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Dressed in a hoodie and sporting a mullet, former Tory MP Johnny Mercer did not want to be noticed when stepping onto the platform at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi railway station after a gruelling 20-hour journey from Poland.
Despite Kyiv recovering from “The Living Dead scenes” witnessed in the weeks after the outbreak of the war, the father-of-three said he did not want to take any chances as he started a recent seven-day mission in the war-torn country.
The city may have “come alive again” since those early days of the war, the former veterans minister said - but the threat remained.
Sirens sounding every night served as a reminder of the danger to the 44-year-old, who stayed in a hotel in the curfew-controlled capital, some 330 miles from the country’s front line with Russia.
“The alarm goes off and you’re supposed to go into the bomb shelter,” Mr Mercer told the The Independent. “But there’s a bit of fatigue with all that, so you sort of pull the pillow over your head and hope it hasn’t got your number on it.”
One night, a drone landed in a garden close to the hotel, said the ex-army captain, who was quick to add that the Ukrainian military was doing a “great job” in shooting the drones down in the sky.
Mr Mercer was on a visit to help the veterans ministry and charities set up a platform to offer work and health services to the country’s war veterans. While there are currently 1.2 million veterans in Ukraine, after the war it’s believed there will be up to six million.
On invite from Ukraine’s veterans minister Nataliya Kalmykova, Mr Mercer spent time at injured soldiers’ rehabilitation centres, such as the Tytanovi Centre in Kyiv, where amputees provided a raw reminder of the ongoing war with Russia.
The army had a high proportion of amputees due to the inability to get injured soldiers off the battlefield quickly, Mr Mercer said. Many had ave also suffered facial injuries caused by FPV drones, which are small quadcopters usually armed with warheads.
Recently, one company commander was deployed with 132 men, but then came back with only 30.
“The visceral nature of the injuries is quite intense but their spirit is remarkable and I love working with them,” said Mr Mercer. “The stuff they go through is unheard of, but they would say they don’t have a choice. It’s their homeland, it’s their family.”
The work in Ukraine marks a year of change of career path for Mr Mercer, who lost his Plymouth Moor seat to Labour’s Fred Thomas at last July’s general election.
His heavy involvement with veterans during his time in government means he still receives daily calls asking for help, which is why he says is keen to help in Ukraine, while also working on plans for a veterans’ support platform in the UK this summer.
And he wants to open an exchange programme for UK veterans to visit Ukraine, including Afghanistan ex-servicemen and women who, he said, can share their experience of using prosthetics in everyday challenges.
Over the past few weeks, hopes for peace in Ukraine have increased. On Friday, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met for their first direct peace talks, but there is still no breakthrough in sight.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who stayed away from Friday’s talks, has held fast to his longstanding demands for Ukraine to cede territory and abandon its NATO membership ambitions - terms rejected by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
On the ground in Ukraine, Mr Mercer said Mr Zelensky’s position was shared among his people.
He said: “In Ukraine you realise that Zelensky cannot possibly give up as much as he's expected to give up at the moment they've sacrificed too much they've given too much and the people of Ukraine just won't accept it.
“It's not him [Zelensky] being belligerent or stubborn, it's him being realistic. I think everyone wants to finish the war but it's got to be done in the right way otherwise it's never going to stop.”
English (US) ·