Chester, had begun sending second-hand vehicles out to Ukraine. He felt compelled to help because a month before the invasion he had been in Mariupol, negotiating the construction of a recycling plant. Being a great-great nephew of Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimea, probably played a part too. 

Soon Verney and MUA linked up. With everyone from his cleaner to a wealthy City friend and a rich Ukrainian contact making donations, he purchased the ‘end-of-life’ vehicles for a few thousand pounds apiece and delivered them to Tom’s premises to be rendered roadworthy and loaded with supplies. There is no point in buying newer vehicles because most are ‘shot to pieces’ within weeks, Verney explains. ‘It’s costing me a fortune,’ Tom protests before adding: ‘It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.’

Before leaving at 3pm Rick Mobbs, 60, a former soldier and volunteer driver, gives us a security briefing. Nurse the vehicles, he tells us. Stay in convoy. Turn off our mobiles at the Ukrainian border. Post nothing on social media until the trip is over. This is Mobbs’ eighth trip to post-invasion Ukraine. ‘I’m a Cold War soldier. I’ve been fighting the Russians since 1982,’ he explains.

On the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam I learn more about my fellow drivers and their motivations. 

Ruth Moore, 51, is a former police force manager whose Jewish grandparents were hidden by a Dutch family during the Second World War. ‘If it wasn’t for the kindness of strangers I wouldn’t be here. This is my act of kindness to strangers,’ she says. Hans Daams, 68, a Dutch retiree, is inspired by his mother: aged 17, she risked her life by smuggling leaflets through Nazi checkpoints in Utrecht as a member of the resistance. 

Dmytro Kryvko, 34, a video designer, fled when the Russians overran Melitopol, his home city, last year and came to Britain with his wife and daughter. Unable to fight because of a medical condition, this is his way of helping his country. A retired doctor from Edinburgh, the owner of a first aid-training company from Tamworth and Verney complete our group.

The next day we drive 629 miles across Germany. The day after that we cross Poland, stopping at a Benedictine abbey near the Ukrainian border to collect 24 boxes of emergency medical packs for front-line soldiers left there by another charity. Four priests and six nuns live in the abbey, along with 30 Ukrainian refugees. Father Marek, the senior priest, tells me he has no problem storing non-lethal military equipment. What about weapons, I ask? ‘I’d have to ask the bishop,’ he grins.

That evening we reach the Ukrainian border at Korczowa to find a long, stationary line of vehicles ahead of us. Spotting our British number plates, a young Ukrainian woman knocks on the window of every vehicle in front of us, asking if we can go first because we are bringing aid and have come so far. All readily agree, but the Polish border guards send us back. 

We talk to our neighbours while waiting. The van next to us is bringing hospital beds from Magdeburg, Germany. The young Ukrainian woman behind is delivering her fourteenth Polish vehicle to the front line, all in her spare time. A grey-haired man, told he was too old to enlist as a soldier, is delivering his thirty-ninth. Probably a third of the queuing vehicles are delivering support to Ukraine.

It takes four hours to negotiate the border bureaucracy. We reach Lviv shortly before the midnight curfew starts. The streets are deserted. We have driven another 538 miles.

The next morning we start late. We transfer the two Hiluxes to a de-mining organisation, and the medical packs to Medics4Ukraine. Kryvko visits a dentist because it is cheaper than the UK. Verney and I wander around Lviv’s lovely Hapsburg-era heart.

It is hard to tell there’s a war on. Children head for school, workers to their jobs. The cobbled streets are freshly washed. The trams are running. Tulips ring the famous opera house. Shop windows display spring collections, and coffee kiosks do brisk business. But the city cemetery tells another story: some 200 soldiers’ coffins await burial, each adorned with a Ukrainian flag.

Back at the hotel we meet a plucky young woman named Uliana. She had accosted Verney on a previous trip to ask if he could find a vehicle for her husband, a former computer repairman now fighting near Bakhmut. He delivered one in 10 days. Our Isuzu is now destined for her husband’s colleague. She is full of gratitude. ‘It’s so nice to know people are not forgetting our problems,’ she says. 

I ask how she and her two children are coping. ‘When someone from the family is fighting, all the family is fighting,’ she replies. ‘It’s very hard. I miss him all the time, but I know if he wasn’t there another father or son would be there in his place.’

Leaving Lviv, Anton and I get lost. We find ourselves on a dirt track leading through rustic villages where horses and carts, not to mention Soviet-era Ladas, are still common. We stop a man in a smarter car. He leads us back to the right road. Then, astonishingly, he gives us a $100 note to defray our expenses. ‘For our army,’ he says. 

Anton, a Brighton & Hove Albion fan, recounts how he gave an acquaintance his ticket for a match while we’re away. When he next looked at his crowdfunding page, the recipient had donated £1,100. As Verney says: ‘Every man and his dog wants to do something to help. They just don’t know how.’

We drive through forests and across great plains. In every town we see flags flying over fresh graves in cemeteries. As we near Kyiv, 335 miles from Lviv, the war really begins to intrude. Road signs have been painted over to confuse invaders. Billboards proclaim ‘Join Up For Our Victory’, ‘Turn Your Anger Into Your Weapon’ and ‘Heroes Don’t Die’. We drive through manned and unmanned checkpoints. On the edge of the capital we pass the charred shells of homes and shops and a collapsed bridge.

Anton, 44, lived in Kyiv until his parents moved to Britain when he was 15. That night he shows me the somewhat depopulated city of golden domes. In St Volodymyr’s Cathedral a priest tells us: ‘We are burying more than we are marrying.’ He introduces us to a young widow. We commiserate, but say she must be proud her husband died fighting for his country. ‘All our soldiers are heroes,’ she replies.

