How a Toronto charity is helping this Ukrainian aid worker feed thousands of refugees

Valeriia Vershynina says she never thought she'd have to flee an onrushing army twice in eight years.

She was one of hundreds of thousands who had to leave the Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk when Russian-backed separatists seized it back in 2014. She ended up in the capital, Kyiv.

But now, Russia's latest military onslaught has forced her to flee again — this time to Lviv in western Ukraine. The aid worker says she knew when Russian shells starting exploding in Kyiv that she had to get her 10-year-old daughter as far away as possible, but she felt she also had a duty to her country. 

"My responsibility, as a citizen of Ukraine, is to stay with Ukraine and fight," said Vershynina, who was a commercial lawyer before fleeing Donetsk and is now a program manager for the Ukrainian organization Charity Foundation Stabilization Support Services.

GlobalMedic, a non-governmental organization headquartered thousands of kilometres away in Toronto, is helping Vershynina's group run a program called Feed Lviv, which provides meals made by local chefs to refugees who enter the city, which has yet to be attacked by Russia's military.

"We're a very seasoned organization. We're not new," said Rahul Singh, executive director of GlobalMedic. "We've run 240 operations. We've worked in 81 countries.

"This is not our first war. I'm hoping it's our last."

'A very complex operation'

Singh's organization has not only helped launch Feed Lviv, but has started other programs in what he calls a "very complex operation" to provide essentials like water purification and medical aid.

The help is sorely needed. On Tuesday, the United Nations refugee agency confirmed two million people have fled since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Most of them are women and children. The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, said Tuesday the city is struggling to feed and house the more than 200,000 refugees filling up its sport halls, schools and other buildings.

"We know when we run those programs, we're doing the right thing. But it's still heartbreaking to hear the stories of what people leave behind," said Singh, who first launched Ukrainian humanitarian aid projects in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.

"I'm pissed. I want to help more people," he said. "We just need more access, bigger trucks, and more movement."

The United Nations human rights office said Tuesday it's confirmed 474 civilian deaths in Ukraine since the war began. The number of confirmed civilian injuries now stands at 861, though the actual figures are likely considerably higher.

Vershynina says she knows where Ukrainians' pain is coming from.

"They can't believe that it's happening. Some of them are angry," she said. 

"Many people have no plan ... In this moment, they realize they have no money to rent a flat, have no money to buy food."

She says she's aware Lviv could be the Russians' next target and she's prepared to get her daughter and her own mother out of Ukraine. But she says she'll stay behind with her husband to protect her country from an invasion that really started years ago when she was driven from the place she still calls home.

"Even after seven years of being displaced, if people ask me where I from, I always say that I'm from Donetsk."