Run 39 – Brass Band Aid – August 2025

Before heading out on our latest run, there was the small matter of raising funds for the fuel and ferry etc! Dee Johnson, one of our big supporters, ran a coffee morning for us at the Belmont Centre in Uckfield – an amazing sum of over £800 was raised which, together with our own sale of Ukraine items, gave us close to £900 towards the run! Huge thanks to Dee for this amazing event which covers sone 80% of the run costs!
Thanks also to the “Brass Rascals”, a learner group from Uckfield Concert Brass, who entertained us at the start of the event. Here’s some pictures from the day:

We also had trips to visit another huge supporter of ours, Medi Tech Trust who provided a lot of medical related aid for our partners in Odesa plus incontinence pads for the Orphanage.

Next, it was a trip to our good friend “Wozza” down in Folkestone to collect uniform items for Zaporizhzhia and baby milk for the family of one of our air defence friends in Kropyvnytskyi.

Once everything was weighed and logged, customs forms were completed and on the 18th August, we set out from Dover to Dunkirk. Andy was delighted to have Tony back as co-driver for the trip!

After a fairly uneventful crossing and drive, it was time for our favourite game of Border Bingo!

It turned out to be a quick 1 hour to get through which left us with a few hours to sleep in the van until the end of curfew at 5am.
We then drove to Vinnitsya where we had a hotel stop for the night – huge thanks to our dear friend Valentyna Skoromets who kindly provided this for us and to her family who provided food for us as the hotel restaurant was closed for the night.
From here, it was a relatively short few hours drive to Kropyvnytskyi to meet up with Anton – we have got to know Anton, his family and the charity team really well and they kindly invited us to join them at a beach barbeque at a lake outside the city. This was a beautiful location to relax for an evening in the sun and a glorious sunset as you can see from the pictures below:

Our main delivery here was to our regular destination at the Orphanage – they make us feel so welcome when we visit and do a wonderful job of looking after over 150 children from 4 years old and upwards,

Once again, huge thanks to Dee Johnson and her network, Medi Tech Trust and member bands of Brass Band Aid for Ukraine whose contributions made up this big delivery!

As regular followers of what is happening right now in Ukraine will know, Shahed and FPV drone use has increased significantly in the Zaporizhzhia area in particular. For safety reasons, we now do not overnight either there or in Odesa and base ourselves in Kropyvnytskyi, making day trips to each of those locations. It’s around 5-6 hours each way so in comparison to what we have to drive to get here, they are just down the road!
Our first day trip was to meet our friends at the charity “I Will Help” in Odesa. Thanks once again to Medi Tech Trust, Dee Johnson and the Brass Band Aid folks, we had just under half a ton of aid for them! This also included some laptop computers, donated by John Leggott College, via Michael Kobarenko, with new hard drives donated and installed by Andy – those old PC Support skills from over 25 years ago still come in useful!

As seems to often be the case, we had a trouble free visit and were out of the city before the start of the nightly air raid sirens.
An early night and up early the next day to visit 2 teams in Zaporizhzhia. First up, it was Jimmy & Alena – we sadly can’t take them too much as they support mainly military and the customs process requires signatures from end recipients which they cannot get easily. However, I did have 2 packages from one of Jimmy’s supporters in Manchester which contained much needed aid for front line troops. I also had some litter pickers for Alena’s ecofriendly.zap charity and a couple of bottles of bubble liquid! (You’ll need to watch all of the video to know why!).

The second aid drop was to another regular, the “Himars” charity. This included 5 big sacks of military uniform donated by “Wozza” along with chocolates donated by some of his network. (Names are in a later video!).
Nataly, who runs this charity, requested 4 laptops which we were able to provide from the ones donated by John Leggott College. Here’s the video of our day with the 2 teams:

Once back in Kropyvnytskyi, Andy was delighted to receive a video of his old van, now refurbished, just before it went down to the Kharkiv region where it is now saving lives.

Before returning to the border, we had some more down time with Anton and the team:

Whilst we travelled back, our contacts were already starting to distribute the aid we gave them! This short video is from one of the teams that requested laptops in the Zaporizhzhia area:

Whilst we were in Odesa, the van developed an issue with the DPF – whilst not a showstopper, it does reduce acceleration and our scanner to diagnose this unfortunately was a cheap one which didn’t have the feature to regenerate the DPF.
This didn’t hold us back much and we set out to get to the border before curfew, which we achieved!

Just before leaving, there was time to record a thank you video:

We arrived to a queue and settled down to what turned out to be quite quick on the Ukrainian side. However, the Polish side was a different story.

Once across the border, we had a different route than normal – as Andy was conducting a band in Schmallenburg, Germany, over the weekend, Tony went home by plane from Berlin airport. From there, Andy was due to head direct to Leipzig to pick up some aid from his employers, Aerea9 Lyceum.
Plans changed slightly during the course of the day as an urgent task needed to be completed before Andy got home. Instead of just going to the office to collect the aid, Andy booked a hotel just outside Leipzig and went in to the office to do a few hours of his day job! It was lucky that this urgent work came up at exactly the same time as he was to be in the office area anyway!

Area9 have kindly donated 5 office desks which will go o a school that was hit by rockets plus 2 iMac PC’s which will be used to support the Digital Awareness Training that “I Will Help” are delivering to refugees in Odesa.
My final thank you video was made after leaving the Leipzig office.