One day, humanitarian volunteer Chris Tiller and I were merrily singing along to Sam Smith in a van on the way back from delivering food to a village near the Russian border. The next day, the van was damaged by Russian artillery and Chris found himself frantically saving the life of an elderly Ukrainian.

I’d been kindly hosted by war correspondent Sarah Ashton and by Dmytro – the latter having allowed me to stay in his parent’s Stalin-era apartment for three days, from where I was able to witness the full horrors of the damage inflicted upon Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city.

In this once vast and vibrant city, schools lie in ruins. Homes and cemeteries, hospitals and churches, shops, restaurants, entire markets – all have been scorched to cinders.

On one particular night, I was awoken by a loud blast that shattered the windows of the balcony beside my bed. The site that had been hit was the children’s playground below.

Invited to accompany U.S. pilot-turned-volunteer Chris Tiller on a supply trip in a small convoy of vans heading out to areas near the Russian border, the picturesque drive was broken up with intermittent burnt-out Russian tanks discarded by the roadside, and the thick columns of smoke that billowed up across the horizon as Ukrainian forces gave the invaders a mid-afternoon taste of their own medicine.

Arriving at Parkhomivka with the Renegade Relief Runners – a group, led by Chris and by Drew Luhovy, of warm and sprightly American humanitarian volunteers and a Ukrainian from Lviv – we were greeted by a warm crowd of villagers and a worryingly small food supply. A sack of potatoes lay beside a few bulk bags of dry pasta.

Yet by the time they’d left, the group had generously lined the walls with stacks of canned meats, long-life milk, and vegetables.

“Because of the war, people are out of jobs,” the local mayor told me. “No work, so no money for food. We are very grateful to humanitarian groups like this.”

Author with town mayor (R). (Photo Credit: Jay Beecher)

Waving goodbye to a smiling throng of villagers, Chris Tiller, Drew Luhovy and the rest of the Renegade Relief Runners team drove off in high spirits. I sat in the front with Chris, a pilot back in the U.S., who came here because he, like so many others, wanted to do whatever he could to ease the suffering of innocent Ukrainians facing the ongoing invasion by Putin and his rotten regime.

Bidding my farewells to the team and venturing over to the train station, within minutes I was forced to run inside on the instructions of a soldier due to what eerily sounded like rapid gunfire suddenly erupting from a nearby alleyway.

It wasn’t until the night train had almost arrived back at my base in Kyiv the following morning that I checked the news and found that, to my utter disbelief, the Renegade Relief Runners had needed to respond to the aftermath of a horrific incident.

This is Chris’s account of what happened:

“The team was visiting a restaurant in downtown Kharkiv. Once we had finished our meal, we were planning to head over to deliver some tourniquets to a military unit. As we were eating, we started to hear incoming artillery fire that sounded like it was getting closer.”

“All at once, as we were standing inside the restaurant, the windows shattered, the ground shook and we all ran up against the bar. Then another volley hit and I started grabbing people and dragging them behind the bar to get away from whatever might be coming.”

“After about a minute I heard Drew’s voice from inside the bar, shouting that there was a civilian outside who desperately needed triage.”

“Me and the team ran outside, and the scene was just complete carnage – debris everywhere. There was a coffee shop on fire. The restaurant directly next door must have taken a direct hit, which is probably what blew out our windows.”

“One person who was closest to the blast almost lost his foot and his right arm was completely gone. We started to work on him and realized we were right in a blast zone and needed to get away from the spot. So, we all picked him up and carried him over onto some grass.”

“Just as we set him down, another shell hit and we dove down under the tree. Then when the shelling stopped, we got to work.”

“Drew and I were primarily handling the wound and the rest of our team were providing support as well as triaging other people who had been injured in the blasts. They managed to save the lives of at least two other people by applying tourniquets to wounds that were anything from a piece of shrapnel that had gone through one lady’s calf, to a head wound, and another lady who had a piece of shrapnel that had taken out most of her thigh.”

“We were working on this one guy who needed everything. We used at least four tourniquets on him and Israeli bandages to keep in place all the gauze we’d put inside his torso cavity. To get the tourniquets onto the man’s leg, I had to cut off the remainder of his foot.”

“Once we’d stopped the bleeding on that side, I cut off his clothes to make sure there were no more external wounds. We found that his abdominal side by his hip bone had been hit by shrapnel pretty badly. We started packing that with blood stop powder and then packed some gauze into the wound and got an Israeli bandage around it.”

 

Screengrab of the team treating a seriously injured civilian.

“Meanwhile, Drew was busy working overtime on his right arm to stem the bleeding, while fellow volunteer Andrew slapped the man in the face and talked to him to keep him awake. “

“At some point the paramedics turned up. The guy was still awake but was grey and fading. I’ve never seen someone that color before.”

“They took him away to the hospital, so we then sprinted over to our vans and noticed they’d taken a lot of shrapnel. I turned the key in the first one and nothing happened. We got into the second van. The seats were covered in glass and shrapnel had gone through pretty much every window.”

 

One of the team’s vans after an artillery attack. (Photo Credit: Jay Beecher)

The team are now attempting to have their vehicles repaired, and donations to this and their ongoing phenomenal humanitarian work in Ukraine can be made by visiting their Facebook page.

Before escaping from the chaos to safety, the Renegade Relief Runners even stopped to tow a Ukrainian military vehicle that had been rendered unusable by the blast.

Finally arriving at a local garage, Chris and Drew regrouped with the other men, none of whom had fully come to terms with the magnitude of their heroic and selfless act.

“I sat down and smoked about half a pack of cigarettes in 20 minutes” said Chris, his clothes still soaked in blood. “The fatigue that fell over us all instantaneously was just crazy.”

Speaking of the traumatic series of events, Drew told me: “We’re all still dealing with it in our own way, but we’re all luckily safe and did what we could to make sure we could help as much as possible. We’re keeping a check on the guy who was in the worst shape, we’re hoping and praying that he pulls through, and we at least bought the paramedics enough time to work their magic.”

Drew’s motto “I just wanna help Ukraine” – a phrase usually accompanied by a sigh of frustration over the endless bureaucracy and PR that come with running such a vital operation – has become somewhat of a running joke amongst his fellow teammates.

But on May 26, 2022, Drew, Chris, Ken Brady, Agatha Williams, Andrew Ohichak, and TikToker Philip Vu, all did exactly that. Guys, you helped Ukraine, perhaps more than any of you will ever know.