Tales From The Front: MPs Share Their Stories From Ukraine

Graeme Downie
Labour MP for Dunfermline and Dollar

A pile of dark brown mud next to a hole in the ground. A hole framed by planks of wood covered tightly in smooth, matt black sheeting. Four rough wooden handles jammed in as the mud hardens around them, with invisible silver shovels buried beneath. 

A pile of mud and four shovels in the sharp, harsh, dry cold of Lviv. This is the image that I have thought of every day since I returned from my visit to Ukraine in February. It is the picture of a newly dug grave in the Cemetery of Heroes in Lviv, Ukraine. It may sound an unusual thing to say, but this graveside was not simply one of sorrow. Nor just of pride. Nor just of memory. It was one of defiance and resolve.

That image encapsulates the emotions of all of the people of Ukraine we met. The Ukrainian people want peace – of course they do – but they will not take peace at any price. They will be neither the appeaser nor the appeased. They will not accept a peace imposed on them from on high by any leader from any country who has no right to interfere.

Every conversation I had in Ukraine followed a similar pattern: thank you for the help the UK is giving us; how can we share our lessons with you? The Ukrainians have made incredible steps forward in drone technology, cybersecurity, infrastructure, medical care, innovation and investment. And they want to share that with us.

This is the image that I have thought of every day since I returned from my visit

Ukrainians do not wish to be simply recipients of aid and support. The future they are building for themselves is as a strong ally of countries like the UK – countries that value and support freedom, democracy and growth.

With the 100-year partnership agreement signed by the government, we have the foundation of a new long-term relationship with a country with whom we share so much – and with whom we are standing shoulder to shoulder. On that foundation, we can build a lasting and future peace.

In the same speech in which JFK called for “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time” he said: “There is no single, simple key to peace – no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.”

Ukraine has taken several of the many acts, and the UK is one of the many nations. It is incumbent upon us to continue acting until we find the peace we all seek.

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Danny Chambers
Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester

Driving a convoy of five refurbished ambulances full of medical supplies from London to Lviv in just 36 hours was a stark reminder of how close the war in Ukraine really is. It took only three tanks of diesel to reach a country fighting for its very survival. What might feel distant when discussed in Westminster becomes starkly real when you see the signs of war at every turn. 

Lviv, just two hours inside Ukraine’s western border, is living in the shadow of war. Air raid sirens force people down into bunkers a couple of times a week. Luckily, we were there for the only two nights that sirens didn’t go off that week.

With 50,000 of its residents enlisted in the armed forces, almost every family is affected. Funerals of those who died fighting are held daily, with the fallen buried in the city they grew up in. Graveyards grow steadily, solemnly.

A minute’s silence is observed at 9am every single morning to remember the fallen, the whole city coming to a standstill – even in hospitals.

At St Panteleimon hospital, I was struck not only by the number of amputees, but that the doctor knew them all by name. These are long-term patients, many of whom require up to 15 surgeries and over a year of rehabilitation. It brought tears to my eyes seeing these brave veterans – some without arms or legs – battle on. This isn’t a distant or anonymous war for Ukraine’s medical staff. It is local, intimate and relentless.

A minute’s silence is observed at 9am every single morning to remember the fallen

Our conversation with the mayor of Lviv was sobering. He spoke of daily air raid alarms, disrupted routines, the physical and psychological strain on his people. With so many wounded soldiers returning to Lviv for treatment and rehabilitation, and with every citizen living under the constant threat of attack, the emotional toll is immense.

But I was also struck by how normal life was for many Ukrainians – still bravely going about their daily lives despite the dangerous new world they now find themselves in.

With all the economic pressures too, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one aptionof the top priorities for the local administration is supporting the mental health of their citizens and soldiers – a constant challenge for a country at war.

It is essential that we continue to send supplies but also listen, learn and lend our voice and political will to Ukraine’s fight for peace and sovereignty.

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Iain Duncan Smith
Conservative MP for Chingford and Woodford Green

It was freezing cold at midnight on 11 December 2022 when I arrived at the Medyka crossing in Poland. The war was in full swing, and we were on our way to join Siobhan’s Trust, a charity that was then feeding the dispossessed behind the front line [now run by a new charity, HopeFull].

Loaded down with our bags, Judith Cummins and I walked across the border and through both checkpoints, carefully avoiding the snow and ice. We climbed into a waiting car and set off into Ukraine – a war zone.

The advice from the Foreign Office was not to go, but I knew the team at Siobhan’s Trust, and I thought if they could do it, so could we.

We wanted to get close to the front to see how brutal the Russians were, and in a matter of days we were at Kharkiv, a mile and a half from the Russian border and Ukraine’s second city. It had been under intense attacks from the Russians, and destroyed schools and smashed blocks of flats were everywhere.

