It’s four in the morning in the Leopolis Hotel in Lviv and a group of bleary-eyed Brits, many of a certain age, are stumbling downstairs to the basement. It is not very long since we were in the bar.
The air-raid siren has just wailed and we will spend the next two hours waiting for the all-clear signal before trudging back up to our beds.
Lviv is a lovely city. It has been spared most of the worst of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, sitting as it does in the west of the country far from most of the fighting. It is open for business. But it is not really top of the list just now for a holiday. The missiles this night targeted an energy plant well south of the city, but at one point the air-raid app warned us they were heading our way until they veered off to the target.
So why had we — a motley band of farmers, business people, ex-army officers and retirees from all over the UK — chosen to spend our weekend in Lviv?
They call them “donkeys of war”. Or, more prosaically, small logistics. The vehicles that provide a fast and flexible link between the front line and the rear, that can ferry people and supplies quickly to where they are needed over any terrain. And carry casualties to field hospitals. Think the Willys Jeep in the second world war.
“At the beginning of the war, we went to the Ukrainians and said, ‘What do you need that we could help with?’” says Vince Gillingham, a non-executive director of CPG, an agricultural business in western Ukraine started some years ago by British farmers. “They said small logistics.”
Mark Laird, a farmer from Angus in Scotland, the founder and chief executive of CPG, had an idea.
Farmers use pick-up trucks. Lots of pick-ups. In fact, they batter them half to death getting people and supplies to where they are needed over any terrain.
“Mark said we should fix up some trucks and bring them out to Ukraine,” says Gillingham.
So was born Pickups for Peace, now a registered charity that to date has delivered nearly 350 second-hand pick-ups, 4x4s, vans and ambulances from the UK to Ukraine, all stuffed with medical supplies and other equipment. They are not shipped in car transporters or containers. They are all driven out by private individuals over the 2,000km to Lviv in convoys marshalled by P4P.
The current grim state of the war, with Ukraine struggling to hold back Russian ground advances in the east and its air defences stretched by Moscow’s aerial bombardments, has not dulled P4P’s enthusiasm, or the flow of people donating trucks, money and supplies. The charity is independent of Britain’s official aid for Ukraine, one of many private UK groups channelling different sorts of help to Kyiv.
“We’ll keep going until the war is over,” says Alastair Stewart, CPG’s chief financial officer and a principal P4P organiser. More than 550 volunteer drivers have joined its convoys to date.
In our group doing the run in April there is Rory from Somerset, who is in the quarrying industry, and his friend Mark. There’s Bob, who has an engineering business in Forfar and is on his fifth convoy. Pals Christine and Christine have driven from Berwick-upon-Tweed. Alastair and his fellow P4P organiser Georgia keep the whole show on the road. They are just a sample of the drivers and co-drivers of the 35 vehicles in the convoy, converging from north and south.
Some donate and drive their own vehicles. Some buy their own and some raise funds for P4P to buy trucks on the second-hand market. The average paid is about £5,000, which typically secures a 17- or 18-year-old truck with about 250,000km on the clock. On our trip there is a variety of pick-ups, SUVs, a flatbed truck and an ambulance. Most have been sprayed by P4P in khaki green, serviced and made good for the task.
Not all make it. There is about a 3 per cent breakdown attrition rate. In November, my son Patrick and I made our first attempt on the run after doing some fundraising from friends and colleagues. We made it about 35km north of the Channel Tunnel in our 2006 Isuzu Rodeo before it died as darkness fell, victim of a shot alternator. We limped home to have the truck repaired so it could make a later convoy. Cue jokes about the retreat from Dunkirk.
This time, P4P has procured us a 2007 Mitsubishi Shogun, a hefty 4×4 in promisingly good shape for its age. We set out from London on Wednesday morning, the boot and back seat filled with a set of spare wheels, an old welding machine, fuel cans, a spare battery, engine oil and other bits and pieces that should help keep the vehicle going when it goes to work in Ukraine. Others bring quantities of medical supplies. It is telling that the Ukrainians ask for serious life-saving kit, including tourniquets, haemostatic dressings and splints.
By early afternoon we cheer as we cruise past Dunkirk, engine purring nicely. We overnight in Belgium, east of Antwerp, taking on some of the load from Rory and Mark, whose Toyota Hilux roof rack is stacked crazily with all kinds of kit. We are now running in loose tandem with them, Vince (driving solo) and Georgia, a demon driver sharing the wheel of her Isuzu pick-up with Chris, an eager young journalist from the Daily Express. They beat us to the next stop on Thursday night near Wrocław, in south-west Poland, despite Patrick gunning the Shogun to 170kph on the autobahn as we thunder across Germany through sunshine, hailstorms and rail squalls.
The convoy gathers in a country hotel where the slightly bemused staff tend to the 60-odd Brits who have descended in their caravan of rackety vehicles. We tuck into beetroot soup, goulash and pancakes, chattering excitedly like an outing of overgrown schoolchildren as we look forward to the last leg of the journey.
There is still another 550km to go to the Ukrainian border on Friday morning. The procession over the last few kilometres to the border is marked by a long line of written-off cars from all over Europe waiting to be hauled into Ukraine where they are apparently broken up for parts. It seems to be a kind of Ukrainian cottage industry. But we get fast-tracked over the crossing and led in a police convoy for the last 50km into the centre of Lviv. Racing through red lights, we sweep up to the Lviv Oblast governorate, where we park up for the last time.
By now we are all rather stupidly attached to our vehicles. We pat them affectionately as we leave them. The Shogun has drunk a lot of diesel, but got us there in good fettle. We listened to a lot of music. I subjected Patrick to John Prine, Bonnie Raitt and Warren Zevon. He instructed me on the difference between house and techno, and a lot else besides. I will listen again to Little Simz.
The next morning, sobered by the overnight air-raid alert, we are taken to the city’s military cemetery to pay our respects. As our minibus turns into the car park, the chatter abruptly hushes. A forest of Ukrainian and regimental flags flutter in a stiff breeze over multiple ranks of graves. Dozens of mothers, fathers, wives and children are placing bouquets, watering flowers and tidying the plots. Many weep or hug silently. There are more than 600 graves in this plot, all dating from the all-out Russian invasion of February 2022. There is a digger parked nearby. There is lots of room for more graves.
Three priests line up at the foot of the plot to say mass, chanting the names of the dead. There are tears, too, among our group.
At a dinner to close the trip, our hosts from the city and regional authorities are touchingly grateful for the kit we have brought. A Ukrainian colonel — young, burly, rather sombre — thanks us for our efforts. The pick-ups and supplies will, he insists, save lives. On a drone-framed battlefield, fast, nimble transport is vital. “They know where we are and we know where they are,” he says.
Things are tough, he acknowledges, as Ukraine finds itself on the back foot. “But we are doing our job good.” The deputy mayor, a similarly self-composed young woman, asks us to keep the trucks coming.
“Donkeys of war” are hardly Patriot missiles, or F-16 fighter jets or other sophisticated military kit that could help the Ukrainians turn the conflict in their favour again. But perhaps, in its own small way, a group that grew out of the Angus glens, and its bashed-up old pick-ups, can make a difference in a brutal war being waged only a couple of days’ drive away against a people who just want to live like we do. That’s why we came.
Hugh Carnegy is an FT senior editor. He made the trip in a personal capacity
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