We pass statues boarded up for protection against missile strikes. In St Michael’s Square we inspect the charred remains of Russian tanks, and the wall of the eponymous monastery which is covered in thousands of photos of dead soldiers. We walk through Independence Square where, arguably, the present war was triggered back in 2013. Vast crowds gathered to protest President Yanukovych’s decision to align Ukraine with Moscow instead of the European Union. Yanukovych fled, but Russia responded by seizing Crimea.

We leave Kyiv early the next morning. The road south is lined with sandbagged foxholes facing the great open steppe to the east. The bridges are all guarded. Thousands of steel girder tank traps, resembling outsized toy jacks, stand ready to block roads. We pass countless military vehicles heading towards the front line. We activate the air raid app on our phones, and soon a disembodied voice warns: ‘Attention! Attention! Shelling attack alert! Proceed to the nearest shelter.’ But we see nothing, and after several such warnings we cease to worry.

Near Dnipro we deliver the contents of our transit van to a church group supporting women and children rendered homeless by the war and now living on an abandoned college campus next to a partly destroyed power station. They include food, sanitary products, nappies, toothpaste and shampoo, all donated by the people of Macclesfield, plus cards drawn by Macclesfield schoolchildren. The grown-ups give us pizza. A young girl gives us dandelions. The group’s leader is absent but calls on her mobile. ‘Thank you from our church, our people and our nation,’ she says.  

In Dnipro I briefly leave the convoy to visit our London refugees’ relatives. Nadia’s brother, Mikola, his wife, Lily, their two daughters, Iryna and Helen, and a grandson were driven from their home in Donetsk by the Russian invasion. When Nadia left they squeezed into her one-bedroom flat. 

It is an emotional meeting. I give them Coronation chocolates, biscuits and tea towels sent by Svitlana in, somewhat incongruously,  a Fortnum & Mason bag. They give me a handmade Ukrainian teddy. 

We talk about the war. They say Dnipro’s air defences now bring down most Russian missiles, but not all: ‘When the dogs bark and the alarms go off we know they’ve landed not far from here.’ They try not to accept humanitarian aid because others need it more. Irena makes camouflage netting for front-line units in her spare time. I have to rejoin the convoy so we hug and part with cries of ‘Slava Ukraini! Slava Brytaniyi!’. I learn later that they had cooked me dinner.

At 3.30am an alarm sounds inside my hotel room, warning of another air strike. I fall straight back to sleep.

Our final day is the most moving of all. Leaving Dnipro, we stop at a monument to Putin’s barbarity: a nine-storey apartment block destroyed by a Russian missile at lunchtime on Saturday, 14 January. Forty-six people were killed, including several children. The fronts of the flats were ripped away, exposing tattered wallpaper, boilers, ovens, bookshelves, plastic flowers, clothes in a wardrobe, a potty – poignant reminders of domestic life. A bus stop opposite has become a shrine, filled with teddy bears.  

We drive on to our final destination, Zaporizhzhia, a city bristling with soldiers and refugees scarcely 30 miles from the front line. We meet Zak before finally coming to rest in the station car park, precisely 2,069 miles from Macclesfield.

A soldier arrives to collect the green Isuzu, a thermal scope and a drone. He says the vehicle will be used as a machine-gun platform, and probably destroyed within weeks. It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend.

Another soldier approaches simply to thank us for our work. A police woman forced to flee her home town, Polohy, gives us all impromptu hugs. Kryvko discovers old friends at a nearby centre for refugees from his native Melitopol, and sobs as he embraces them. Olexsandr, a business associate of Verney, takes the transit van away for use as a front-line delivery vehicle. 

Then Vladimir arrives to fetch the last pick-up and a load of ration packs. An offshore engineer in civilian life, the diminutive 45-year-old has spent the past 15 months clearing buildings, trenches and woods of Russian soldiers – one of the most dangerous tasks of all. He has discharged himself from hospital for the day, and walks using a crutch, having recently been wounded by shrapnel in his leg and buttock.

Vladimir says he has not seen his wife and children for eight months. He has lost more than 30 colleagues. He shows us video clips of dead Russian soldiers, of a mortar attack in which 11  comrades died, and of the ruined buildings that he and his men inhabit for days at a time. How does he cope with so much death and destruction, I ask? ‘After each mission we remove the memory card from our brain,’ he replies. Will he return to the front line? Of course, he says. ‘My duty will finish when we finish with the Russians.’ But, he asks rhetorically: ‘When will my luck run out?’

Vladimir thanks us for the aid. ‘Without support from your country we would not have survived this long,’ he says. By way of a gift he gives Verney a bayonet taken from a Russian he had killed. He then hugs us all and drives away, leaving us distinctly damp-eyed.

We catch the sleeper train back to Lviv, 17 hours away, passing trains carrying tanks to the front for the long-awaited spring offensive. Mission accomplished? Not quite. 

Verney has a new shopping list – secure communication devices for Zak, drones for Vladimir, diabetic medicines for a doctor in the Melitopol refugee centre. We find ourselves sharing a compartment with Tatiana, a front-line medic whose husband had been killed 40 days earlier. She asks for neck braces and blood coagulants. 

As I fall asleep Verney is on his mobile, buying a second-hand pick-up from someone in Inverness, hunting down coagulants, preparing for the next convoy. ‘I’m aware that what I’m doing is a drop in the ocean,’ he tells me. ‘But so many others are doing the same that those drops are becoming a tidal wave.’