One Saturday afternoon last month, a procession of seven vans pulled into an industrial estate. A dozen bleary-eyed drivers — myself among them — emerged, blinking, into the sunshine. Legs stretched, necks cracked. Surrounded by Soviet-era tower blocks, Oleksandr Stanasiuk greeted us with arms outstretched. “Welcome to Ukraine,” he said, smiling. We had reached the end of an almost nonstop 36-hour drive that began six countries and 1,251 miles away in Teddington, southwest London.
Mighty Convoy, a non-profit company that transports ambulances, vans and pick-ups packed with medical supplies from London to western Ukraine, was founded in 2022 by Simon Brake, 61. In February of that year, Brake had watched, horrified, as Russian tanks advanced through Ukraine. So far he has made 14 trips and delivered 61 vehicles for use on the front line, which is a further 600 miles beyond the drop-off point in Lviv.
The aid — which includes crutches, wheelchairs, dressings, bandages and first-aid kits, Zimmer frames and PPE — is donated by medical supply companies, staff at NHS trusts, private hospitals and UK-based Ukrainian charities. It is all driven in convoys to the warehouse of the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine in Lviv, and shuttled to the First Separate Medical Battalion, a newly created unit of Ukraine’s armed forces.
When Russia launched its full invasion three years ago, Europe sprang into action. So far 254,000 Ukrainian refugees have settled in the UK. Now, as peace talks falter, support from the United States rests on a knife-edge, but Britain’s backing of this eastern European country remains steadfast.
In joining the convoy, I wanted to find out what possessed this group of men, most with full-time jobs and families, to drive through the night to a country at war on the fringes of Europe. What is it about this conflict that has struck such a chord?
All aboard
After briefly getting acquainted with the other drivers over a 7am bacon butty at Brake’s house in Richmond upon Thames, I set off on Friday morning bound for the Channel Tunnel terminal in Folkestone in a seven-strong cavalcade including pick-ups and one former Iceland food delivery van, donated by the leasing company VMS Automotive. Drivers are paired up and take turns in roughly three-hour stints. I was paired with Brake.
Brake gave me his backstory as the Iceland van navigated Richmond’s school-run traffic. He worked in the fishing industry for years, with a stint in Singapore, before building a software company, Trade Interchange, during the dotcom boom. He stepped back eight years ago, sold the company last year and is now essentially retired, although he said Mighty Convoy is now his full-time job.
“Part of the reason I do this is because I realise how damn lucky my life is,” he said. He had visited Kyiv with a group of friends for the Euro 2012 football tournament and remembered the hospitality of the Ukrainians he met there.
“They’re soulful and spirited and proud of their nation, not in a pumped-up-chest way, it’s more a deep-rooted love of their culture — and they have a great sense of humour,” Brake said.
After the invasion, “I just felt I should do something”, Brake said. He stumbled across an advertisement on the Next Door website from a Ukrainian expat looking for volunteer drivers. “I really wanted to help. I don’t have any skills, but I can drive, that’s the one thing I can do.” In April 2022, he made his first journey to eastern Poland, delivering a pick-up to the Ukrainian border. “I think it reminded me of the spirit you’d imagine in Blighty back in the day,” he said. “The Hun were at the door.”
When he returned to the UK, he set up Mighty Convoy and started fundraising to do more trips, able now to drive into western Ukraine, which had become safer. The non-profit company now operates under the umbrella of the International Christian Medical and Dental Association charity, which operates in about 120 countries.
Bright idea
Brake initially raised money through a crowdfunding appeal to buy second-hand vehicles for about £7,000 each, and looked for volunteer drivers to transport them, but his charity pot started running low towards the end of 2023.
So he changed his approach to a “pay-to-drive” model. The premise was simple: people would raise £7,000 — to cover the cost of a second-hand vehicle, insurance and fuel — and drive the vehicle with a friend to Ukraine. “It really worked,” Brake said. He put on Mighty Convoy events in London and invited business owners. “Certain people grab it by the horns.”
