Paul Hughes figures the Russian missile a few days ago struck about 500 metres from his workplace in Kharkiv.
“It’s pretty random,” said the Calgary humanitarian aid worker.
It’s a danger that’s become second nature to Hughes and won’t deter him from heading into a third winter in the war-ravaged Ukraine helping civilians enduring their country’s seemingly endless agony.
“It’s coming up to my third year, I can’t even believe it but we keep contributing and people keep on supporting us,” said Hughes, 60, in a video interview.
“There’s probably only 50 foreign aid volunteers left in the whole city.”
Since arriving in the country in the late winter of 2022, Hughes’ Calgary-based group Helping Ukraine-Grassroots Support (HUGS) has run nearly 350 missions delivering all manner of humanitarian goods and medicine to the war’s victims — and evacuating them.
In the summer of 2022, Hughes’ son Mac, 21, left a construction job in Calgary to join him in Ukraine and help with aid work. He, too, remains in the country, most recently helping clean up and salvage the remains of homes struck by Russian artillery or rockets in the southern city of Kherson.
The group operates out of a garage space in northern Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city that sits only 40 km from the Russian border.
The city the size of Calgary hosts about 300,000 Ukrainians displaced by the war, it’s streets prowled by military vehicles bristling with electronic drone-jamming apparatus “that make them look like alien vehicles,” said Hughes.
Last summer, Russian forces launched an offensive towards the city that’s been stymied by Ukrainian troops but Hughes said he can sometimes hear fighting that continues north of Kharkiv.
“It was a huge artillery duel,” he says of a recent rumbling clearly audible from where he organizes aid missions.
On one wall of the HUGS garage is a maroon flag from Hughes’ old military unit, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry that’s flanked by Ukrainian colours.
A group of aid workers sit at a table awaiting their next mission or delivery of supplies while an older dog paces the cement floor.
Near them, a black backpack or “strike bag” containing emergency necessities in case of an artillery hit sits next to an orange medical case.
The space is also used to repair vehicles that help deliver aid to outlying, war-ravaged areas.
In one of those zones near the town of Pokrovsk that’s become a prime objective of a grinding Russian offensive, Hughes said a female Canadian volunteer was recently injured.
“But they still managed to get nine civilians out of there,” he said.
The previous week, Hughes said he made a delivery foray into areas southeast of Kharkiv that are either in the path of the Russian advance or under bombardment.
In a scattering of villages, some of the inhabitants refuse to leave their homes, many of them elderly human scarecrows, he said.
“People live in basements, there’s a lot of people in really dangerous situations but they will not leave — there’s no mandatory evacuation,” said Hughes, 60.
“The elderly are just hanging on and look really worn. There’s not a lot of smiles.”
His team brings them food and fresh water — the latter in dire demand due to the actions of the Russians, he said.
“The Russians have damaged the water systems, wells … there’s not much of an effort to repair things near the front line.”
The fighting not far from those villages has left a tension among aid workers, soldiers and civilians alike, said the Calgarian.
“If (the Russians) break through there, it gets really tough, it’s pretty dicey,” he said.
Even so, the Ukrainians remain grimly determined to fight on, he said, as shown by their troops’ recent foray into Russia’s Kursk region not far to the northwest of Kharkiv.
Hughes said he knows some of soldiers who’ve been serving there.
“They say there’s a lot of heavy fighting going on and that the Russian civilians seem to like them, though that might be the case for whichever side is winning at the time,” he said.
As for Ukrainian civilians facing another winter of energy shortages amid Russian drone and missile strikes on the country’s power infrastructure, Hughes said HUGS is focused on supplying much-needed generators and even wood stoves, along with the always-needed medical supplies that includes wheelchairs and crutches.
Collaborators in western Canada are seeking to secure a 40-ft. sea can to fill with the items and ship to Ukraine in the coming months to ease the pain of another winter of war, he said.
Allan Reid, who oversees veterans’ food banks in Alberta and B.C., said he’s hoping to fill the container over the next month and ship it to Poland.
“We already have transport in place to get it across the border (to Ukraine),” said Reid, who hopes to also collect laptops for students, some of whom have lost their schools to the war.
“It’s heart-wrenching what they’ve had to go through.”
Anyone interested in donating can call Reid at 403-471-9851.
As for how long he’ll remain in Ukraine, it depends on the whims of war, said Hughes.
“I’ll be here until the war is over,” he said.
X: @BillKaufmannjrn