On 15.3.22 we received word in Warsaw that there was a place for us and our brothers were waiting for us to come into Ukraine to help them organising a project to aid refugees orientate into Europe from Ukraine.

The city we were going to had been shaken as a Ukrainian base was attacked by the Russian army four days prior. More than 30 missiles killed 35 and injured 134 at the base about 10 miles from the Polish border and about 30 miles west of Lviv.

In order to reassure my mother and my immediate family I sent them this text.

[Hey family. We safely saw the women and children of our Ukrainian friends off to Amsterdam today. Tomorrow we will go into Ukraine to see their husbands and show solidarity to them. We will look at helping them solidify their shelter project. Maybe scale it up. They are taking women and children to the border. We’re just gonna see what we can do. I’ve been a few streets away from ‘strategic bombing’ in Belfast in 1993/4. I feel it’s a low risk for the good we can do. Deirdre will stay at the hotel in Warsaw with friends. Keep us in your prayers. We aim to be back out on Saturday at the latest. ❤️👍🏻🇺🇦🤫🙏🏻Were just telling family at this stage. Slava Ukrainia!]

Two men boarded the 5.50am train to the border with me in Warsaw Central. Nick Bordieri the president of our international charity www.mercyworldwide.org and Victor Maslyanikov (soon to be Wartime appointed leader of the Warsaw International Christian Church) a trilingual Ukrainian man of high character. Several hours later we got off our second train, a 10 minute walk from the border and had to walk between and around trains to get to the exit. Walking down the back road to the border we met Rob, a retired police officer from the UK. We clicked immediately. He’d sat in front of his TV knowing he could make a difference and couldn’t take the pressure of that thought. It gnawed away at his conscience until he couldn’t bear it. He explained to his wife and daughter that he just had to go. He didn’t know where he was going to go. He didn’t know what he was gonna do when he got there. He’d left his hotel and come down to the border looking for work. It took him 5 minutes to get recruited! Outside the border control building is a little corridor of love flanked on both sides with humanitarian tents all the way down both sides for about 100m. Every single one of them fully stocked with high-quality food and clothing and other items. Sikhs, Jews and Christians etc all working together in harmony. And behind the tents giving out the aid there was a little village of camping tents where these workers were staying. Rob was right. He was needed. We swapped numbers. He’s the kinda guy I’d want on my side in a fight.

It took us about 30 minutes to go through passport control and cross the border. Needless to say the numbers crossing into Ukraine are so much less than the hundreds that were waiting to pass through into Poland. Once across the Border it was much busier. There were loads of taxis lined up waiting to take people into Lviv. There was car parks full of buses and vans. There was long lines of coaches emptying their passengers onto the street to go and join the queues. We found a minibus willing to take us into Lviv for $3 per head and jumped aboard. As we pulled out of the border town there was a constant stream of people walking towards the border as well as a long line of parked cars for miles. Soon we were on our way through the back roads going village to village and picking up and dropping off passengers. This was a local bus that we jumped on. None of the local people wanted us to move our luggage off the seats to sit down. It just occurred to me writing this that they realised we were foreigners coming to help and out of respect they remained standing for their short journeys so that our bags could remain where they were. I offered several times but in spite of my insistance they would not sit down. Everyone in Ukraine is fighting this war in their own way. Many Ukrainians have made a solemn decision never to speak Russian again!

We pulled into Lviv central bus station at about 18.00. After a short pit stop in a supermarket (and a short interview with a security man who  asked us to delete pictures) we were picked up outside by Yura. He was 2m tall (ex Hell’s Angel), project manager of one of Lviv’s new high rise luxury apartment buildings. Lviv was a bustling city. We drove in his work van to the site of his almost completed high spec tower block where he showed us the lower floor that had been converted into a refugee shelter, housing 70 refugee women and children. We then went round the corner to his flat, in a small soviet style estate. There we met the consultant doctor who was staying with him to help organise the passage of refugees out of Ukraine to Germany.