One of those was Matthew Howden, 43, a portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs, who heard of Brake’s group through someone at work. “As soon as I heard about it, I was like, ‘Yes, where do I sign?’ ” Howden said.
For him, the adventure is part of the appeal. He graduated from Sandhurst, going on to serve tours of Iraq and Afghanistan as a cavalry officer, and admits he cannot pretend his involvement “was an entirely selfless thing”.
“If someone said, ‘Do you want to raise £7,000 for an ambulance in Ukraine?’, that’s an important thing and I should probably say yes, but it’s not terribly interesting. If someone says, ‘Do you want to raise £7,000 for an ambulance and then drive it there?’, that’s an entirely different proposition.”
After speaking to Brake, he “whatsapped everybody I know” and roped in seven friends, including his twin brother, Phil, to do it with him. They raised £42,000 for four vehicles through a mixture of emailing colleagues and friends, LinkedIn posts and notices in church and their local newspaper. One friend ran a half-marathon and another took part in a backyard ultra-endurance run.
‘Fun lads’ weekend’
One of the group, Freddie Clough, 41, joked it was “like a stag do — but because we’re driving, nobody’s pissed — which is great”. He added, seriously: “There’s a real sense of purpose.”
Another, Luke Burras, 37, an entrepreneur, said he was there because “Phil invited me on a fun lads’ weekend, but the other 20 per cent is because I feel a gnawing guilt. It’s the front line, it’s a battle about what society should be.”
James Cooper, 42, a recruiter, said: “I sit there in my bubble, in my comfort zone, in Tunbridge Wells and watch the news. The most dangerous thing I do is skipping a red light. Doing something like this gives me more justification to have an opinion.”
Howden liked the idea of driving through the night without stopping, saving time and money on a hotel stay. “Doing it over three days wouldn’t feel like a challenge,” he said. Another reason he wanted to do the trip was to realise how close Ukraine is to the UK. “The Russians could be in London in two days if they put their minds to it,” he said.
On the road
By lunchtime we were in Belgium and I was in the driving seat, whizzing past Ghent, Antwerp and into the Netherlands, switching over before the German border.
When we stopped for petrol, I looked in the back of the vans: they were piled high with aid as well as old computers, knitted baby clothes and some musical instruments — guitars, violins and drums — which Brake was taking to a school in Lviv formusic lessons to surprise the children.
I switched cars and spoke to Julian Rataj, 34, from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, who was driving on his own. His grandfather is Polish and he remembers childhood holidays when his father would drive to Rzeszow, near the Ukrainian border.
Rataj said he hoped his father would have be proud of him for pitching into the war effort: “He passed away five years ago. He was proud of his eastern European roots.”
Ultimately, taking part in the convoy “just felt like the right thing to do” he said. “If everyone leaves it to others, nothing gets done.”
At about 8pm we stopped at an Italian restaurant east of Dortmund for pizza and double espressos, then I was back in the driving seat for the first of the night shifts in the Iceland van. It all went smoothly until I cracked the wing mirror on a roadworks barrier on the autobahn. Graciously, the guys refrained from making jokes — although I was the only woman on this trip, several women have taken part in past convoys.
‘My father fought, my grandfather fought’
As the journey progressed, I found out others’ reasons for getting involved. Tim Musgrave, 62, a university friend of Brake’s, had teamed up with his brother-in-law, Gary Haworth, 64, who lives in France.
“Most wars are complicated and there’s always two sides to every story,” Musgrave said. “This one feels to be straightforward right and wrong. It wasn’t a hard thing to get my head around, morally.”
This was the second convoy for Justin McKenna, a 59-year-old lawyer from Dublin who had flown over specially. “I really do believe that the Ukrainians are Europeans who are fighting not just for their own survival, nationality and culture, but also for the rest of Europe,” he said. He would like to go back to Ukraine after the war to help with the rebuild.
McKenna has five children and dreads a war that engulfs more of Europe. “If something happened, it would affect my family,” he said. “I have four boys: which one would I send? Would I plead with the authorities to take me instead? There’s no excuse for why it took me so long to get involved, to be honest.”
