Better your neighbour

We can all do better when we help each other: some hopefully positive lessons from Ukraine

This week - countless humanitarian and other aid projects around the world have been thrown into uncertainty, after Elon Musk’s DOGE employees marched into the offices of the US Agency for International Development and announced they were shutting it down. Thousands of staff members around the world were told over email that they were being put on administrative leave, while projects which relied on US funding were suddenly closed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since insisted that some life-saving projects will be allowed to continue, and there are legal challenges to the mass lay-offs. But in the chaos and confusion which has ensued, nobody is clear about what the future now holds. The Trump White House is busy consigning decades of Pax Americana to the past.

In the midst of all this, I wanted to write about mutual aid, and the good which flows from people helping each other, whenever anyone is in trouble. Last week, a British volunteer in eastern Ukraine, Eddy, was seriously injured after his evacuation vehicle was hit by an FPV drone in Pokrovsk. He told a friend, Saphryn, what had happened, who shared the details on his Instagram. He was driving away from Pokrovsk with his navigator Filip, when they stopped to give out evacuation leaflets to a couple of civilians and suddenly heard a drone overhead. They were too late trying to get out of the way and it smashed into their vehicle - clearly marked as a humanitarian evacuation car. Filip managed to give Eddy emergency first aid, which undoubtedly saved his life, but he lost his left arm and leg and is currently being treated at a hospital in Kyiv.

His friends - of which there are many in Ukraine and abroad - immediately began collecting funds to help his recovery. At the time of writing, it stands at almost £100,000. I’ve been fortunate to meet up with Eddy in Kharkiv, with his dog Ice, and he is truly one of the most selfless and courageous people I’ve ever met.

Despite his incredibly traumatic experience, he wants people not to focus on his situation, but on the stories of Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian civilians, the murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war, the Ukrainians targeted “simply for existing”, as he puts it. The huge outpouring of support as soon as news of his injuries appeared online is a tribute to the incredible work he has done as a volunteer in some of the most dangerous parts of Ukraine.

A couple of days later, someone forwarded me a message from the founders of Hell’s Kitchen Kharkiv, a fantastic volunteer kitchen and bakery which I’ve written about on this substack. They’ve been operating since the very start of the full scale war, providing free bread and hot food, mainly to hospitals in and around Kharkiv. They had suddenly lost the grant which paid for their flour: without that $1300 a month, they said, they would be unable to continue baking and would have to stop work. By chance, I had just managed to close a fundraiser thanks to a very generous donation from a restaurant owner in London who wanted it to go direct to small food charities working on the ground in Ukraine. We will be able to help Hell’s Kitchen for a few months while they search for a more sustainable source of funding. I’ll provide more details about that when I see them in Kharkiv in a couple of weeks’ time.

After almost three years of full-scale war, Ukrainians have seen their incomes plummet while prices of food, electricity and the fuel they need to keep generators going keeps on rising. It’s becoming increasingly hard to keep projects going with volunteers alone - understandably, people need to pay their bills and feed their families, as well as doing what they can to help friends and relatives in the military. It seems to me that it is now more important than ever to keep showing up, keep showing support, and keep intact those virtuous circles where we all help each other out. ‘Better your neighbour, not beggar your neighbour’, surely makes the world a better place to live.

The fundraiser to support Eddy’s recovery is here

https://www.gofundme.com/f/h7aewv-eddys-recovery