June 9th, 2023

Good evening from Kharkiv.

I arrived Thursday evening after a 6 hour drive from Kyiv. Kharkiv is our base from which we will then travel to Kramatorsk at 0 dark 30 tomorrow.

The last time I was here it was December and there was no power. Shelling and missile attacks were constant. The streets were almost empty. Now the spring greenery is in bloom and many have returned from Europe and other places inside Ukraine. Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine, an education hub and has a sense of civic pride like I have never seen. The main city is roughly 35 miles from the Russian border. Like the initial battle for Kyiv, Kharkiv was successfully defended last year but the outlying settlements were occupied until the Ukrainian counterattack in September.

Today we visited our friends Ira and Sergey and their daughter Anna (13) and son Roma (15). You may remember me speaking of them last year when they lived in a bunker underground near an abandoned factory. They are originally from the village of Staryi Saltiv which had been mostly destroyed and occupied. We accompanied them back to the village to see the family home that they are trying to repair. Ira made a huge lunch and we all sat together and spoke broken Ukrainian and English with a lot of help from Google Translate. Beat salad I have ever eaten and everything came out of their garden.

We saw the exact spot where Anna’s grandfather died when he was hit by shrapnel from Russian artillery. Myself and my teammate Hymie Dunn had given money last year to the family to assist with their needs and hopefully help to rebuild the house. We are happy to report that even though the village still has no water, rebuilding is happening. And Anna is able to continue to go to school online. Their was a missile strike near their bunker in February, so they have relocated to a different part of Kharkiv until they can move back to Staryi Saltiv.

We also visited Ivan and Yulia, the young couple who opened a coffee shop at the beginning of the war and served freenfood and drinks to soldiers defending the city. They now run a business and last winter your donations helped purchase a generator that continues to power their shop when the Russians bombed the power facilities. This generator provided electricity and heat and food for the shop and a shelter from the cold for residents of Kharkiv during the dark winter.

This evening we met with our friend Anton who is a Sergeant in a special operations group in the Army. We provided him a portable rechargeable power bank capable of charging multiple USBs and conventional sockets for their phones, radios, Starlink modules and other mission critical items. Anton showed us photos of NVGs that were sent by the US. Like much of the equipment we send, it was old and much of it non functioning. But he showed us how the resourceful and tech saavy Ukrainians were able to fix it. This is the same tech saavy that took the obsolete Patriot Missile systems and improved them to such a level that the US now wants to refurbish and upgrade our aging and obsolete Patriot batteries with Ukrainian upgrades. Anton said the Patriot is one reason why we haven’t had a fraction of the missile attacks in Kharkiv that we have experienced in past visits.

Finally we visited Paul Hughes of HUGS Ukraine. Paul is a well known Canadian volunteer here since the beginning. He has assembled an impressive team and facility that includes a warehouse, an auto mechanic shop and IT support. Today we delivered seven laptop computers donated by the Bank of Montreal. This is part of Paul’s effort to provide school kids with operable computers for the coming academic year. We also donated funds to purchase a specific type of adapter to improve the computers. Don’t ask me, I can barely ooen a file, but it works and the IT guy, Artem was thrilled.

Tomorrow we set out for Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Pokrovske. We will deliver comabt medical gear to an American nurse, medical equipment to a civilian hospital and aid bags to Ukraine units and our friend Frasier Goodie a British Legionaire who was badly wounded in a battle three weeks ago. Goodie as he is known, still has shrapnel in his shoulder and leg, but is headed out to fight again shortly. We hope to catch him first.

The sirens are sounding now. Only the second time since I arrived here. Some things don’t change. The Russians are right on time. 11pm seems to be when they get bored and need to blow stuff up.

Below, lunch at Anna’s, Yulia and Ivan and me and Artem the IT nerd.

More to follow