There was a sense that these men wanted to have a story to pass down to the grandchildren. Musgrave said: “I have a very strong sense of duty and obligation. My father fought through North Africa and Italy. The whole environment has been comfortable for the last few decades, really, hasn’t it?”
Haworth added: “My grandfather was at Dunkirk. He spent two days in the water up to his waist.”
Another on the trip was Dan Dwight, 45, a primary school teacher from Sheffield, who worked for four years in orphanages in remote parts of Russia for a charity — until 2011, when it was blacklisted by Russia because, Dwight said, “it was a British Christian charity and they accused us of being a cult”.
He said he was “heartbroken” for the children. “When I heard about this [Mighty Convoy], all those feelings — of wanting to make a difference — came back.”
Into Ukraine
Soon the sun was rising over Poland, and we were speeding past Krakow and golden yellow fields of oilseed rape. There was another round of service station coffees before we advanced to the border at Budomierz, where we crossed in about 30 minutes.
UK passport holders can cross the border into Ukraine easily, with no visa required. Brake had prepared all the papers for each vehicle: registration and ownership, as well as a full contents list. He had been held up for almost five hours before, but now the staff seemed to recognise him. We also had a letter of backing from the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine (CMAU).
I was, perhaps naively, braced to see burnt-out buildings and stacked sandbags, but on our way into Lviv, gold-domed Orthodox churches gleamed in the sunlight and we passed a patchwork of allotments with hens scratching in the mud. People sipped spritzers in pavement cafés in Lviv’s cobbled old town. Live music echoed through the streets. Only the cathedral, with boarded-up stained-glass windows, and the occasional army billboard urging would-be soldiers to fight hinted at the war raging 600 miles away.
There have been 16 drone strikes in Lviv in the past year. The most shocking, in September, hit a residential building in the city centre, killing a mother and three daughters; only the father survived. Several other people were killed in the same attack.
The scars of the war might not be visible in Lviv, but meeting its brave residents, it was apparent they run deep.
“You see some regular life here, but every aspect has changed so much,” said Uliana Kovalyshyn, 34, who was born in Lviv and works for CMAU. “Even people who aren’t soldiers, their families, everyone has a connection with the war.”
‘One medic is worth ten soldiers to them’
It was clear just how much help is needed. A few of Mighty Convoy’s ambulances have already been bombed by Russian forces. “One medic is worth ten soldiers,” Kovalyshyn said. Two of the vans were readied immediately, and driven to the front line that evening by Ihor Ivashchenko, the khaki-clad Zelensky-esque head of the medical battalion, who shared war stories with us before he departed.
Since February 2022, the UK government has committed £18 billion of aid to Ukraine, including £13 billion in military support. Through the Disasters Emergency Committee, British charities have raised £445 million, although the actual amount raised through all charities is difficult to quantify. Mighty Convoy has donated about 40 tonnes of aid and some food pouches for soldiers.
At the CMAU warehouse in Lviv, Kovalyshyn and Stanasiuk showed us the high-tech medical backpacks carried by soldiers on the front line, which cost £1,000 each. Funds are tight and staff have been cut from eleven to seven. “We had a huge warehouse before and in August we realised we can’t afford it any more,” Kovalyshyn said. She said that as the war has dragged on, what was initially a tidal wave of aid has petered out to a trickle. “I understand,” she said, sadly. “People have already done so much to help.”
We spent the night on the streets of Lviv, drinking mugs of piana vyshnia — a Ukrainian hot cherry liqueur that is not to everyone’s taste — and speaking to Kovalyshyn and Stanasiuk about their lives in wartime: midnight curfews and semi-regular air raids. On Sunday we took a taxi to the border, crossed into Poland on foot and took another taxi to Rzeszow airport for the direct flight back to London.
Peace deal or not, the country will still need aid for years to come, and I hope to come back in happier times. Brake is planning his 15th convoy in a few weeks, and has two scheduled after that. “The heartfelt gratitude makes it all worthwhile,” Brake said. “It’s really powerful. That’s the bit that means I have to carry on.”
To donate visit mightyconvoy.org
