9 March 2022...

...a year ago - we made a decision that we had to do something. This was the day that Russia bombed a maternity hospital in the beseiged city of Mariupol. We had been watching the news with growing horror every day, but something clicked when we saw the image of a heavily pregnant woman being stretchered out of the bombed out hospital. Both the woman and her baby died soon afterwards.

Bob will say that we had one too many glasses of wine, which is true. He was all for going over to fight in Ukraine, but realised that he would probably be more of a hindrance than a help! The next morning, however, we booked the earliest flight to Krakow that we practically could, which was 10 days later.

At the time we didn't think that Putin could stoop much lower. We were wrong, of course - the atrocities have continued, relentlessly. Last night Russia launched another murderous missile attack across Ukraine, when people were sleeping in their beds - 6 hypersonic missiles, which Ukraine has no way of shooting down. So far, at least 6 civilians have been killed (5 in Lviv region) and many injured; the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (the largest in Europe) had to operate in emergency mode again (for the 6th time), after being hit. Civilians are killed most days in artillery strikes close to the frontline or from mines, which largely goes unreported outside Ukraine. We wonder if any of the perpetrators will ever be brought to justice.

We are both still slowly recovering from COVID. We have a provisional plan to start our next aid run to villages in the Chernihiv region, including buying books for the school, on 20 March. First, we need to collect some aid from Krakow, hopefully sometime this weekend. Our volunteer friend in Kyiv, who takes aid to these villages, bought out of her own pocket, has told us what people need - more on this tomorrow.

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