How your donations help Red Cross to help refugees
As families seek shelter and thousands are forced underground...
SHELTERING in a Red Cross refuge funded with the help of Mail readers, a mother cradles her baby daughter in the besieged city of Mariupol.
Meanwhile, in the capital Kyiv, aid workers bring food and basic provisions to around 8,000 people forced to seek sanctuary in a subway station.
These are the poignant images which show how readers’ generosity is making a difference in Ukraine.
As the bombs rain down in southern Mariupol, Yulia’s little girl knows nothing of the horrors outside. But to the mother, the sanctuary of the Red Cross shelter
‘We came here with nothing’
means everything. She plants a kiss on the hood of her daughter’s pink woollen cardigan and says: ‘We have been here since the day they started bombing.
‘We came here with nothing. We receive help here. We need food, clothes, batteries, and everything you need for everyday life. We are grateful for any help.’
Yulia is one of 100 people staying at the centre in Mariupol, where 400,000 have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis.
Escape routes out of the port city have been cut off and the civilian population has been pummelled with indiscriminate bombing.
Yet Red Cross staff are working in the heart of the city, helping 4,000 people with food, hygiene items and children’s toys – funded in part by the Mail Force charity.
Overall, the Red Cross has given out 30,000 food and hygiene parcels, and is helping those with disabilities to flee from Ukraine.
Mail readers have responded magnificently to the humanitarian crisis, with the appeal raising more than £4million in a week. This includes £500,000 donated by the Mail’s parent company DMGT at the request of Lord and Lady Rothermere. An incredible 40,000 cheques have now been posted to us, nearly all accompanied by heartfelt messages of support.
Reader Anne Lawrence, of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, sent £100 yesterday with a handwritten message saying: ‘I hope this will help towards your appeal for the brave citizens of Ukraine, who I think about constantly and tearfully.’
The generosity is matched by the courage of the aid workers the money is helping to fund.
In Mariupol, the situation is dire. Food and water supplies have run dry, electricity and heating supplies have been turned off and bodies of the victims of the sickening campaign litter the streets. Residents are huddling together in sub-zero temperatures and drinking melted ice to quench their thirst. According to local officials, the shelling of their neighbourhoods has been relentless.
The Red Cross says the situation is ‘incredibly tense, dangerous and distressing for people’. A spokesman added: ‘Our teams are seeing lots of street-to-street fighting, including near where [our] personnel are... Most, if not all stores are closed, meaning ordinary citizens have difficulty buying items.’
Maksym Dotsenko, director general of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, said: ‘We are deeply concerned for the safety of communities given the recent intensification of fighting.’
Nataylia, who is also staying in the Red Cross shelter, said she and her family fled from the Artana area of the city under heavy and merciless bombing.
‘Shells fell directly on our heads, so we ran away in what we were wearing, to the basement,’ she said. ‘We need everything now. We are wearing only what kind people and the Red Cross gave us. Right now, we are in dire need of medicine and hygiene products.’
THE temperature in Mariupol will drop below freezing once again tonight. And the residents of the besieged Ukrainian port will have to endure this in their makeshift underground shelters without heating, without electricity and without water, as the Russians have cut off supplies.
They need food, too, but all the Russians send are missiles and bombs. Red Cross volunteers, trying to use one of the alleged safe corridors in and out of the city, found it strewn with landmines.
For Vladimir Putin, no tactic, however repulsive, is off the table. Having failed so far to win militarily in the face of heroic resistance, he has now decided to bomb ordinary Ukrainians to pieces or starve them to death.
Siege
Hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk — unless Nato introduces a no-fly zone over Ukraine to deny Russians the use of airspace and engages with military aircraft that refuse to comply.
Our Government, along with those of the U.S. and other nations, has rejected any attempt to enforce a no-fly zone, arguing it would be seen as act of war and could result in a catastrophic escalation.
I understand the risks, but there are bigger risks if we don’t. Bullies like Putin only understand strength and we have only to look to recent history to see where the situation may yet lead.
Putin is only too familiar with the siege tactic he is now deploying in Ukrainian cities. Back in 1941, the brave people of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) held out for 872 days against German soldiers directed by their crazed leader Adolf Hitler.
Now it is the brave Ukrainians holding out against Russian soldiers directed by their crazed leader Vladimir Putin.
