Senselessness

We had an early start, attending a Ukrainian visa application office, with a translator, to try to extend our 3-month stay and that of one of the MAD volunteer drivers, whose 3 months expires today. He

is one of the drivers who goes into areas where the war is raging and takes people to safety.

It was an hour of pointless bureaucracy, ending up with 2 sides of A4, in Ukrainian, detailing what we have to do. Pointless because we were told that all these requirements are because of the war, to prevent people masquerading as volunteers who want to do harm, e.g. infiltrate the country. But anyone who gets to this stage has already been here 3 months so could already have done all the harm they wanted by now! We are lucky to have a friend here who will try to get a lawyer to look at things.

We visited the Lychakiv Cemetery, by far the largest cemetery in Lviv, which is a tourist attraction in normal times, containing more than 300,000 graves, a lot of them of Ukrainian intelligentsia, including writers, poets, composers, singers and a famous mathematician.

By far the saddest and most striking part of the cemetery was the vast area of war graves, mainly of young men, from the first and second world wars, through to the various conflicts in the Ukraine area, including those who died when Russia invaded, and then annexed, Crimea in 2014. And then an area of about 40 fresh graves, the sandy soil still on top, with simple wooden crosses, of the young men who have died in this current war, the youngest 21 years. There was a woman with her arms draped over one of the crosses, her anguish unimaginable, mourning just one of many pointless deaths that will continue.

After visiting the cemetery we met a young woman on the tram, who saw our UK aid T-shirts and asked us to help her mother and younger siblings get to England. They have come from Kharkiv. 

At the end of the day we met with two sisters and their young sons, who have fled constant bombing in Kharkiv and are staying in Lviv until they travel to Krakow on Wednesday, then take an early flight to Leeds Airport on Thursday. We went for ice-creams and sat, looking at photos of Kharkiv, a lovely modern city with museums, parks and a zoo (the animals have been taken to safety), as well as an old historic centre with lots of churches, some of which have been bombed. One of the sisters described having had a stomach "full of ice" and her 9-year-old son crying every night.

It is positive that they are looking forward to flying for the first time and will be moving to safety in a nice, welcoming village. But they are leaving their home city, jobs, schools, other family and their cat, all because of the actions of one man who thinks that he is better than everyone else, as one of the sisters said. She has a husband in the army and will be constantly worrying about him.