Just kilometres away from the frontline in the war in Ukraine, volunteers drive secretly through the night – their lights turned off to avoid detection, their vans packed with essential equipment branded with the names of Australian companies.
Since the outbreak of the war, millions of dollars worth of equipment – from medical-grade thermals to X-ray machines –has been packed on Qantas planes, or slipped between Bushmaster armoured vehicles on military flights.
The pallets of supplies are picked up in Heathrow and driven into Ukraine – often as far as the frontline.
“International aid organisations have to be risk-averse,” says Liz Paslawsky, a member of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisation, who leads the team of volunteers. Health and safety don’t allow them to work in areas where there are potentially missile attacks.
“Where we are different, we have local civilians living and breathing it. They travel at night with their lights off, they have such a good communication system – it’s not internet-based, it’s like an underground movement, which is extremely powerful.”
Paslawsky, who has worked as a healthcare executive and consultant, is the daughter of Ukrainian migrants and lives on the Illawarra coast. She is running this show.
Before the war she visited Ukraine every year and is still registered as a visiting professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
The group send medical supplies donated from hospitals, GP clinics and even NDIS recipients who have unused kits, but what Paslawsky says they really need is money to buy generators so that parts of Ukraine have power throughout winter.
“We can’t send generators from Australia,” she says. “They are too heavy.”
As hospitals in Ukraine start to lose power, and soldiers on the frontline battle Russian forces alongside the country’s notoriously cold winter, Paslawsky says in the area around Ternopil, in the west of Ukraine, 38 hospitals are without power.
“They can’t do theatre, they can’t do much without power,” Paslawsky says. “That is just one region – every region has hospitals without power.
“Wounded civilians and soldiers come into hospitals and through emergency departments but there is no equipment to help diagnose what’s wrong.
“There’s no capacity to actually look at what’s happening internally, you can’t use an X-ray machine. If someone has a severe problem that needs an operating theatre, most of the equipment, an anaesthetic machine, for instance – requires power.”
Russian attacks on the nation’s grid have left millions without power. But health services have more than just blackouts to worry about – by the end of November, there had been more than 700 strikes on hospitals and clinics, according to the World Health Organization.
During a tour of hospitals in eastern Ukraine last month Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director, said winter could be devastating for the country.
“The winter will be a threat for millions and millions of Ukraine people. I have seen it,” Kluge said. “In fact, now the temperature is hovering around zero degrees celsius, but soon it will plummet down to -20 …
“How can a hospital function without electricity? How can maternity wards function without incubators, vaccine storage, without fridges?”
Paslawsky is even more direct – she says Vladimir Putin is using winter to replicate Holodomor – the human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of people between 1932 and 1933.
“We’ve just acknowledged the anniversary of the Holodomor – which is when Stalin starved 3 million,” she says. “Putin is trying to do the same thing. He’s trying to kill through the cold. He’s using winter as a tool.”
The director of humanitarian aid initiatives at the Ukraine Crisis Appeal, Diahanna Senko, says since the war started $7.5m has been raised – all through donations from Australians.
“We were the first charity to have money to them,” Senko says. “We had the money within Ukraine within five days of the war being declared.”
She says there are almost 1 million people in the country who don’t have anywhere to live – so the appeal has started building homes.
“We’ve refurbished 18 shelters which house about 9,000 people,” Senko says. “The main residents are the elderly, women with children, and some men.”
The shelters have everything from food to bedding and schools, so families who have lost everything can experience some normalcy.
Senko says they don’t share the locations of the shelters in case the Russians target them.
“Otherwise they would be sitting ducks,” she said, “My day starts off with an SMS telling them everyone is safe. When it doesn’t come in until later I start to tremble.
“How can Australians help? By giving whatever they can.”
• To donate to the Ukraine Crisis Appeal visit ukrainecrisisappeal.org. Other charities supporting Ukraine can be found here