Putin has the nerve to call Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a far-Right neo-Nazi. Zelensky is, in fact, a Jew. If the Russian leader wants to find a neo-Nazi, he need do no more than look in the mirror. For he certainly seems to have been following Hitler’s tactics.
In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, arguing it belonged in the German family. He welcomed Austrians ‘home’.
In 2014, Putin invaded Crimea, calling his annexation a ‘homecoming’.
Later in 1938, Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, be handed over to Germany, arguing that the population was ethnically German. The allies capitulated and the territory was annexed.
In 2014, unmarked Russian troops crossed into the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine and, by 2021, 7 per cent of Ukraine territory was in the hands of Moscowbacked separatists and 15,000 Ukrainians had been killed.
Defence of these separatists was the spurious reason given for the invasion of Ukraine last month after Putin recognised the areas as independent.
In 1938, Britain, France and the democratic countries wanted to avoid war at all costs. But their appeasement just encouraged Hitler to go further and faster. Yet if he had met resistance in 1938 to his land grabs, he might have thought twice about invading Poland the following year.
And now the democratic countries baulk at getting involved militarily in Ukraine for fear it will lead to something bigger. But something bigger is coming anyway.
Just as Hitler exploited a feeling of national humiliation after the imposition of highly punitive measures in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after World War I, so Putin smoulders away. He thinks Russia was humiliated by the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the advance eastwards of the European Union and Nato.
The harsh truth is that the failure of the democratic world to become directly involved in the Ukraine war will spur Putin to further outrages.
Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union, or in his terms Greater Russia, surrounded by compliant, satellite states that will again provide a buffer between Russia and Nato.
Indeed, his demands at the end of last year included the removal of weapons from all countries that joined Nato after 1997, and limits on Nato troop deployments. This would include Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Balkan countries.
Moreover, he has threatened military consequences for Finland and Sweden if they try to join Nato. The irony is that neither country showed much interest in doing so until the invasion of Ukraine.
So I do not believe Putin will stop at Ukraine. Moldova and Georgia will be next: countries formerly in the Soviet Union but which have become modern democratic states — but crucially have not joined Nato.
Bullying
As he is doing now, Putin will threaten to use nuclear weapons to keep Nato in its box.
We simply cannot allow this Hitler-style land grab to continue. In 1938, the democratic world chose appeasement, a policy it had to abandon when Hitler went too far. In 2022, we have already let Putin go too far. For Poland then, read Ukraine today.
The question for Nato is not whether to become involved but when. The choice is now or later.
Across the world, in parliaments, in public squares, at football matches, support and admiration for the Ukrainian people has been pouring out.
It is not simply the heroic resistance they have put up, outgunned and outmanned by a bullying superpower 28 times its size. It is Putin’s total disregard of international norms of behaviour and law, even of the rules of war, that have so appalled people.
Russian missiles have rained down on residential areas. President Zelensky has now accused Putin of murdering his people. He is not wrong.
Putin has offered safe corridors out of besieged cities, but only to Russia itself and Belarus. That is akin to Hitler offering safe passage for the inhabitants of invaded countries only to Nazi Germany.
Grasped
Both Putin and Zelensky understand that the fight for Ukraine is also a fight between authoritarianism and democracy, a surrogate fight between Russia and Nato.
Sadly, the West seems not to have grasped that. But we cannot afford to let Putin win.
Yes, the democratic world has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia, but by the time they fully kick in, Ukraine will be no more.
Yes, we have supplied enough weapons to slow Russia down but not defeat it. And why has President Zelensky not been given planes? Control of airspace is vital in war.
There are aircraft in Nato countries that Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly. There is a 40-mile line of Russian tanks slowly aproaching Kyiv. It is a line of sitting ducks. Why has it not been bombed?
The brave Ukrainians have bought time, but it is asking a lot to expect them to emerge as the winners in this war.
Zelensky has pleaded for a no-fly zone, to give his people a fighting chance. With this in place, Putin could be defeated — and it might, just might, make him think twice about future invasions.
And what is the price of not imposing a no-fly zone? The annihilation of Ukraine and its people, the triumph of an out-of-control dictator over the democratic world, and a green light for further military action against sovereign states.
Back in 1938, the West hoped for the best and made the wrong decision. We must not repeat that mistake in 2022.
If Nato doesn’t act, Ukraine will be annihilated and a crazed dictator will march on