Find the Dutch original travel report Ukraine by Tineke Ceelen in this hashtag.
In Ukraine, together with our partners, we managed to reach over 200,000 people directly. Our director Tineke Ceelen, visited our humanitarian emergengy aid projects. There, she spoke to our humanitarian workers and displaced people about the situation and the help they receive from us. Read her trip report.
Monday 13 February 2023 SNIHURIVKA
After missed planes, delays and other travel woes, we arrived in Odesa late last night. Our hotel has light, water and heating. That is more than almost all households in Odesa can say. It is pitch black on the streets and cold in the houses. Before dawn this morning, we drive first to Voznesensk, just northeast of Mykolajiv. In a school with an interior and smell that remind me of my mother’s boarding school stories, food parcels are being given today to Ukrainians who could not stay at home because of the violence of war. In front of the back door of the school is a long queue of people, mostly old. They have been standing there for hours they tell us. The old lady at the very front, Valeria, was already present at 6 o’clock. So for four hours she has been waiting for her box of oil, canned fish, pasta, tea, flour and other basic foodstuffs.
Valeria is 70 years old and walks with difficulty. She is from Mykolajiv, lived high up in a flat block there but as there was more often no electricity than electricity, she had to go up the stairs. Water also stopped coming from the tap, so Valeria had to climb the stairs with heavy buckets. At the thought of that hard time at home, Valeria immediately starts crying. She shivers, her hands are ice-cold, tears stream down her cheeks. ‘Rockets were falling all the time too,’ she sighs as she shakes her head dejectedly.
Gratefully, Valeria takes delivery of her box of food. She transfers the packs and cans into her shopping bag on wheels and leaves for her temporary home.
We drive on to Snihurivka, some 65 kilometres from the front. It is eerily quiet on the road, we hardly encounter other cars, and when we do encounter them, they are military vehicles. Snihurivka was occupied territory for months. There was hard fighting to retake the town. In front of the battered town hall is a large sign warning of explosives and mines.
Volodimir invites us into his house, which was badly damaged by a projectile that landed in his garden. Pieces of metal pierced windows, walls, cupboards and even garments in the closets. It is bitterly cold, damp and an incredible mess in Volodimir’s house, whose wife left for Poland. Volodimir refuses to leave, continuing to look after his battered house. For new windows, the man has no money. He waits for someone to come and help him.
We provided stoves, firewood, torches, candles and a cooking cooker for this man and others who lost everything in Snihurivka.
Tuesday 14 February 2023: KRIVIY RIH
We spend the night in Kriviy Rih and visit a centre of ‘place of invincibility’ there the next morning, a place to go when basic services fail. When you have no heating at home, while it freezes considerably at night, when you no longer have running water or electricity, no internet or phone, and then when the bombs fall, you are glad this place exists. A generator provides electricity, sockets are screwed to the tables and there are also powerbanks in case even the generator fails. There are stoves and mountains of wood, barrels of hundreds of litres of water. ‘There is internet from Elon Musk,’ says the female manager of this shelter, clearly impressed by what is possible. There are games for the children, there is tea and we supply mattresses. In an open space, there are two toilets fraternally side by side; you can pee together.
I ask how the manager and the representative of the local administration who comes to shake our hands and probing for opportunities to access our funding view a possible new offensive in the war that has been going on for a year now. Their faces tighten instantly. ‘Ukraine is going to win the war’. Both leave no room for even the slightest doubt.
On the way to Kharkiv, we stop at a former student flat. The small rooms now house Ukrainians who fled the Donbas including many young children. Here too, as in many parts of Ukraine, electricity regularly fails, and with it heating and running water. We sent a generator to this place, so a few lights can stay on and the children need not be afraid in the dark.
We continue on our way to Kharkiv. On the way, we hear that Moldova has closed its airspace because a Russian drone flew over the country. There is great fear in the neighbouring country of a coup by the Russians. A small half of Moldova’s population is at the hands of the Russians, with also a piece of the country, Transnistria, which declared itself independent and hosts Russian military personnel on its territory, that fear is not at all surprising.
