Bath Rotarian Anna Beria recently returned from a personal study tour visit to Ukraine, during which she met with fellow Rotarians from several Clubs in the country.
The Rotary Club of Bath has been supporting humanitarian efforts in Ukraine since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion by Russia in February 2022.
The Club launched an immediate appeal to raise funds, and helped in the creation of the local “Friends of Oleksandriya” group, a conduit for significant donations for generators, and transport, for the city-region of Oleksandriya in central Ukraine.
Anna’s first stop was in Lviv, where she met Leicester-born, Ukrainian-raised Rotarian, Borys Bodnar, who has become one of the central figures in the international humanitarian relief effort, and Greg Brock, a former professor of Soviet and Russian economics, now a member of the Lviv Rotary Club Unity: a so-called passport club open to international Rotarians living in the city.
From Lviv, Anna travelled north to Chernihiv, close to both the Russian and Belarussian borders, and one of the first cities in the crosshairs of the 2022 invasion, but never captured.
Anna’s final destination was Kyiv, where she met with “two more remarkable Rotarians”, as she describes them: Sergii Zavadskyi, a founding member of the Rotary Club of Kyiv -City, and Rostyslav Lucach, a member and past President of the Rotary Cub of Kyiv-Capital. Sergii, a past Rotary District Governor, has coordinated major local humanitarian projects, including the provision of modular homes for families whose homes have been destroyed by the war. Rostyslav’s Club is very active supporting local schools, hospitals and providing summer camps for young people, and has addressed Rotary Clubs across the USA and beyond since 2022.
Anna took with her pennants from Bath, and exchanged these with the Ukrainian Rotary Clubs she met. Those given back in exchange have been formally presented back to the Bath Club, and will take pride of place with the table-top Ukrainian flag, which the Club continues to toast at its lunches each month, as it has done since February 2022.