Vancouver Island humanitarian team planning fifth mission to Ukraine

A team from B.C. is heading back to war-torn Ukraine continuing its efforts to support a hard-hit children's hospital.

Oleg Atamaniuk runs the Kamin-Kashyrskyi Regional Children’s Hospital in the west of Ukraine and says back home the sounds of air raid sirens are relentless, as Russia continues to target both civilians and his region’s critical infrastructure.

“Everyday we have a drone attack, we have a rocket attack in our region,” said Atamaniuk, who is on Vancouver Island to visit his family who fled more than three and half years ago when the invasion began.

“We must be prepared for the arrival of a lot of people with injuries.”

The children’s hospital serves a region of more than 1.5 million people and last year it performed more than 2,000 blood transfusions on children either injured in Russian attacks or facing a battle with childhood cancer.

Bob Beckett is with Vancouver Island Supports Ukraine, a humanitarian team that has made four missions to that war torn country providing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid.

Every time his team embarks on another mission, he is hopeful it will be the last trip during the war.

“It’s tragic, it’s sad and we’re coming up to the fourth anniversary of this terrible war,” said Beckett.

In April of this year the team provided $50,000 to the Kamin-Kashyrskyi Regional Children’s Hospital in order to establish a much-needed breast milk bank that would serve all of the west of Ukraine.

Now the team is planning another deployment for early spring, with a goal of providing funds to establish and outfit a blood transfusion ward.

“We’ve got an itemized list of equipment that they’re looking for,” said Beckett.

That project is going to cost $50,000 and fundraising is currently underway.

“We have an amazing relationship with four other communities in western Ukraine,” said Beckett. “We have delivered projects on all four of the trips that we’ve made to Ukraine to those communities.”

Vancouver Island Supports Ukraine is also looking to provide each of those four communities with $10,000 in project funding, bringing the total fundraising goal to $90,000.

Bruce Brown is part of that humanitarian team and has been on two of the four past missions to Ukraine. He says the pain Russia has brought onto the people of that country is unimaginable.

“These drone attacks and missile attacks are striking schools, they’re striking kindergartens, they’re striking hospitals,” said Brown.

Brown says when his and his team reach out to their partners in Ukraine asking what projects the team can assist them with, the answer is always something focused on the children of that country.

“They see their children as being the future, because with so many of their fathers, brothers, uncles being killed—the children are the ones that going to be carrying on,” said Brown.

“It’s really important to save the lives of our children,” said Atamaniuk.

That is what the humanitarian team is hoping to do by providing a proper blood transfusion facility to a children’s hospital that is currently attempting to keep up with the pressure the war continues to put on it.

To make a donation go to the Vancouver Island Supports Ukraine website. https://vancouverislandsupportsukraine.ca/