Charles Moore in Ukraine: ‘The people are traumatised, bloodied and bewildered by sadistic violence’

The original Feeding of the Five Thousand was, of course, achieved by Jesus, but it happens today in Ukraine without direct divine intervention. It is accomplished by Siobhan’s Trust, a small British charity, conceived in Scotland, operating from Lviv, and led by several men wearing kilts, and Miss University of Ukraine 2017.

Every day at 10am or so, if you happen to be in the middle of some Ukrainian town ravaged by the Russian invasion and its aftermath, you may see three lorries appear. One will probably be emblazoned “The Sedbergh Wolf”, supplied, through Jozef Mycielski, the chief fundraiser, by Sedbergh School in Cumbria. Another, “The Gazza”, is provided by St James’s Place, the wealth management advisers. The third is “Artemis”. A fourth, “Blossom”, is currently being repaired near, of all places, Auschwitz.

These vehicles will then form three sides of a square, so that, if a shell drops nearby, the spread of any shrapnel is contained. The fourth side will be filled by the trestle tables from which the thousands may be fed.

Each lorry has been specially repurposed in Yorkshire to contain five or six gas-fired pizza ovens. A skilled operator, the chief of whom is called Harry Scrymgeour, can heat three oven-ready pizzas at any one time. Each pizza takes 90 seconds to cook. Alerted by the police through social media, a hungry crowd will already have gathered. Within 20 minutes of arrival, the volunteers will be placing pizzas into outstretched hands (children’s, mostly, first). Several hundred pizzas per hour can be consumed, the process often continuing into the dark. The pizzas themselves (20,000 a month) come free from Ital Pizza in Bologna. Recently, the German Dr Oekter company contributed 365,000 more.

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In my brief stay with the trust in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, the only two words of Ukrainian I learnt were “cherha”, which means “queue”, and “haryachyy”, which means “hot”. Wait patiently in the former, and the pizza that you eventually get will not burn your hand. I sometimes had to shout both these words at the eager children to restore order.

The trust’s leaders wear a kilt whose tartan they have designed in the Ukrainian colours of blue and yellow. This week, they were joined by a young piper named Sasha Murray-Threipland, in his red and black Murray tartan. Once the crowd was flowing nicely, he piped up and down beside them, inspiring laughter and wonder in the children and starting tears in the eyes of some of the babushkas who, with their men usually absent fighting, dead or wounded, are suffering so much.

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There is the sheer poverty too. Many pensioners are living on the equivalent of £32 a month. In the still half-deserted town of Izium, scarcely a single building is undamaged by Russian artillery. Unemployment is high. It is neither surprising nor reprehensible that many, having queued once for a pizza, then go round to the back of the queue for a second.

Siobhan’s Trust was formed in memory of Harry Scrymgeour’s mother Siobhan, the Countess of Dundee, a generous-hearted woman who died prematurely four years ago. In its small beginnings, it concentrated in the Dundee area, but as soon as Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24 February last year, that changed.

David Fox-Pitt, a close relation of Siobhan, who founded the trust, is, by trade, an events manager. He knows how to get something going fast. Moved by the plight of Ukrainian refugees. he drove east with a few friends and what equipment he could carry, including a wood-burning pizza oven, to the Polish border at Medyka. There, he literally pitched his tent.

The short online film of the kilted Fox-Pitt, serving soup and hot drinks to the huddled masses as they crossed in sub-zero temperatures, showed the need to relieve suffering on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War. One sad night, early in the tragedy, a party of 70 orphan children arrived, tearful and confused. At least there was a hot pizza for each of them.

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When I saw this makeshift operation from afar 15 months ago, I privately feared it would quietly fade away, as good intentions often do. The opposite has happened. The charity’s work has exploded and now, even with so much voluntary labour and so many pizzas donated, costs £5,000 a day to run.

Siobhan’s Trust’s capacity to address need directly, fast and in difficult areas has ensured its growth. On the days I saw the pizza show in action, air-raid sirens sounded from time to time, but were almost drowned out by the music (“Always look on the bright side of life”, “Trouble, oh trouble, set me free”) played to accompany the feeding. “The crowd looks at us,” says Fox-Pitt, “and we just keep going.”

Through the liaison work of Nina Yevtushenko, the ex-beauty queen and former influencer, the trust is guided each day by the police towards reasonably safe places to go. Earlier this month, however, the Russians stepped up their shelling of numerous towns and cities, chiefly in the east and south. The charity’s workers heard the whoosh of the missiles that killed more than 20 people in Uman: if you want to reach the need, you have to accept some danger. They are uncomplaining, but they do get tired. Tom Hughes, the trust’s country coordinator, has been in Ukraine for 14 continuous months, except for one week back home. Most days, his work does not end till 10pm or later, seven days a week. Most nights, his sleep is broken by sirens and explosions.

Because of the war, you cannot fly in or out of Ukraine, so, through two days of road travel from east to west, I had plenty of time to reflect on what I had seen of Siobhan’s Trust and its mission to “Make pizza, not war”.

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I noticed several things. One is the camaraderie of adversity. Here was a motley crew of volunteers, chiefly British, but also from Zimbabwe, Sweden, the United States, Venezuela, Spain and Ukraine. They ranged from men in their 70s to Olya, a 21-year-old Ukrainian volunteer, who turned up one day uninvited and has never left. It is funny and moving to find such mixed company united in a common purpose.

Another is the way in which the charity mimics, in a humanitarian context, the adaptability of the Ukrainian people in war. They keep beating the Russians by being cleverer, quicker and bolder. Good charities enter into that spirit. The Ukrainian people, seeing it, respond warmly. If I pick up one message from conversations, whether with policy experts, soldiers or the poor people in the pizza queue, it is the very high value they set on our help, not only for vital material reasons, but because it makes them proud.

This is a traumatised people, bloodied and bewildered by sadistic, unprovoked violence. It really matters to them to know that our shared civilisation wants to help defeat their oppressors.

One day last week, after a relatively low level of pizza production in quite a small village, Siobhan’s Trust took time off in Kharkiv. Nina’s connections opened the enormous 1,500-seat opera house which has not had a single concert since the invasion began. Sacha came in with his bagpipes. He played them to an empty auditorium. Then, standing on the roof beside an unexploded (and disabled) Russian missile, he played “Highland Cathedral” to the crowd below. Finally, having bumped into Natasha, a Kharkiv violinist who happened to be practising in the building, he and she went into the park and improvised.

Sacha emphasised to me that his piped rendering of the Ukrainian national anthem was not particularly impressive. But, in this case, for the cheering people of Ukraine, it was surely the thought that counted.

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