Help us get this bus to Ukraine!

I am a freelance journalist who has been covering the war in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Earlier this year I was part of a team that helped fundraise for a charity in Ukraine to buy a minibus to help transport children and families displaced by the war. You can read about this here .

Along the way, I made some great and generous contacts in the UK transport industry, and as a result have been donated this 17-seater minibus by coach company National Express to also send to Ukraine.

This is thanks to Paul Sainthouse, managing director of Dawsongroup Bus and Coach , who has been relentless in his support.

Paul has also put me in touch with the wonderful Worshipful Company of Carmen, which has offered to help deliver the bus from the UK to Ukraine. This organisation has already delivered scores of vehicles to Ukraine, through its network of volunteer drivers.

Our bus is heading to the city of Bar, in the Vinnytsia Oblast, where it will be handed over to the regional authority to be used by the Ukrainian charitable foundation United Forces for Aid to Ukraine.

Bar, like many Ukrainian cities, has faced enormous challenges because of Russian aggression. The city's community has shown extraordinary solidarity and hospitality, welcoming more than 4,800 internally displaced people (more than 1,000 families) from various regions of Ukraine, including Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.

In addition, they actively support families of people who have been killed, missing soldiers, and wounded servicemen.

However, the Bar community is now facing a critical problem - the lack of transportation to meet the basic needs of the population. The situation worsened after the city transferred its buses to the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

I have set up this small fundraiser to cover the costs to deliver this bus. The bus has been donated for free (hurrah!), but we need to pay for a few things to get it where it's needed.

These include:

If you would like to help the bus make this journey, please donate! All money will go directly to the cause.

The bus will also be full of aid collected by the foundation here in the UK, so it will be a very valuable journey to support.

I have pasted below the letter provided by the charity to prove that this is a legitimate fundraising appeal, and that the bus from National Express is going to them.

We hope to make this journey in October or November 2024. I'll be posting updates here.

Thank you!

Gabriella Jozwiak