A LOCAL ex-serviceman, who has been running aid trips to Ukraine for the last three years has embarked on his last scheduled trip to the war torn country.
Chris North has travelled to Ukraine almost 20 times delivering essential aid and medical supplies since the country was invaded by Russia in 2022. But now he’s calling time on his missions as its become too expensive to continue and this Sunday will mark his last scheduled trip.
However his efforts to help the people of Ukraine will not end and Chris has an ambitious plan up his sleeve which involves ambulances for the country.
“It’s costing just too much money in fuel and ferry tickets,” explained Chris. Adding: “It’s just become too cost prohibitive to to do it ourselves on the scale we’re doing it. It costs us in diesel over £2,000. When we first started, trips were running just over £1,000 and the price of digs on the continent is going through the roof and Channel ferry tickets have taken a major hike. Everything is going through the roof and so we we we’re thinking we can better put our efforts into helping them another way. So, after this last trip, we’ll still have a little bit of money in the bank, we’re going to continue fundraising, and we’re hoping then to buy ambulances and take them out and drop them off.”
Known to his friends as ‘Puggy’, Chris, who is based in Innellan, spent 20 years in the military and will once again be joined by his former army friends on this last scheduled trip.
Chris said: “I’ve still got my team of four. They’re all involved, even though I’m driving the van from here. We’ve got two guys in the Northeast Charlie and the Stig and we’ve got a guy down in the Midlands, Griff, and they’re all coming together collecting and as I leave Dunoon, I go down to them to Middlesbrough and then drive down to Hull and all the way down the route I’m picking stuff up that these guys have been collecting. They’re all still heavily involved.”
In the past Chris and his team have taken several vans over to Ukraine but more recently their operation have been forced to scale trips down to one vehicle, but that hasn’t stopped them maximising space for essentials.
“With the one bus we get about four cubic meters of aid on it,” explained Chris. “This will be our eighteenth trip and I think in total we’ve taken 35 van loads over to Ukraine. Although this Sunday will be the last trip we are scheduling if we get the right amount of aid and the right amount of funding comes in, if we do go again, it’s gonna be first aid and food and that’s it.
Since travelling to Ukraine over the last three years one of the biggest changes Chris has noticed on his trips is the lack of humanitarian aid, basic medical equipment and food are now on short supply.
Chris said: “I deliver to a town in Poland about 10 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and for the first year we would turn up at this hub, which was like a former B&Q type store which used to be full of aid.We go there now and there’s hardly anything. There’s this thing right now about foreign aid in that when you have a crisis anywhere in the world,you’ve got you’ve got a six month window to maximize and because there’s so much bad stuff going on in the world people just can’t keep the tempo up and have to change direction so sadly that means a drop off and aid gets diverted to somewhere else.”
With a new President in America and a U.S. administration with an entirely different approach to the war it’s been noticeable to Chris that attitudes in Ukraine have changed markedly. He finds that Ukrainians are very worried about America’s current stance and they’re actually keen to do whatever America wants to get the help from the U.S.
He explained: “The people of the Ukraine want the war to stop, that’s the bottom line, but the sad thing is nobody there believes it’s going stop soon. I have an app on my phone which gives me indication of the air aids and the raids coming into Ukraine are increasing.
“Locally here in Dunoon anyone I speak to are more aware of what’s happening in Ukraine and are supportive, at least verbally, of Ukraine, you. A lot of people think that that what happened in the Oval office during that now infamous meeting was an unfortunate situation that needn’t have happened, especially when President zelinskyy was slated for not wearing a suit, people i speak to locally found that quite ridiculous. I mean, we can go back to pictures of Churchill in the Oval Office during the Second World War in battle fatigues. So that criticism doesn’t hold up and people are very supportive of Zelensky from that situation.
“I actually believe a ceasefire will happen in the next few weeks as neither side can afford for it to continue. Russia is losing a lot of people and Ukraine is losing a lot of people, and there is no good outcome for any soldiers on the ground and so I think there will be a ceasefire there’s no real reason to to believe it’s gonna last forever. What we don’t need is another war in Europe.”