As we get closer to Kharkiv, the numbers of checkpoints, trenches and obstacles on the road increase. The city itself is pitch-black. The traffic lights are on, oddly enough, but otherwise there are virtually no lights, there is a freezing wind and it is snowing. As we step into the hotel, the air alarm goes off.
Wednesday 15 February 2023: ZOLOCHIV
We drive from Kharkiv to Zolochiv, a town surrounded on three sides by the Russian border no more than 20 kilometres away. The town was on the front line for a long time and it shows. Of the 23,000 original inhabitants, 8,000 remain, including 500 children. The rest moved away, fleeing the bombs and shells. Among those left behind are many very elderly people, many of whom are also ill, have no children and certainly no money.
Along the way, we see the occasional piece of a missile sticking out of a field. ‘They are not very precise those things,’ adds a colleague needlessly. The road is empty, we drive from checkpoint to checkpoint. One of them has help from a mannequin dressed as a military officer, a trick we have seen before. Straw doll soldiers standing watch.
Past a long row of battered houses, we drive to that of 85-year-old Vera. The old lady wears black trousers knitted with coarse stitches. She also keeps her coat on inside, which is by no means an unnecessary luxury, it is freezing cold. Vera recently lost both her sons in the war. It’s better not to mention it, a colleague urges me.
Vera tells us she is having a very hard time, her pension is not nearly enough to live on. Vera survives thanks to the boxes of food and toiletries and now the piles of firewood, stove, torch and candles we brought her. Vera’s health is fragile; we have to shout loudly to carry on a conversation. The noise of the bombs damaged Vera’s ears, is her full conviction.
I never went to a bomb shelter or anything like that, Vera explains. ‘I waited inside until the weather was over and I kept track in a notebook of how many explosions there were’. When I ask Vera if I can see her notebook, she pulls out a few crumpled pages where, from day to day and hour to hour, all the explosions in the area are meticulously recorded. They were by no means few, judging by the long lines of times Vera noted down. The old lady rummages around under a cupboard and pulls out a bowl of pieces of metal. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘these all ended up in my garden. I keep them.’
Vera waits, for the war to end.
Thursday 16 February 2023: ZOLOCHIV
77-year-old Ludmilla gets all excited by our visit. Excited, she pulls the laundry off the clothesline and ushers us inside. The old lady looks neglected and dirty, just like her house and her husband Wassili, who, like Ludmilla, is 77 years old. The old couple lives in the house of their daughter, who fled the country. Zolochiv is close to the border with Russia; the danger here is palpable, visible and very real. Witness also the couple’s story.
There was much and frequent bombing they tell. Then they went to the storage room under their house, a kind of cellar. They did the same on 1 May 2022. ‘When the weather calmed down and we went back upstairs,’ Ludmilla tells us, ‘our house was gone’. She raises her hands to heaven, makes a resigned gesture. Everything was broken, on fire.
Water, electricity and heating has been a big problem for a long time. Sometimes the government manages to organise a few hours of electricity a day, but then something goes wrong and the villagers are once again in the dark. Ludmilla is happy with the help they get, a wood stove and wood so they don’t sit in the cold; torches, candles, a power bank so the old mobile phone can stay charged, their lifeline with the outside world. And under a cloth that Ludmilla bravely pulls aside, a pile of bags of pasta emerges. The harvest from a number of food parcels. The old woman lists everything else she has received: toothpaste, shampoo, soap, towels, blankets. She is clearly very happy.
Later that day, we meet Nicolai, 47, ‘just call me Nic’, in his battered house a few kilometres away. Nic lived next door to Ludmilla and Wassili. Indeed little is left of their house except some charred remnants of the walls. Nic’s house was also badly damaged on 1 May. When the first rocket fell, Nic was in bed. Seven more impacts followed. Nic lost an eye and a leg in an industrial accident, long ago. He lives alone, living on a very small disability pension, insufficient to repair the damage caused by the missiles. The old, poorly maintained cottage has countless holes from the pieces of rocket that went right through everything, walls, doors, cupboards, clothes. Nic had no money to flee, so he was left behind in Zolochiv, with Ludmilla, Wassili and many more old, sick people with no savings in the bank.
