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The tragic dismemberment of a foreign volunteer

Updated: Feb 3



I knew a volunteer based in Kramatorsk, called Eddy, a British citizen, who was working to evacuate civilians from front line towns and villages in the Donbas area of Ukraine.


He was a fundamentally decent person, devoted to humanitarian causes. He went to some of the most dangrous frontline locations to help civilians who were suffering from relentless Russian shelling and drone attacks.


Kramatorks is one of the most dangerous cities in free Ukraine, close to the Russian front lines.


Eddy was undertaking a humanitarian mission to Pokrovsk, to help evacuate civilians. Pokrovsk is one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces being just a few kilometres away.


Eddy was driving an armoured vehicle on the fateful day, 30 January 2025, when it was struck by a Russian drone. Eddy was critically injured, losing both his left leg and and his left arm. It was astonishing that he survived, not bleeding out. Now he has to live with the consequences of his injuries, that will be life changing, and can only be testament to his bravery.


It will take him at least a year to recover. He is currently in a hospital in an eastern Ukrainian city, in simple circumstances, and he is shortly to be transported to a hospital in another Ukrainian city. Then circumstances must be made for his repatriation to England, and then he will need to get used to prosthetics. This is all better undertaken in the United Kingdom; but then there is the serious psychological injuries he will have to come to terms with.


Eddy has established a GoFundMe website for those seeking to contribute to his rehabilitation may wish to assist with, and the photo above is taken from that website which was published with his consent and contains more detail than this article can do - in both English and Ukrainian.


If you feel able to contribute to his inevitably long process of physical and psychological rehabilitation, please help by using the GoFundMe website below.


Thank you for your encouragement and support. Eddy is one of the great heroes of the war in Ukraine: a volunteer, risking his life for others, and ultimately paying a grave penalty for his generosity and braveness.



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Post scriptum. Since initially publishing this article, we have come under various kinds of pressure to remove this article from the Lviv Herald website. We want to emphasise that all the facts published in this article, including the photograph accompanying the article, have been published first, on social media and including in the GoFundMe webpage above, by the injured person himself, whose full name has not been published in the article above. The matter has also been reported on the Ukrainian media 1+1 website. There is therefore no invasion of privacy or other grounds to require us to remove this article, which is just a repetition of matters made public by the injured person himself in the course of his own fundraising exercises. We wish the injured person all the very best in his recovery and adaptation to his new life after these devastating life-changing injuries.

Copyright (c) Lviv Herald 2024-25. All rights reserved.  Accredited by the Armed Forces of Ukraine after approval by the State Security Service of Ukraine.

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