Ukraine Fundraiser

This Saturday will mark two years since Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine.

Since then an estimated half a million people have lost their lives, and the world has faced many other challenges including war in the middle east that risk Ukraine’s struggle being forgotten.

What hasn’t changed is that an illegal invasion, aimed at changing borders by force matters to New Zealand and every other country that depends on a rules based international order. The Ukrainians are not only fighting for their survival. They are also fighting for everyone’s freedom.

Since the invasion, we (Brooke and David) have hosted three fundraisers at La Vista restaurant in St Heliers. The proprietor, Nataliya Shchetkova, is a Ukrainian migrant with her own family caught in the conflict. We have raised over $120,000 NZD that has been used in Ukraine to purchase several reconnaissance drones, evacuation boats after the Kakhovka Dam was blown up and the region was flooded, and medevac vehicles along with other clothing and supplies.

We are enormously grateful to all who have contributed so far. This Friday we are hosting another fundraiser to mark the two-year anniversary on Saturday. We acknowledge this is very late notice, we too have been extremely busy and it can be easy to forget the Ukrainians’ plight.

We hope, notwithstanding the late notice, we hope you’ll be able to join us this Friday at noon for a lunch to raise funds for our partners in Ukraine. They pledge to use further funds raised for drones and medical equipment.

As with previous events, we will have a guest speaker giving insight into what is happening in Ukraine. Mikhailo Lavrovski is part of a medic unit with the Ukrainian Forces will address the lunch by Zoom, we are in the course of securing a Ukrainian Member of Parliament as a second speaker.

I hope you’ll be able to join us at short notice, please use the button below to register. As with previous fundraisers, we are using ACT’s payment system to collect the funds for convenience, however they will not be counted as a donation to ACT.

Funds raised from this fundraiser will be forwarded to our partners Maria Semykoz and Frederick Roeder who have used funds from our previous events. Maria’s father was killed by the Russian Army in the early weeks of the invasion, and she has appeared by video link at previous fundraisers. Together they have worked for the last two years to purchase supplies and send them to Ukrainian defenders. They pledge to use any funds raised from this fundraiser to purchase drones and medical equipment for those defenders. We hope you will join with us to support this cause.