Biden my time in traffic jam…

As I am writing now, I am sitting in standstill traffic in Kyiv. It is absolute chaos because all the roads have been closed off.

The word around the city is that Biden is here on a surprise visit, so you can imagine the sort of security measures that are put in place when there is a US President in the country.

On top of that, we have an air raid alarm going off, blasting across the city.

Picture the scene: The roads are crammed with cars, meanwhile a siren sounds across the capital to warn people that bombs could start falling at any moment. The brave would call it odd, but I feel a deep sense of dreadful unease.

On the road

LAST week entailed a lot of delivering. That means driving across the country in vehicles loaded with supplies.

While we were on the way to our destination, we passed a hospital.

As we breezed by it was a busy, fully-functioning hospital.

By the time we arrived at our location, it had been bombed. Apparently, it happened about 30 minutes after we had driven by.

Off the road

ANOTHER thing of note, I suppose, is that I was involved in a car crash last week.

It was my first time being in a collision – and we got pretty lucky.

I was driving the vehicle. It was the middle of the night, after curfew, and we hit black ice on the road.

I hit the brakes and the car careered down a bank of about 15m, narrowly missing a gully to the right of where we landed. Had the direction of our jeep been destined for the gully, it would likely have been certain death for everyone in the vehicle.

I guess I have used one of my nine lives.

There is a video on my Instagram if you want to see what happened. My Instagram name is now Legenda.ukraine.

A lack of urgency

YOU often hear that nothing slows down a process like handing it over to the bureaucrats. I cannot say for certain that this is what is going on with the Ministry, but I do know that anything you ask them to do happens at an unbearably glacial pace.

We had another meeting with them last week.

We were joined by our EOD (unexploded ordinance removal) operator, Trevor, and another two EOD operators from another NGO who are willing to get on board as well.

We were assured during the meeting that this week we would head east to clear a route towards a mass grave in a highly contaminated area.

In preparation, we have been gathering together everything we could conceivably need for the mission. For example, we went to a building market to buy wood for marking posts to help us distinguish safe, cleared areas from dangerous, unchecked ones.

However, we have been here for four weeks now with the specialists – who are tremendously valuable assets – and the Ministry are really frustrating the process.

These experts are paying out of their own pocket to be here because they want to be out in the field helping. The Ministry are doing little to show them that the risk they are taking and cost they are paying is appreciated.

Less money, more problems

I HAVE stress coming from every angle this week. One of the sources, however, is constant.

I do not like to sound like a broken record but we are really struggling to get funding from anyone.

It is coming from absolutely nowhere now. There seems to be no will to help us continue what we are doing.

I am spending too much money on silly stuff as it is, just to try and get things going forward. But the supply is running out.

Unlike the cash cow, I do not have an endless stream of money that can be tapped whenever necessary. Funds are fintite.

So, without some kind of significant sponsor coming in, I would say we have about two months left out here. It deeply saddens me to acknowledge that, but burying our heads in the sand will not buy us more time.

The void

It has become quite clear to me through Linkedin and other sources that millions of dollars – close to £100 million – is sitting in a fund in Lviv doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It can be made sound complicated, but is was once explained to me as something called ‘the void’.

Basically, you have all these big charities that come in and promise to demine – which is the same work we do at Legenda.

They will send one or two cars, take pictures of the the same minefield from a load of different angles, and put up posts on social media that give the impression that they have done much more work than they actually have.

Using these tactics of soft deception, they create the optical illusion that they are working every minute or every hour. The result is that they attract a pile of donations, but then fail to transfer that money into good, honest work.

In reality, many of them are doing close to nothing at all.

Meanwhile, we are sitting here with specialists, on the ground, ready to go, and, because of the way the Ministry are behaving, our hands are all but tied. We need money and we need the Ministry to enable us, not hold us back.