The next two hours we talked, built rapport, buried the hatchet, and hashed out where we were all at. Jura had put a lot of his own money into supporting refugees.  He’d paid rent on apartments. He’d fed multiple refugees. He’d not been paid due to the war starting the day before he was due to receive his wages. He was due 6 months payment. After this he then organised a 100 capacity refugee shelter on the ground floor of the multi-storey apartment block where he was working as a project manager for the entire block. This was a project with a medical clinic on the second floor. On top of this, he has been working together with fearless drivers going back and forward from areas where the conflict is fiercest and where infrastructure has been damaged, to physically drive refugees out of their situation and all the way to Lviv. This particular project has more than enough brave drivers but not enough gas money as it costs about $200 one-way. He himself lives in an old-school three room apartment in a tower block and even though there were three guys living there already, Yura put up the three of us weary travellers overnight and fed us in the evening and brought us breakfast in the morning. He’s a fighter, a warrior and an example to us all.

All around Lviv there are reinforced road blocks. We were stopped a few times and the passports were checked and they checked the trunk. Men and women soldiers had machine guns and road block style fortified positions were piled high with sand bags. I have to say this brought me right back to my childhood as this was a regular occurence for me growing up in Northern Ireland. These road blocks reminded me more of the border crossings into the Republic of Ireland which were are reinforced and bomb proof constructions with good views of the approach and the surrounding area. The British Army were always armed with machine guns and pistols and they were often accompanied by the police who were also armed. They would usually park in a chicane style format and in Lviv, the roadblocks were very similar where the cars had to weave around and the road ahead was hidden from the approaching vehicles by interlocking barricades. My Ukrainian friends could tell I was right at home.

The three of us fitted snugly into one of the bedrooms in Jura’s apartment. We got to bed probably around about 12 or 1 in the morning on our first night and I took the sofa. I fell asleep very quickly but woke up again at 3 a.m. to the drone of an air raid siren. I lay there in a semi comatose state listening to see what the other guys would do. The air raid siren stopped and the other guys didn’t seem to stir so I just went back to sleep. I’d already been told that the air raid sirens went off even if it was a military target under attack and that most people in Lviv didn’t even bother going to the bomb shelters. So now I know that feeling. I actually know some people in Kiev who do the same thing. Anyway, I woke up in the morning at about 7 or 8 and was told by the guys that there had not actually been any missiles hitting Lviv but that it had been an attack on Kiev and they had suspected a coordinated attack on Lviv and so the air raids sirens sounded there anyway. The next night we stayed at a different address and when I woke up in the morning I found out that there had been a missile attack 5km from the place where we were staying. I slept through the whole thing and we had stuff to do that day so we didn’t really dwell on it very much but I did send my family a text quickly to let them know that I was alright.

We had meetings with our guys in Lviv during the few days. We were there to try to design a project and see how it would work and to try to find a niche in the humanitarian effort and capitalise on the fact that we have a solid volunteer base of Ukrainian men.

That done, we found out that  we would be accompanying one of our dear friends and her 90 year old mother back across the border and into Warsaw the next day. I’ll tell more about that journey in my next article. Meanwhile here is my written salute to all The Men Behind The Wire. I don’t mean this in a political way, but take time if you can to listen to the Irish Rebel song, The Men Behind The Wire and try not to shed a tear as you think about the men of Ukraine who remain standing at this time, behind the wire, in whatever capacity that may be. It’s easy for me to go in to a ‘safe city’ on the western border and claim that I know anything about what those men are going through psychologically and emotionally, separated from their wives and mothers, broken sleep from air raid sirens every night, tired every day, many with loaded weapons at the ready, having fled their homes, seeing Ukrainian babies and children’s bleeding and dead bodies on their TVs and internet feeds, under constant threat of bombing and death or being called into the army at short notice. I didn’t face any of those things. I just live in the hope that I can be a part of something that will make a difference to their lives and the lives of those they love. Slava Ukrainia!