Ukraine fights for all of us who believe in freedom from oppression - Christa Ackroyd

He had the contacts and the wherewithal to not only find a way in but to try to help. What I witnessed I recorded in this column at the time.

But as the news at present centres very much on the politics of war, largely on America and Russia with Ukraine very much on the sidelines, it is worth reminding us of what I saw while remembering things have got much worse since.

War may be ended around the negotiation table but make no mistake it begins with an aggressor and what ever you have read, whatever the US president would have you believe, there was only one aggressor, Russia.

It is a journey I will never forget. We had flown into Poland to meet humanitarian organisations who had within hours set up makeshift camps to help those fleeing the country into which Vladimir Putin had illegally sent his bombs and his soldiers.

But my host wanted to ensure safe passage deep into Ukraine for the thousands upon thousands of pounds worth of food and water he had garnered within hours of the invasion. And so he asked me if I was in.

Was I prepared to cross the border with our interpreter to meet with Ukrainian officials, to find safe routes into a country where the men were already fighting as the women and children fled? I said I was.

Approaching the Ukrainian border at dawn we said nothing except we were there to meet family and we were allowed through.

As we waited for our passports to be checked I was puzzled by a collection of wheelchairs, prams and flasks at the side of the road.

Once into Ukraine makeshift rubble barriers blocked much of our path as men in uniform carrying guns demanded to know why we were there. Our translator provided documentation in the form of emails from the town hall in Lviv. They were satisfied and let us continue.

At first light we saw them. Women and children joined by the elderly and infirm, some dragging a small suitcase, others apparently with nothing, walking towards the border. Many of them in tears, others hugging their men folk as they said goodbye.

One man in uniform held a small child kissing her repeatedly on the head, putting her down picking her up again, an act of unbearable pain repeated at least a dozen times.

Through the back window as we drove away I saw his wife and daughter walk to safety as he went in the opposite direction to join his comrades in arms.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. As the sirens sounded and we approached Lviv, queues and queues of people snaked towards the railway station.

We later learned a hundred thousand were leaving every day. At a government refugee centre documentation was being processed and, due to the efficiency and downright goodness of the Polish people and humanitarian organisations on the other side, instructions were given as to where to go and who to see.

And then it dawned on me, the wheelchairs and the buggies, the flasks of hot drinks even pots of food had been left by way of welcome from ordinary folks on the safe side of the border. The Polish people understood Russian occupation.

The next 24 hours were a whirlwind. Government officials provided warehousing for the food and clothing frantically being gathered at the hub set up in Halifax.

And then the desperate phone call from a medic at the nearby military training base hit by Russian bombs just a few hours before where hundreds had died and hundreds more lay injured asking for urgent medical supplies because they simply couldn’t cope. And so it went on.

I will never forget spending the night in a hotel with a young girl, a relative of the proud Ukrainian bringing her to safety in Yorkshire.

On a makeshift shrine to her country in a simple room above a shop in Poland she placed photographs of her family, brothers who were fighting, a mother and sister who refused to join her saying they would rather die than leave their home and a father too old to fight but too proud strong and obstinate to leave his country. And it is that strength that has kept Ukraine fighting.

During the three years which have followed Saving Ukraine in Yorkshire has provided hundreds of thousands of pounds of aid going deep into the war-torn country.

They have sent ambulances, four-wheel drive vehicles and medical supplies and visited schools, hospitals and devastated towns and villages, their drivers risking their own lives to save others.

And now we are told it need never have happened. That the man who has had to beg, borrow but not steal for his country to even survive is not an elected leader but a dictator who started the war and could have prevented it.

Let me briefly fact check some of the claims made by President Trump against Volodymyr Zelensky. A dictator?

Firstly he was elected democratically with 73 per cent of the votes. No elections can be held while the country is at war according to the Ukrainian constitution. He has guaranteed there will be one the moment the war is over.

He only has four per cent support among his people? Recent polls show support for him is still well over 50 per cent. He started or could have stopped the war? In the days proceeding the Russian invasion Zelensky offered talks to avoid conflict. They were rejected.

And America needs to take over the minerals as reparation because they have given three times as much as Europe. In fact the figures are nearer £109bn from Europe and £95bn from the States according to the Kiel Institute for the World’s Economy.

Russia far from “wanting” to “stop the savage barbarianism’” (a claim by Trump) now occupies one fifth of a country that is not theirs to own.

Three years on I often wonder about the man hugging his daughter as he went to fight for his country and for democracy. I hope he will live to see her again.

I support Ukraine, its president and its people all day every day. Ukraine is not a country to be carved up and given away while being stripped of its assets. And so it fights on.

And in doing so it fights for all of us who believe in freedom from oppression, or put more simply in what is absolutely right and against all that is totally wrong.