{"id":21205,"date":"2026-05-14T22:15:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T22:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/?p=21205"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:17:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:17:00","slug":"2026-ukraine-travelogue-12to8-dispatch-no-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/2026\/05\/2026-ukraine-travelogue-12to8-dispatch-no-3\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 Ukraine Travelogue ’12to8′ Dispatch No.3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

FRIDAY, MAY 8<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Colleagues from the Croatian humanitarian organization Dobro dobrim<\/em> didn’t manage to arrive at the ceremonial handover of the electric generator that we jointly provided for the Kapitoshka preschool institution in Bucha. The vehicle in which Radovan, Mario, and Nikolas traveled from Zagreb all the way to Kyiv (the distance between these two cities is about 1500 kilometers) started overheating every hour already in Zakarpattia, so, lacking an appropriate service station, they had to take frequent breaks for the engine to cool down enough to continue. Thus, instead of arriving in the morning as planned, they only reached Kyiv on Wednesday evening and unfortunately missed the ceremony that the children and their teachers prepared for us as a sign of gratitude for the provided help. Therefore, we agreed to head towards Kapitoshka once again on Friday morning so that, together with our friends from Dobro dobrim<\/em>, we could hand over the remaining necessary equipment they brought in their vehicle \u2013 a new industrial-sized washing machine, a desktop computer (for which I had bought an appropriate Ukrainian keyboard the day before in Kyiv; here, by the way, it’s called a klavijatura<\/em>), as well as a sizable amount of canned food. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Samir Ibi\u0161evi\u0107, our guy from Sarajevo, drove me from Kyiv to Bucha first thing in the morning. Together with his wife and daughter, he has been living here in Kyiv for three years, and from here he manages the Bosnian-Herzegovinian organization PROI, which, among other things, engages in humanitarian work and was also our partner in this regional endeavor. With a classic Bosnian combination of relaxedness, humor, and perceptiveness, throughout the entire forty-five-minute drive\u2014which is how long it takes to get from Kyiv to Bucha under the best conditions\u2014Samir talked to me about his previous activities but also about his attitude towards local characteristics, which he experiences as incomparably more rational and pragmatic than those present in practically all nations and societies in our region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Bucha, we met with our Croatian colleagues, and so our small regional humanitarian coalition gathered together for the first time. With us was Lidiia Komarnytska from the Bucha City Administration, who for months had been our main contact with Kapitoshka and who coordinated most things directly on the ground. We took photos together next to the unpacked boxes and then went on a tour of the air-raid shelter, which was set up in the basement rooms of the kindergarten and serves both the children attending the kindergarten and the citizens living nearby who have no other shelter.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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In many photographs we received from Bucha during the freezing winter months (which people across Ukraine, but mostly in and around Kyiv, were forced to survive without electricity and heating, under constant air raids\u2014both those carried out by Iranian and Russian-made drones and the far more destructive ballistic ones), there were little children playing in the darkness of this basement under the dim light of flashlights. Seeing that oppressive space in person, being in it, feeling the claustrophobia of the hard walls and the sadness of the cheerful drawings on them\u2014all those flowers, clouds, and cartoon characters under ceilings that are too low and barely visible behind pipes wrapped in rags and tow, carefully stepping over mattresses on pallets acting as temporary beds\u2014all of this had a special meaning for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later that day, towards evening, at the Serbian embassy, at the invitation of Ambassador Sapund\u017ei, about a dozen guests gathered for a reception and socializing to mark our joint, successfully implemented humanitarian action and my arrival in Kyiv. Besides a few representatives of our diaspora, there were professors from the Slavic Studies Department of the Philological Faculty of Kyiv University, as well as two former Ukrainian ambassadors \u2013 Volodymyr Tolchak, whose term as the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia recently ended, and his colleague Oleksandr Levchenko, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Croatia and BiH. It certainly wouldn’t be fair to the ambassador to list the details of the cross-talk that took place in the formal environment of the embassy here, even though it was in the characteristically jovial and relaxed spirit typical of all conversations with Andon Sapund\u017ei. But once again, discussing with him, as well as with all those great people who have lived here through all these years and persevered alongside the Ukrainians, I thought how important it is that we have such a person as our top representative in this country\u2014someone who every day actively washes the greatly tarnished face of the Serbian state but, unfortunately, also of a sizable part of Serbian society, due to their alignment in excessive respect and even pure adoration of the darkest aspects of Russian criminal policy towards Ukraine, and the complete lack of compassion for the suffering the Ukrainian people are forced to endure so deep into the twenty-first century. And even, I must add this, in no small number of cases, with bloodthirsty satisfaction over the various crimes committed daily against this country and its citizens.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What I noticed quite disturbs Ambassador Sapund\u017ei is the truly hard-to-understand fact that since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Serbia has provided aid to this country in the not-so-small amount of 62 million euros, yet very little is known about this because this fact, which any reasonable person would be proud of, is hidden like a snake hides its legs precisely by those who provided that aid. Or should I write this in the first person singular? Be that as it may, this discovery alone is enough to split your brain in two, but at the same time, it might at least somewhat clarify to others all the unhealthy contradictions and the sick mechanism of the politics of dirty hands and a guilty conscience that has been at work in Serbia for far too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

FRIDAY, MAY 8 Colleagues from the Croatian humanitarian organization Dobro dobrim didn’t manage to arrive at the ceremonial handover of the electric generator that we jointly provided for the Kapitoshka preschool institution in Bucha. The vehicle in which Radovan, Mario, and Nikolas traveled from Zagreb…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21224,"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\/21205"}],"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=21205"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21234,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21205\/revisions\/21234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krokodil.rs\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}