B.C. aid volunteer witnesses violence, death in Ukraine

Justin Carter said he smelled death and witnessed a lethal Russian missile strike during Moscow's latest bid to crack Ukrainian resistance in the eastern portion of the besieged country.

And the Kelowna man — who's been in Ukraine since April 12 delivering supplies to refugees and residents who've refused to flee the fighting — said he can't wait to return to the Kharkiv area that's been under constant Russian bombardment.

“I want to go back to Kharkiv because it touched me,” Carter, 44, said in a phone interview from Lviv, Ukraine. “I see the Ukrainian people and how they believe in democracy, how they refuse to live under oppression.”

That realization deepened for Carter last Wednesday when he travelled from his home base of Lviv in western Ukraine to the Kharkiv area, which is on the northern edge of the latest Russian onslaught to capture the rest of the Donbas region.

He brought with him supplies — food, medicine, clothes — for the living, but quickly confronted the dead, victims of Russian shelling.

“We approached the door of one building and you could smell the stench of dead bodies,” he said. “It's heartbreaking — they couldn't remove the bodies because they don't have the resources to do it.”

While in the area, Carter said he was within a few hundred metres of the Ukrainian forward trenches where he glimpsed a flash of the fighting that's reduced some of the country's cities to rubble.

“I saw a missile or rocket fly into an auto repair shop — someone was killed there,” he said. “Everywhere we saw civilian targets that had been hit.”

That destruction, he said, has only seemed to motivate the Ukrainian defenders who have pushed back Russian forces from the city in recent days, “almost to the point of being back to the Russian border,” said Carter, who has family in Calgary.

Given the defenders' determination, Carter said he doubts the Ukrainians will relinquish Kharkiv, at least in the foreseeable future.

But minutes after the phone interview ended, Russian missiles slammed into the Lviv area — a reminder that few parts of the country are safe.

“Two missile strikes just landed to the east of Lviv. I heard them. My Ukrainian friend thought it was thunder but I knew they were explosions,” Carter said in an email moments after the strike. “My friend in another part of Lviv is saying the power is out in his area.”

His hunch that electricity generation had been targeted was confirmed shortly after by a local government announcement stating three power substations had been hit and that the city's water supply was disrupted.

Before the war began, Carter owned a solar power company in Kelowna that fell victim to a slowdown during the pandemic.

At loose ends, the Australian native figured he'd join an influx of foreign volunteers headed to Poland and Ukraine to help the victims of Russia's invasion.

Since then, he's immersed himself in the logistical challenges facing the country and those who want to aid it by working with a Ukrainian charity, with plans to link up with a German humanitarian aid group.

A fuel shortage and other obstacles, he said, are affecting their ability to deliver relief — lifelines under Russian air attack.