Yet in the preceding few months, the Russians had been forced back away from the city, and we were able to visit some of the villages which had been liberated. They had an eerie, empty feel, as the destruction meant even those very few houses still standing had been ransacked, and anti-personnel mines were everywhere.

All that we had seen came home to us while listening to the soldiers who had been taken out of the line – civilians until a few months before – now suffering from severe combat stress. Their accounts of the brutality they had seen, and their lost friends, were deeply moving.

Those very few houses still standing had been ransacked and anti-personnel mines were everywhere

Yet in the whole visit, two contrasting things affected me. The first was our visit to the military hospital. The Russians regularly attacked this facility with rockets. Seeing the humanity and dedication of the doctors and nurses – while under attack and despite their shortages of medical equipment – moved me deeply.

The other was that, even amid all this destruction and suffering, our time with the volunteers of Siobhan’s Trust, in among the dispossessed from these villages, lifted our spirits.

Mad as it might seem, they weren’t just giving them food but serving pizzas while singing and dancing. Looking around at these poor people in the freezing cold, we could see, despite their difficulties, their faces break into smiles – even more so the little children. For this peculiar British charity was giving them hope, showing them they hadn’t been forgotten.

Their hope for freedom is surely a simple human right, in that we mustn’t forget them. Even now, we must help them have reason to hope. 

Slava Ukraini!

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Judith Cummins
Labour MP for Bradford South

In December 2022, I travelled on a cross-party visit with Iain Duncan Smith to Ukraine where we saw first-hand the damage caused to newly liberated territories in the Kharkiv region.

What Russia has seen as a strategy for upending the global order and redrawing the boundaries of Europe, the people of Ukraine have been living as a tragic daily reality. In the face of the aggression and heartbreak, I had the immense privilege of experiencing the strength, resolve and dignity of the Ukrainian people.

In Kharkiv, I spent time with a local volunteer infantry unit who spoke vividly about their experiences. Before the war, these men were ordinary citizens doing ordinary jobs. Now they were soldiers dealing with the most horrific of circumstances. One volunteer soldier told me that it was moving the dead bodies after the bombings that was the worst – the people in the houses and buildings who had been murdered by the Russian army. 

I was shown a photograph of a small boy laid out on a bench. The soldier told me that the father of the child had clung to him, refusing to be separated from his son. “It is hard,” the soldiers told me. Some, they said, had found it too hard, returned home and shot themselves. It was a stark and painful reminder of the human cost of Russia’s war of aggression.

Our surroundings made the determination of the Ukrainian people all the more striking. As part of our visit, we served pizza to the newly liberated villagers. Despite all the horrors that these people had suffered, they offered us gifts of pickled vegetables.

One volunteer soldier told me that it was moving the dead bodies after the bombings that was the worst

In Kharkiv, we passed by blocks gutted by missile attacks. In Tsupivka, I saw the aftermath of the bombing of churches and schools. In Ruska Lozova, houses were peppered with shrapnel from bombs and bullets. In Slatyne, a huge crater existed where the school once stood, with live missiles still visible in the frozen ground. “We will win, it will be hard – but we will win,” they told me in defiance of the horrors that surrounded them. More than two years on, the Ukrainian people remain committed to defending their homeland with the same grit and determination that I witnessed on that visit.

The Ukrainian people have not relented. They are unified by hope, they are united in strength, and they are bound by the country that they call home. What inspired me on my visit two years ago should continue to inspire us all today. I will always remember those words which were spoken to me time and time again: “Do not forget us.” 

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Johanna Baxter
Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South

It’s hard to describe what goes through your mind when you first hear the air raid alarm going off on your phone. It was the middle of the night and the eve of the third anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion into Ukraine, and they were bombarding the city of Kyiv with drones. 

Alongside families, who tried to sleep on makeshift beds, we stayed in the bomb shelter for the next four and a half hours. What was no more than an inconvenience for us is daily mental torture and physical danger for the people of Ukraine.

In the face of that, you’d expect to find a people cowed, but nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone we met – the veterans in hospital missing limbs, the mothers sitting by the graves of the fallen, or the politicians trying to lead their nation – had a resolve and a spirit that no invading force will ever take away from them. You see it in their humour – the priests who named their little dog Drone, the people who painted a crack in the Peoples’ Friendship Arch which used to represent the friendship between Ukraine and Russia (and has now been renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People), or the organ that sits in Kyiv train station that has been made from the scrap metal from Russian bombs.

They need all that resolve because they are fighting for their nation and our democracy, and because the war is relentless. The graveyard we visited was bigger than you could comprehend and had three fresh graves dug that morning, with shovels still in the ground. The fallen and injured continue to arrive from the front line.

The graveyard we visited was bigger than you could comprehend

And they need that determination, particularly to keep fighting for the return of the 19,546 children that Russia has stolen from them. I had to double check the figure when the Ukrainian human rights commissioner told us. Children ripped from their families, deported from their homeland, sent to re-education camps, forced to live with invading soldiers, and some even conscripted to fight against the country they were born in. The youngest was only eight months old when he was taken.

