The OFT Ukraine Humanitarian Mission is a people-to-people humanitarian rescue and relief effort that will deliver all forms of humanitarian aid to mostly children and rural Ukrainians who are trapped in dangerous settings in or near combat zones where they are preyed on daily by Russian military and Russian-backed separatist terrorists, or where they are stuck in isolated locations where they are unable to get international aid which is primarily distributed in Ukraine’s largest cities.
Another special component of this Mission will focus rescue efforts on the children of rural Ukraine, many of whom have already tragically lost one or both parents to the war. Thousands of these orphans are spread across central and southern Ukraine, huddled in basements, schools, hospitals and other makeshift shelters, and lacking the ability to get to safer locations. Our Mission will work with Ukrainian officials to locate and extricate these children (and their families if they have any) and safely transport them to safehouses and child-care facilities in the safer northern-third of the country. Regardless of who else we serve with our Mission, the children of Ukraine will always be our highest priority.
Otherwise, for those people who need to remain in their homes or communities, the aid that we will be delivering will include basic food, water, clothing, medical supplies and services, along with specialized aid intended for children and their families or others with special needs. With core operational funding coming from the Olson Family Trust, this Mission will allow compassionate Americans and others worldwide to donate funds or aid supplies knowing that 100% of their contributions will go directly to these imperiled Ukrainians.
Being a small but nimble private aid group, our Mission has the ability to identify the neediest of Ukrainians at any given time and expeditiously redirect our aid efforts to them. For example, a recent modification to our Mission plan re-focused our efforts on the Ukrainian farmers, who have borne the brunt of Russia’s genocide.
The Russian invasion and subsequent genocide have hit Ukraine’s rural residents especially hard as not only have tens-of-thousands of them been killed, but their homes, crops, livestock, roads & bridges and agricultural facilities and equipment and their farms themselves – have been totally destroyed. Seeing as Ukrainians rely on their own crops for the vast majority of their everyday food – and seeing as Ukraine is “the bread-basket of Europe” – the agricultural losses incurred here not only threaten everyday Ukrainians with impending starvation, but the loss of these vital crops will soon expand this threat of starvation to Africa and other parts of Europe.
By specifically timing our Mission for the summer months – which is another adaptive measure that we have instituted since the invasion began – we will be delivering aid when the Ukrainians need it most, especially our aid targeting Ukraine’s agricultural communities. This time of year includes the harvesting of summer food crops – at least that which survived ongoing Russian attacks – which are the Ukrainians’ primary source of food to get through the long Ukrainian winter. Also, late summer is when next year’s extremely important winter wheat is planted; without our efforts, the looming loss of the 2023 wheat and other grain crop harvests will result in greater food shortages and equally important, in Ukraine’s inability to export crops which are the backbone of Ukraine’s global trade system.
Another valuable benefit of our adaptive decision to conduct our Mission’s primary relief and rescue operations in the summer and fall months is that our aid will be delivered to Ukrainians literally when they need it most. As happens with every major international humanitarian crisis, the international public’s interest – and along with it their support – has waned significantly as each month passes.
Whether this is measured by merely the reduction in news reporting from Ukraine or by the marked decrease in amount and timing of aid deliveries to Ukraine, the bottom line is that this reduction in aid and attention is now corresponding with (and some will argue that it has caused) the war’s momentum shift in favor of the Russians. In-turn, with the Russian’s expanding their violent occupation, this has allowed the Russian forces to expand their brutal genocide upon more and more Ukrainians…which in-turn significantly increases the need for more and more aid, but that is now occurring at a time when that humanitarian aid is simply not there in sufficient amounts.
Which is where we step in. Not only will we be delivering aid to the neediest Ukrainians at a time when this perhaps represents the only aid they will receive, but in adapting to this newly emerging need our Mission has now taken on a new additional focus. While our Mission continues to blunt the horrific consequences of Russia’s brutal occupation, our Mission‘s adaptive strategy will also allow us to integrate one-the-ground fact-finding efforts to target documenting the tragically-apparent War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity that the Russians and their state-sponsored terrorists are committing daily.
This reporting will go to all international parties engaged in policing international criminal acts, but we will also publish these daily reports on our Mission website, “OFTUkraineMission.com” and “OFTUkraineMission.org”. We believe that by providing new evidence of these horrific crimes, along with publishing more unfiltered reports on other elements of the war that have dramatically increased the suffering experienced the Ukrainian people – that we will once again elevate this enormously important topic to the forefront of not just media coverage, but also to past donors to Ukraine and future supporters of our Mission – and we believe that America and the international community will rise up and meet this challenge, and bring some degree of hope to the embattled Ukrainian people.
All of this aid work represents the core mission of our efforts:
“to bring the most-needed aid to the most-needy Ukrainians.”