Fiona4Ukraine

It's hard to write with much hope and positivity for the New Year, given the scant prospect of peace in Ukraine in the near future and and the precarious state of the world elsewhere.  At the end of last year the Mayor of Kharkiv, Ігор Терехов, posted the following statistics. 728 shellings of the city. Air raid sirens: • in the region — 2403 signals, 4791 hours 20 minutes (this is 200 days) • in Kharkiv — 1826 signals, 2590 hours 56 minutes (this is 108 days) Injured : 973 people, including 106 children. Killed: 41 people, including 3 children. In 2026 we have already started a new toll of deaths and injuries, following 2 Russian missiles that hit a high-rise residential building in the centre of Kharkiv, mid-afternoon on 2 January. As bodies are still being pulled from the rubble, the death toll increased to five today, including a 3-year-old boy and his mother. Two people are still missing. It's hard to see how anyone survived this. Recently, I visited a small photographic ...

Children across Ukraine have experienced death, injury and deprivation over nearly 4 years of war. As of late 2025, estimates from Save the Children, based on “new United Nations figures,” cite 733 children killed and 2,285 injured since February 2022. The real numbers are likely to be higher, due to undercounting or lack of verification, especially in occupied areas or active-combat zones. April 2025 marked the month in which the most children - 97 -  were killed or injured in Russian attacks on Ukraine . On 4 April, a missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of  Kryvyi   Rih  was the deadliest, single attack on children since the start of the full-scale invasion, according to UN-verified data. The missile hit a residential neighbourhood, striking a playground and nearby apartment buildings, killing 18 people,  including nine children, and injuring 75 others, among them 12 children. Many of the casualties were in the playground. ( https://www.savethechildre...

Thank you, Fiona, for giving me the opportunity to write in this blog. My name is Thomas and I reside in Guernsey. I am also the recent supplier, as mentioned in Fiona’s last blog, of her Yorkshire Tea!  Recently, I returned to Kharkiv to volunteer at Hell’s Kitchen for the third time. I have always been involved in the Kitchen’s food preparation but, on this occasion, I joined one of the Ukrainian volunteer drivers one morning, to deliver food to the hospitals the Kitchen supplies. It was a chance to see the places where the food we make goes. Fiona wrote about her experience earlier this year of joining one of the delivery drivers to the hospitals and I thought it would be good to share mine. I joined Kirill, one of the Kitchen’s delivery drivers, and visited three hospitals that the Kitchen serves, in different parts of the city. We split this into two journeys: two hospitals in the first load and, in the second load, one larger hospital. The Kitchen supplies food to other hospi...

On Thursday morning an exhausted young mother and child landed at Manchester Airport in Northern England, having made the long journey from Chernihiv, Northern Ukraine. They are guests of wonderful sponsors (under the UK's Homes For Ukraine scheme)  in Trawden , the village where I lived before moving to Ukraine. Chernihiv, like Kharkiv, is close to the Russian border and experiences frequent bombings. As well, its inhabitants have the collective traumatic memory of surviving Russian occupation at the beginning of the full invasion, in 2022. Myroslava ( Myro for short) was born during this terrifying period, in a basement. Her mother has made the difficult decision to leave home and family behind so that Myro can have a life of peace, stability and relative normality, until there is peace in Ukraine. Мир ( Myr ) means peace in Ukrainian. I try to imagine how strange and different it will feel to experience, not only the peace and quiet, but a tiny village with steep, narrow r...