Edinburgh man who delivered aid to frontline Ukranian villages says 'death was everywhere'

An Edinburgh charity founder, who has personally delivered aid to “decimated” frontline villages in Ukraine and helped thousands of civilians, has urged Britons to continue to care for ordinary people impacted by war in the country.

Oleg Dmitriev told the PA news agency he was compelled by the “feeling of injustice and the catastrophe” to start helping deliver aid to Ukraine two weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24 2022. Since then he has established his own charity, Sunflower Scotland, which has helped more than 11,700 people in Ukraine’s frontline villages, people in liberated areas and hospitals.

Almost two years on, the 43-year-old has travelled to at least 16 frontline villages and towns to deliver aid to people living in the most dangerous and impoverished circumstances. He first visited the city of Kharkiv, which he said was a “heartbreaking experience”.

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“At that time, the city was half-encircled by Russians and each day after dark, they started shelling it, and you just drive or walk through Kharkiv and a big part of buildings in the city centre had no windows and had cracks in the walls from the bombs, and it was dreadful,” Oleg said.

“On the main square there was an unexploded missile right in the centre of it. It felt like there was like a dark cloud over the city – everyone was very depressed and everyone was scared.”

From there, he drove through numerous frontline villages. He said: “I drove through villages after villages after villages that were decimated and it’s actually a road from Kupyansk to Izyum that impressed me so much in the most terrible way.

“All the villages were just decimated and you could see the houses with roofs broken and everything and you could see the sheer scale of destruction. Death was everywhere.”

A destroyed building in Kharkiv, Ukraine

He said “one of the worst things” about aid distribution work is when the volunteers do not have enough for everyone who needs it.

“After hours of driving through the land of death, you arrive at a village with people and they form a queue to receive aid but you don’t have enough for everyone,” he said.

“When you’re starting, everything is nice. Everyone is cheerful because food came and then you see that you only have a few bags left and then you say, ‘people, please don’t queue up, we only have enough left for 10 people’, and then five people, one.

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“Then they always come, ‘oh, can you please give me an extra one for my neighbour, she is very old, she’s ill, she’s injured, she cannot come, please’. It’s actually very hard for the volunteers to go through this because you basically have to turn down people. After this, you drive in silence for some time.”

This experience always sticks with him. “I always find it very hard when I have dust from the roads on my shoes and my hands are still shaking, and I have to wait to be seated in a restaurant somewhere in the safe area,” he said.

He experienced “one of the most most devastating moments in my life” when he encountered a destroyed nursery in Saltivka, a district of the city of Kharkiv.

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“The structure, the frame remained of the building, but some of the walls were cracked and destroyed, and then most windows had no glass and all the furniture inside was broken, and it was a mixture of rubble, broken furniture, toys and snow,” he said.

“I have two kids and as a father, obviously, I take those things very personally. After a few minutes, something suddenly cracked and I started crying and I couldn’t stop crying for about 10 minutes. Thinking what happened to those children was very hard.

“There was a sleeping room where kids slept on their beds. The windows were broken but the beds were intact, and on two of the beds there were flowers, so you could imagine the parents whose kids were there had brought flowers to their beds.”

A destroyed town in Ukraine

Oleg’s experience has been captured in a documentary, Sunflowers In The Rain, directed by Aaron MacCarley, which follows the stories of 10 Ukrainian and foreign volunteers. The 43-year-old believes the documentary will shed light on the experiences of ordinary Ukrainians suffering because of the war as it shows “how their lives changed, what they go through”.

He now plans on returning to the front line and urges others to continue to care about the ordinary people affected by the war. He said: “I think, as a society, we moved on and it’s very hard to explain this to people who need help, because people need to eat every day and they are getting injured every day.

“We would like our donors not to give a one-off donation but to make space in their heart to support people for a longer term.”

Sunflowers In The Rain is premiering at Edinburgh City Chambers on February 23.