Ukraine Aid Trip

On 11 July, just a few weeks from now, I will be travelling back to Kyiv, Ukraine. I will be visiting people who are involved in charity projects and aid work, and any donations that I am able to raise will be delivered to these people and groups in person.

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The first time I visited Ukraine was in spring 2012.

I took a train across the north of the country – entering from Moldova, then passing through Lviv, to Kyiv. It was the end of the Easter holidays, and at every station students were getting onto the train as they travelled back from family holidays, to their university cities. They all had bags full of home-cooked food, leftover Easter treats – cured meats, pickles, stuffed vine leaves, cakes. As the only foreigner in the train compartment, every new passenger insisted that I tried their mother’s cooking too. The train emptied at Lviv, but then as we continued on to Kyiv, the same thing happened all over again. There was music, laughter, and by the time I arrived in Kyiv I was so full that I couldn’t eat for a day.

That warmth and hospitality is my first memory of Ukraine. I started visiting more often, and in 2015 I began working with local guides to design ambitious, multi-city tours of the country – because I wanted more foreigners to have the Ukrainian experience that I’d had. I did research for my PhD in Ukraine, and in 2020, my book Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide documented the people and communities who lived and worked in that underreported but surprisingly lively corner of the country. To date, I’ve brought in over a hundred tourists and I think they’ve all fallen in love with Ukraine too.

I am originally from the UK, but I hardly visit there any more. In the past decade Ukraine has been a much bigger part of my life. Up until the pandemic, I was typically spending three-to-four months of every year living in Kyiv – and some of my closest friends in the world are people I’ve met there.

Now my Ukrainian friends and colleagues are either refugees, or else they’re patrolling borders, or camped out on the front lines in a war they never asked for. Defending their homes from foreign aggression. Some of them have already been killed by this war.

I had just left Kyiv a few months before the full-scale invasion started. This is now the longest I have been away, in over a decade. I need to go back. There are people I want to see, and support. I am not planning to visit anywhere currently involved in active conflict, but I will visit Kyiv, Irpin, Chernihiv, Slavutych, and various other places, meeting with people who have been severely and directly impacted by this war. I can deliver supplies to people who need them, and I can share their stories too, if that’s what they want.

I am fully funding this trip myself, because it’s something I feel I just need to do. However, if people outside of Ukraine want to send me additional donations, then I can personally put that money straight into the hands of people who need it. It won’t get lost in NGO bureaucracy, it won’t go to military funds, it will go straight to people who are now attempting to rebuild their homes and communities.

At the end of this trip, I will share some details about what I was able to do. Any unused donations left at that stage will be given to 12 Vartovykh, a Ukrainian aid group whose work focusses on the restoration of cultural heritage, providing help to families affected by the war, and also protecting animals caught in conflict zones.

Thank you.