{"id":21187,"date":"2026-05-14T21:56:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T21:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/?p=21187"},"modified":"2026-05-14T21:56:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T21:56:04","slug":"2026-ukraine-travelogue-12to8-dispatch-no-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/2026\/05\/2026-ukraine-travelogue-12to8-dispatch-no-1\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 Ukraine Travelogue 12to8 Dispatch No. 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6: ALBA \u2013 MILAN \u2013 CHISINAU \u2013 PALANCA \u2013 ODESA \u2013 UMAN \u2013 KYIV<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
\n
\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Wherever you start from, reaching your intended destination in Ukraine is always challenging. This time, my journey from Alba via Milan, Chisinau, Palanca, Odesa, and Uman all the way to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv stretched out to a full twenty-five hours of travel, first by train, then by plane, and finally by bus. But here I am now and this short sentence\u00a0 – I’m here, I’m here, I’m here<\/em> – beats rhythmically inside me as I watch the sprawling city slowly wake up at five in the morning local time from the window of my eleventh-floor room at the Premium Hotel Rus.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

I had not the slightest doubt, even before this fourth humanitarian trip to war-torn Ukraine had begun, that it would differ significantly from the previous ones. First of all, for the first time, we are not arriving in this country with a convoy of cargo vehicles carrying goods and equipment from Serbia. Also, for the first time, we are not entering the country from the west via the tripoint Hungarian-Slovak-Ukrainian border and the border city of Uzhhorod. And, last but not least, for the first time we are not carrying out this endeavor with Andriy Lyubka, a writer, translator, activist, and our friend and collaborator who has been in the military in the far east of the country since the beginning of the year. We hope he will return safe and sound when this madness\u2014in which Ukraine has survived for a full four years and a few months to boot\u2014finally comes to an end.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Nevertheless, this story should be started properly, i.e., from the beginning. This time, its beginning is in December 2024, when Andon Sapund\u017ei was inaugurated as the new Ambassador of Serbia to Ukraine. This appointment followed a two-year period during which Serbia did not have an official representative in this country after the previous ambassador was withdrawn at the very beginning of the Russian aggression. Even before the official inauguration, we at the KROKODIL Association, accustomed to the disdain and total lack of any contact from our political mainstream, were surprised by the atypical action of Ambassador Sapund\u017ei who contacted us before leaving for Kyiv and established a relationship, correctly realizing that we are basically the only organization in our country that consistently, without calculation, and in all possible ways at our disposal, strives to help this country. Immediately after the inauguration, Ambassador Sapund\u017ei was among the guests of our Ukrainian-Serbian forum Liberte, Egalite, Solidarite<\/em> held in Uzhhorod at the end of March 2025, where Andriy Lyubka and I interviewed him in a hard-talk format about everything Serbia should regulate regarding its relationship with Russia and, consequently, with Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also communicated intensively in October of last year during our visit to the Lviv Book Forum, when we received a certificate of appreciation from the Ivan Franko University for our continuous help to Ukraine and its citizens. It was then, I think, that the idea was born to collaborate on a new action to collect humanitarian aid for the most vulnerable in this country, for the fourth time since the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression. This gave us yet another confirmation that, regardless of the rather disgusting and essentially self-destructive politics of our country (not only regarding the Ukrainian-Russian dialectic but in general), Ambassador Sapund\u017ei’s heart is undoubtedly in the right place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We from the KROKODIL Association have been delivering aid to the most war-affected residents of this country ever since February 2022. That first year, we traveled to Kharkiv to bring neonatal respirators, baby food, and diapers for prematurely born babies at the City Perinatal Center, which found itself on the very firing line during the spring months of that year when the war was raging there. The following year, we collected food, warm clothing, and medicine for the Social Center in the township of Blyzniuky in the far east of the Kharkiv region, close to the Donbas, which was facing a huge number of internally displaced persons and the dramatic humanitarian catastrophe that inevitably goes with it. In 2024, we cooperated with the Point of Invincibility at the Baptist Church in Kherson to help the small number of residents (barely 25%-30% of the pre-war population) who remained there during the Russian occupation\u2014mostly the elderly, the sick, the frail, and the vulnerable whom no one wants and who have nowhere to go. It was then and there that we understood the true meaning of the phrase “hell on earth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, we were strongly motivated by the collapse of the Ukrainian energy system under Russian drones and shells and the freezing winter that the local citizens had to spend without electricity and heating. Thanks to Ambassador Sapund\u017ei, in the midst of that horror in January, when temperatures dropped more than twenty degrees below zero, we got in touch with the Kapitoshka kindergarten and the city administration of Bucha\u2014the Kyiv suburb where this kindergarten is located and a great victim of this war. We decided to do our best to provide the children who attend this institution and spend most of their day in unheated, dark shelters with a more dignified life by raising funds to buy a 30kW power generator. This will produce enough electricity to provide the much-needed lighting, heating, and warm meals for over two hundred little ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

And finally, four months later, here I am at last. Our generator is also here, procured from local distributors and already installed in the Kapitoshka kindergarten. Later today, together with all the partners we involved in this project during the fundraising period (more about all of them in tomorrow’s dispatch), we will carry out the ceremonial handover and finally meet in person and shake hands with the kindergarten staff and the people from the Bucha city administration. And that, at least for me personally, is always the most exciting moment and the reason why, after all, we do what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The temperature these days, by the way, both in Moldova and Ukraine, is truly summery and reaches an incredible 28 degrees Celsius. All the way by bus from Chisinau to here\u2014a total of ten and a half hours of driving on Moldovan and Ukrainian roads which, for various reasons, to paraphrase Teofil Pan\u010di\u0107, are one giant pothole with only a little bit of asphalt here and there\u2014I was sweating in a not-so-great air-conditioned vehicle. So it seems a bit paradoxical that we only managed to provide the generator now, when a hot summer is on the horizon and everyday life here is incomparably easier than during the freezing winter months. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the next autumn will arrive soon, followed by another standard freezing winter, and Ukraine’s problems, unfortunately, will not just disappear by then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next dispatch \u2013 tomorrow at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6: ALBA \u2013 MILAN \u2013 CHISINAU \u2013 PALANCA \u2013 ODESA \u2013 UMAN \u2013 KYIV Wherever you start from, reaching your intended destination in Ukraine is always challenging. This time, my journey from Alba via Milan, Chisinau, Palanca, Odesa, and Uman all the way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21188,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21193,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21187\/revisions\/21193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}