By Brooks Newmark
I have ended up on February 14 in Odesa, an old port city on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. My wife Lucy flew out from London to visit me a few days ago. Amazingly the Opera and Ballet Theatre House in Odesa has just reopened, so we are going to see La Bayadere, a ballet by Ludwig Minkus. The opera house is famous for its Potemkin Stairs, made iconic in the film Battleship Potemkin. They sweep down to the waterfront and the Primorsky Boulevard which is a Riviera style promenade that makes you feel you are almost in Cannes.
In this war-torn country, what never ceases to amaze me is the resilience of the people and their determination that civil society must go on. Although Ukrainian flower shops tend to sell mostly fake flowers (made of plastic), I somehow managed to find a dozen fresh red roses which I gave to my wife this morning.
We have a traditional restaurant booked for dinner in the old town tonight. Such almost surreally Flaubert-like moments are in sharp contrast to the harrowing scenes I have witnessed across the Ukraine over the last 12 days, including visiting the minefields of Putin’s new front-line, starting from my arrival in Kyiv on Thursday, 2nd February. At the Herald editor’s request, I kept a daily Ukraine Diary which is below:
My favourite restaurant in Kyiv is called “Beef, Meat and Wine”. I love Ukrainian beef and order a steak with a salad. The war notwithstanding, many restaurants have remained open and the beef here is tender and as close as I can get to a USDA prime cut, but a third of the price.
The restaurant is opposite the Brodsky Choral Synagogue, so I drop by to see the Chief Rabbi Moshe Azman, a larger-than-life character who has done a huge amount of humanitarian work since the war started. The synagogue is an imposing late nineteenth century yellow brick building. I go in through the front door, past security (they know me now), grab a kippah to cover my head and go upstairs to meet the rabbi. I brief him on my work to date – that I have set up a new charity, Angels for Ukraine, through which we have managed to evacuate more than 20,000 women and children from warzones in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The rabbi, who has over a million followers on social media, berates me for my poor PR (he called me a modern-day Schindler earlier in the war which both embarrassed me and brought a tear to my eye). He grabs me and we go outside the synagogue where he makes a recording of thanking me for my work in Ukraine. I now have 10 per cent more followers on Twitter!
The relief effort in Ukraine is a combination of religious faiths working together. Catholic charities and lay religious orders have been in the front line from the start of the war. That afternoon I went to Bucha, a town outside Kyiv, which was the scene of a massive war crime when the Russians slaughtered 458 innocent women, children and men. I went to visit 11-year-old Angelika, displaced from Mariupol and living in temporary accommodation with her mother and grandmother.
The accommodation is supported by the Catholic charity Caritas who, with the Knights of Malta, have done heroic work supporting displaced people in Ukraine. I had met Angelika two weeks before and loved one of her paintings. She kindly offered it to me so I asked her what would she like in return. She said an iPad. She couldn’t believe that I had returned with a blue iPad with a yellow cover (the Ukrainian colours). She hugged me. Her mum hugged me. Her grandma hugged me. It’s moments like this that make this all worthwhile
The next day we drive to Sumy, 800 kilometers across the country. Sumy is potentially on the front line of Putin’s new invasion, expected any day now. I meet the Mayor. We discuss his evacuation plan for civilians and we offer to help with as many buses as he needs to evacuate residents if necessary. He agrees to get back to me with how we can work together – he particularly likes the fact that we cover all the costs, saving his local government money which they can deploy elsewhere. Sumy is one of 10 evacuation hubs we now have in the country.
That night the temperature drops to -12 degrees celsius and I wake up to a blanket of snow. Earlier in the year I donated $22,000 to kit out two ambulances in the town, which have been deployed as far south as Bakhmut, a small town at the front line of the war. I meet the ambulance crew, who thank us for our donation and tell us that they have evacuated over 3,000 wounded soldiers and civilians in the past three months.
We move on to Kharkiv, the largest city in the East. This is where I have spent most of the war and from where we have evacuated over 11,000 women and children (over 50 per cent of our evacuees) in the past year. I visit a factory that makes huge concrete barriers which are being used for the new line of defence 20 kilometers from the Russian border. This is an impressive operation and in a secret location outside the city. I am invited to visit the new frontline protection zone the following day – 20 lives have been lost building this due to Russian anti-personnel mines. Back in Kharkiv I visit a “Boris homage” café decorated with cartoon figures of Boris. He is a hero in Ukraine, especially here in the East.
The following day I am taken to the potential new front line, should Bakhmut fall, see the barriers and watch the demining experts at work in the fields. We are now in a de-occupied area and the ground is littered with anti-personnel mines. Now and then I hear a loud bang as another Russian landmine is exploded. You can literally feel the shockwaves in the air. On the way back to Kharkiv we stop off at the only vet left in Izyum to deliver some pet food for the area’s dogs and cats, most of whom have lost their owners.
That night Kharkiv comes under attack and two S-300s are fired into the city. Putin has this habit of firing them at around 4am when I am sound asleep. Even though I am getting used to bombing during the day, these early morning wake-up calls unnerve me; I lie awake until dawn and scour the news to find out what has happened. The university and an apartment block were hit.
As I am up early, we get going to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk – both on the front line and both being shelled constantly. I meet up with half a dozen soldiers I have got to know. Included in the group is Denys Berinchyk, the WBO Oriental Lightweight Boxing Champion. We have become good friends and he insists on joining me. We deliver more humanitarian aid to the villages – mainly warm clothing for the elderly and medical supplies. That night I get into a drinking competition with the soldiers (normally I am a complete teetotaler but here you can’t be!) and after seven shots of the local homemade juniper vodka I call it a day.
We drive to Zaporizhzhia via Dnipro where I stop at my new favourite coffee shop ‘Brooks Eats & Drinks’, which pretty much sums up my experience here in Ukraine when I’m not working. The pastries are amazing, as is the coffee – which can sometimes be a fairly mixed experience. We arrive in Zaporizhzhia to find that our hotel has no electricity (and no generator), it’s -14C outside and we are on the seventh floor. I get into bed in my thermals. At 4.30am I’m woken by a loud bang, followed by another, then another. I can tell they are S-300 missiles, and they are close by. The missiles rain down for about an hour. They don’t seem to stop. My heart is racing and I am praying one doesn’t hit my building. I can’t be bothered to get up to go to the air raid shelter – it’s cold, it’s dark, I am seven floors up and the lift is not working – so I just lie there waiting for the shelling to stop. Suddenly after an hour there is silence. The emergency siren goes off (a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted). Amazingly the city defences worked well, with most of the missiles shot down (they still explode) although two hit the hydroelectric power plant – one of Europe’s largest.
I decide not to hang around for more missiles, so we leave at 6.30am for Mykolaiv where we meet two British volunteers nicknamed Goose and Meerkat (they don’t want me to use their real names). Throughout the war they have done an amazing job of going into frontline villages primarily to evacuate the elderly and the infirm. We meet at a café called Filijanka. They have an amazing New York-style baked cheesecake on the breakfast menu, so I order that with my fried eggs and bacon. In wartime one must eat what one can eat! We then go into Kherson to deliver more humanitarian aid to some of the newly liberated villages. The destruction left by the Russians in many of these villages is utterly devastating, with almost nothing left standing. Back in Kherson I meet Kostya who runs a hub with lots of humanitarian aid. I have three containers of aid back in Kyiv. I tell him I will try to get as much as I can down to him.
Brooks Newmark was MP for Braintree and Minister of Civil Society. He founded “Angels for Ukraine” to evacuate women, children and wounded soldiers from the war zone in Ukraine.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.