Friday 17 February 2023: OSKIL
It was a ‘state of the art’ psychiatric hospital in Oskil. The village is now at most 40 kilometres from the front but was occupied territory for a long time. Russian troops were stationed in the hospital and it shows. Even the ceiling tiles were demolished from the buildings, and so were the light switches, fuse boxes, furniture, plumbing, heating elements and whatever else of even the slightest value. On their retreat, the Russian soldiers left behind a spent havoc. Explosives lie in the immediate vicinity of the hospital, and roofs were destroyed during shelling. It is desolate, cold and damp.
The hospital’s director, a small stocky spirited aunt, insists that the roofs must be restored quickly. In a dangerous, laborious operation, the 400 patients were evacuated from the hospital and transferred to other facilities across the country. But the beds there are badly needed for the hospital’s own and new patients. I am hanging out with Robert Serry, the first Dutch ambassador to Ukraine and now an ardent advocate for restoring roofs damaged in the war. At 72, he undertakes long and risky treks to find those roofs most urgently in need of repair.
In Balaklia, we clamber together to the roof of an eight-storey apartment building. Right behind the building is a military barracks and that was the target of 8 missiles. The apartment complex was hit full on, with a huge hole in the roof. Rain gushed in and caused further damage. 500 people ended up on the streets. Repairing the roof is a priority, Robert Serry decided. The residents are grateful, they supply the materials, oversee the repair, Serry and we, because we are paying, provide the labour needed to renovate the roof.
Oskil seems to have been almost completely destroyed. House after house after house: roofs off, windows out, gaping holes in the walls or the whole house gone, these too are legion. As in the other villages and towns we passed, far from everyone has fled the violence, here in Oskil too, old, sick, vulnerable people were left behind. There is no electricity nor running water nor heating in the village.
We make a short stop in Izjum. There too, the damage is unimaginable. Having coffee in the town, as we had planned, is out of the question. There is no shop, no restaurant and no coffee shop on the street that is still functional. A woman comes up to us and asks when we will bring blankets. Again, the heating does not work, she is cold.
Saturday 18 February 2023: UMAN
‘Nobody needs it,’ Andrej says firmly. ‘It’s been here for months’. We look together at a pile of boxes of brand new clothes. Coats, thermal underwear, hoodies, jumpers. Stuff that I would have estimated would be very useful given the winter conditions in Ukraine. Everything is brand new, still in its original packaging. ‘Stop sending us stuff we don’t need,’ Andrej grumbles as he points to a dusty pile of medical supplies. ‘All expired. Would you let your sick mother be treated with that?’ he snorts angrily.
We were talking about the white boots I discovered in a pile of donated clothes a few days ago. On Twitter, I asked, okay not very tactfully, especially not to send this kind of junk to Ukraine. The reactions did not lie. I am an ungrateful brat, a spoilt brat. A real refugee should be delighted with the high-heeled boots that, in my humble opinion, you can do anything but walk in.
Andrej more than agrees with me. He tells me that there is also a mountain of clothes from the Netherlands in another warehouse that nobody wants. ‘What will I end up doing with that? Throw it away, what else,’ Andrej sighs.
Earlier, the director of the farmers’ cooperative said that in those first months of the war, when farmers could not get their crops out of the country because the Russians were blocking the Black Sea, trucks of food were brought into the country, to the total dismay of the farmers. ‘Buy the stuff needed here, please. Then you help the farmers, you give what people like and you save a lot of money that would otherwise have to be spent
on transport and storage,’ Andrej adds.
And so it is.
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I, Cora, am a Peace and Human Rights Activist
Timeline Tilburg OECD violations, 2014 – 2023, bilingual
Tilburg University Code of Conduct and my review on the Code
Who Knows Who Knows Who to Contact?
What is a personality test? What are the effects of discrimination?
Overview translated news items and self-written (some of them published) articles
