British Expeditionary
Aid & Rescue
UKRAINE
ABOUT US
British Expeditionary Aid & Rescue's Founder and Chief Executive, Elizabeth, is a British technology start-ups director. With a Second World War family legacy - her grandfather having served in the British Special Forces (SOE) and her Polish grandmother having been forced to leave her homeland - it felt important that she act and respond to Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine.
So, ten days after the full scale invasion, she left her career in technology and drove alone to Ukraine, where she started evacuating vulnerable people across the border. She only expected to be in Ukraine for a few weeks, but in the event stayed for 3 years. After witnessing the constraints on large international organisations, she decided to found an independent, quick-response unit. Rejecting bureaucracy and performative aid, she brought her experience in start-ups to bear by executing strategic operations quickly and efficiently and solving critical civic catastrophes.
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The teams included men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds, both British and Ukrainian, depending on the project being executed.
We worked to simply get things done, without fuss or fanfare, and solve the most devastating issues facing people affected by the conflict.
BORDER EVACUATION
Elizabeth spent her first few weeks in Ukraine, in March 2022, evacuating women, children and grandparents from Lviv to Poland. She witnessed the fearful mass exodus and droves of people standing at the border waiting to cross, freezing in the snow.
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She quickly became aware of the importance for the Ukrainian people to see that there were foreigners in Ukraine working to help them and the specific significance of British support.
CRITICAL AID
In Lviv, Elizabeth met several other Brits and together started running supplies to hospitals and distribution centres in Kyiv, which was then frontline under direct Russian assault and an almost empty city.
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In early April 2022, the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin were liberated from occupation and the Russian atrocities of civilian massacres were reported internationally. The team immediately took supplies to people who had been cut off from food for 40 days. We witnessed the resilience of the people who had survived and the huge numbers of Ukrainian civilians driving in to help. However, we were shocked not to see a single international organisation present. This was what drove Elizabeth to form a fully independent response unit; British Expeditionary Aid & Rescue was born.
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With an expanded vehicle fleet, we went on to deliver critical supplies all along Ukraine's frontlines - across Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts.
FRONTLINE EVACUATION
In April 2022, we were asked to evacuate people from the eastern Donbas, who were bedridden or disabled and so were trapped in the face of the Russian advance.
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We spent the rest of 2022 evacuating vulnerable people and families from the Donbas frontline - Lysychansk, Bakhmut, Toretsk - operating up to 1km from the line of contact. We evacuated people on a daily basis, putting them on trains to central Ukraine.
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In early 2023, we relocated to the southern front, in order to evacuate people from the liberated section of Kherson oblast. Having survived 9 months of Russian occupation, these people had to flee their homes as the Russians were heavily shelling the territory that was no longer under their control.
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In total, we executed specialist evacuations for 400 people who were unable to evacuate themselves. The wider impact is unknown; evacuating these people often enabled their family members to also leave and escape Russian agression.
DRINKING WATER
Before being defeated and withdrawing from the southern Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts, the Russians tried to make it impossible for Ukrainian life to return. They shot down water towers and poisoned wells with dead dogs or their own deceased soldiers.
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In April 2023, we started to install 1000 litre water barrels in liberated villages and delivering drinking water to them. Then, in June 2023, the Russians destroyed the Nova Kakhovka Dam. Overnight, the resultant flooding contaminated the water supply of every village, town and city along the Dnipro River in Kherson oblast. Wells also started to test positive for Cholera; people were terrified and desperate. Within a matter of days, we went from delivering water to 1,000 people in 11 villages - to delivering water to 30,000 people across 36 villages, towns and cities. With a rapid expansion of the team, we delivered over half a million litres.
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We designed and implemented a self-sufficiency model, where we installed and gave water-transportation equipment to each of the villages, so they were no longer reliant on anyone else to bring them water. We liaised with local governments to ensure the villages' free access to safe wells. For Kherson city, we handed over our water deliveries to the official water utility, Vodakanal.
RECONSTRUCTION
Despite having worked across numerous frontline areas, we were shocked by the sheer level of destruction in the liberated parts of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts. The Russians had deliberately razed some villages to the ground, forcing every person who wasn't killed to flee.
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In September 2023, we started to rebuild villages that the Russians had attempted to erase. We hired local Ukrainian builders, both to ensure we had expertise of how to rebuild Ukrainian homes in a culturally sensitive manner and to create employment in an area where the work economy had been destroyed.
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We completed our final major reconstruction project, and our work in Ukraine as a whole, in December 2024.
PRESS COVERAGE
Our work has anonymously had international coverage by BBC News, The New York Times, Le Monde, Sky News, The Washington Post and in the award-winning documentary film Dear Beautiful Beloved
Podcast:
Click here to listen
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GALLERY
Our Final Project
CONTACT US
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We concluded our final project at the end of 2024 and so, following 3 years of work in Ukraine, we returned to the UK.
Our involvement in Ukraine continues, so should you wish to you are very welcome to contact us via the following email address:​
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