2 weeks Ago By Alex Cole-Hamilton
This was a cross-party enterprise – I was joined by two Lib Dem MPs, Angus MacDonald and Danny Chambers, Labour MSP Paul Sweeney and Conservative Dr Robert Kilgour. All told our team of ten drove for 35 hours across seven countries. After emerging from the Channel Tunnel we swapped drivers every three hours, stopping for junk food and coffee.
We hit rush hour in Antwerp and followed the sunrise east over the fields of Poland. On crossing the border, the first thing that strikes you is the Orthodox churches, they are everywhere and punctuate the landscape with their brilliant domes of gold. But as you take in the majesty of these structures, the size and scale of the freshly dug graveyards around them brings the immediacy of the war back with jarring clarity.
There are new graves everywhere. They are marked with Ukrainian flags, but also flags of red and black. These represent the blood of the glorious defenders seeping into the dark soil of Ukraine .
But the church graveyards are as nothing to a park in central Lviv called the Field of Mars. Think of Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh – in 2022 the Field of Mars was a central city park. But it has been repurposed as a cemetery for the fallen heroes of the Eastern front.
Graves stretch as far as the eye can see and funerals are conducted there every morning by city officials. There were three ceremonies on the morning of our arrival alone. Lviv is beautiful and its citizens live defiantly normal lives.
It’s only when you’re given your air raid briefing that you remember this isn’t a normal city. Sirens sound almost every day and at 9am each morning the whole of Ukraine falls silent in memory of the fallen. We observed our period of silence at the National Rehabilitation Centre for combat veterans.
In the corridors and day rooms of this immaculate facility we met the heroes of Ukraine. Most were in wheelchairs, almost all were missing a limb. As we stepped into the gym one guy was exercising with a tension band, he had no feet and only charred stumps for hands, but he was clearly determined to recover his strength.
Each of them has long internal journey back to civilian life ahead of them. On leaving the hospital complex we visited the Mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi. He took us through the complexities of running a city in wartime.
Given the hand-wringing that went on as Scotland’s councils set their budgets for this year, just imagine having to allocate 20 per cent of your entire local authority budget for weaponry to be sent to the front every year, so it goes in Lviv. Our hosts then took us to a drone factory. An Aladdin’s Cave of soldering kits, half finished prototypes and stacks of completed drones, this factory alone produces 10,000 “kamikaze” drones a month, each capable of carrying 3kg of high explosives into the sides of Russian tanks or troop positions.
Our final stop was to a military base deep in the forest where we made a ceremonial presentation of the ambulances to the brigade commander. They will be in service at the field hospitals of the front within days. As he welcomed us in Ukrainian his voice audibly cracked with emotion.
This trip has changed me. It has brought home the enormity of what the people of Ukraine are trying to achieve, but also how this is all happening on our doorstep. We are just three tanks of diesel and one set of road tolls away from a conflict that will define our century.
Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes. Alex Cole-Hamilton is Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and MSP for Edinburgh Western.
