Prince Harry visited Kyiv on Friday at the invitation of the Ukrainian government with a team from his Invictus Games Foundation to detail new initiatives for supporting the rehabilitation of Ukraine’s war-wounded.
In an interview with British outlet The Guardian during an overnight train journey to Ukraine’s capital, the Duke of Sussex said that he wanted to do “everything possible” to help the “recovery process” of people who had been involved in defending Ukraine.
Founded as an initiative of The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry in 2014, the Invictus Games Foundation offers a pathway to recovery for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women.
“We can continue to humanize the people involved in this war and what they are going through. We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds,” he said. “I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitized to what has been going on.”
The Duke of Sussex, who served 10 years in the British Army, last visited Ukraine in April, when he took a trip to Lviv’s Superhumans Center, an orthopedic clinic which specializes in treating and rehabilitating war personnel and civilians.
Prince Harry said that he had since bumped into Olga Rudnieva, the founder and CEO of the Superhumans Center, on the streets of New York.
“It was a chance meeting and I asked her what I could do to help,” Prince Harry explained. “She said, ‘the biggest impact you have is coming to Kyiv.’”
“In Lviv, you don’t see much of the war. It is so far west. This is the first time we will see the real destruction of the war,” the prince said.
A video posted to Instagram by Ukrainian Railways shows Rudnieva greeting the prince as he disembarked the train – and gifting him a podstakannik, a silver holder for a glass used to drink tea, as a gesture of thanks for his visit.
Over the course of his trip, Prince Harry will spend time with 200 veterans, meet Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and visit the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War.
His trip to Kyiv follows an announcement on Wednesday, Sept. 10 that the Sussex’s charitable foundation, Archewell, had donated $500,000 to initiatives supporting injured children from Ukraine and Gaza.
The foundation said that the funds will assist the World Health Organization with medical evacuations and will fund work developing prosthetics for young people.
The UK’s newly appointed Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, also visited Kyiv on Friday in her first overseas visit since taking office.
Meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and senior Ukrainian officials, she announced a £142 million ($192 million) winter aid package to support Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and frontline communities.
Cooper also announced a raft of 100 new sanctions aiming to cut off Russia’s economy and military resources, saying that the UK’s support for Kyiv was “unwavering and stronger than ever.”