And yet still they go on. In many parts of the country, life looked almost normal. But then the air raid alert goes off again and fear comes as a wave, and tanks sit in readiness outside the parliament. I regularly pray for the return of these children, for the Ukrainian people, and a just end to this unjust war.

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Will Forster
Liberal Democrat MP for Woking

For the British delegation and me, the first night in Kyiv was harrowing. We spent the night in a bunker because of an air raid warning. For the locals, accustomed to the brutal nightly attacks, this is routine – they were already asleep when we arrived.

Our delegation of MPs found a corner and watched Darkest Hour. Under the circumstances, this seemed appropriate. Many Ukrainians are comparing their situation to the Second World War and deeply admire Winston Churchill. In that shelter, it was easy to imagine what life was like in 1940s Britain.

During a visit to a hospital, I met Volodymyr who lost his leg in a drone strike. He wants to go back to the front line when he gets a prosthetic leg and learns to walk again, but unfortunately, there is a shortage of prosthetics.

Volodymyr never wanted to be a soldier but felt compelled to step up and defend his country when it was invaded. This is an amazing example of the resilience of the Ukrainian people.

It was heartbreaking to learn that 25 per cent of deaths in Ukraine could be prevented – a lack of blood supplies, particularly near the front lines, is causing a quarter of all Ukrainian deaths.

In that shelter, it was easy to imagine what life was like in 1940s Britain

Since returning from Ukraine, I’ve called on the British government to expand medical aid as well as military support to Ukraine.

I also visited a school, where I learnt just how much war is shaping Ukraine’s youth. A war-fighting spirit has taken over. By 16, they are trained in marksmanship, battlefield medicine, and survival. This is a part of their curriculum. They are trained to shoot – to aim for the head – and they practise on each other.

Back in the UK, we worry about the impact that the Covid pandemic and the amount of screen time is having on the next generation. However, what I saw in Ukraine puts our concerns starkly into perspective. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is having a profound impact on the next generation, and I really worry about the psychological effects of living in a war zone on Ukraine’s children.

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Phil Brickell
Labour MP for Bolton West

At the time of my February visit to Kyiv, international reporting had focused on a coalition of the willing to safeguard Ukraine’s borders. But I wanted to delve beyond the high-level reporting and speak to citizens in Ukraine about their daily lives – the trials and tribulations of not knowing when the next Russian attack might happen, their concerns about long-term security and the impact it has had on the economy.

Getting off the train in the capital, I was immediately confronted by the sight of a high-rise office block, its windows almost entirely blown out by a Russian aerial assault. And, having spent time sheltering from missile strikes and drone attacks in separate bomb shelters on my first day in sub-zero Kyiv, I witnessed first-hand the daily attacks by Vladimir Putin’s murderous regime on civilians and the city’s infrastructure. The intense air raid siren blaring out from mobile phones in the middle of the night. The scrambled run downstairs into the basement. The camp beds hurriedly assembled underground. The furtive looks online to see how long the strikes might last. It all spoke to the routine lived experience of civilians across Ukraine having to maintain a semblance of normality despite the daily, indiscriminate bombardment by their Russian neighbours.

The absence of young men on the streets spoke to the immense mobilisation efforts

Among us in the shelter were a motley crew of Estonian police officers training their Ukrainian counterparts – a stark reminder that Russia’s threat to western democracy extends far beyond Ukraine. We spoke the vocabulary of war; of UAVs, Shaheds, Patriots and FPVs – a jumbled assembly of acronyms and weapons names which rolled off the tongues of our Ukrainian hosts at an inexorable pace.

As I travelled around the capital, the absence of young men on the streets spoke to the immense mobilisation efforts required just to hold the front line against the Kremlin’s continued war of aggression.

Yet, the conflict did not start in 2022. My visit to Maidan Nezalezhnosti bore witness to that. The sight of thousands of Ukrainian flags and photographs of deceased civilians shot dead by the former, pro-Russian government in the 2014 Euromaidan protests was a harrowing experience and one which will stay with me. My visit to the Wall of the Heroes also left a profound impression. There I saw the photos of countless individuals – from both Ukraine and abroad – who have given their lives on the front line to protect Ukraine’s democracy in the face of more than a decade of unrelenting Russian hostility.

Elsewhere, amid the air raid sirens and eerie stillness of the government quarter, Ukrainian ministers and officials continue to work frantically to keep their country in the fight after three years of full-scale war with Russia.

Ukraine’s resolve to continue the fight and make Putin pay remains steadfast. Their politicians are trying to work through the implications of President Trump’s daily pronouncements on the conflict. All the while the British government has rightly remained clear that the UK’s support for Ukraine remains unwavering and that all European nations must now step up their defence spending and support. My visit only deepened my determination to support our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, so they can decide their own destiny.