Tom Hughes never thought a three hour flight to the boarder to help would become two and a half years (Picture: Supplied)
Tom Hughes only planned to go to eastern Europe for a few days to help with the aid effort when the war in Ukraine broke out in 2022. After being appalled by what he saw on the news, he dropped everything and took a cheap flight to Poland to see if he could help out.
‘I thought: “It’s a £30 flight on RyanAir. It will take me three hours to get there. So I’m going to pop down to the border”. I never thought it would become two and a half years,’ says Tom, from Hinton in Wiltshire.
Since then, he’s witnessed traumatic events, had his own life endangered and seen his mental health affected by the horrors of living in a war zone. But, as head of field operations for charity HopeFull, he has also served hundreds of thousands of pizzas to the cold, hungry and desperate Ukrainians who he worries are starting to lose hope.
Tom, 43, is the ultimate hype man. Dressed in a kilt in Ukrainian colours, he and his team of intrepid volunteers travel the besieged nation in a bid to bring joy and nourishment.
The teams visit barracks, villages and towns across Ukraine, bringing hot food, booming music, colourful face paint and a party atmosphere to communities devastated by war.
HopeFull has served hundreds of thousands of pizzas to Ukrainians devastated by war (Picture: Supplied)
Speaking to Metro from a village 20 miles east of Kharkiv, Tom says: ‘Out here on the eastern end, there’s very little help going on, and people are relatively isolated. Most of the villages and towns are living under the threat of missiles, the schools are all closed because they don’t have bomb shelters, the kids are all deeply unsocialised and communities are broken down.
‘It’s been really effective turning up with a whole load of hot pizzas, which are really aspirational food here, and putting on music through the speakers and dancing around and being a fool to reinvigorate the essence of community. It’s really hard to get your head around until you see how desperate people are here. Just yet seeing Westerners prepared to come and help under the same skies, with the same bombs, makes people feel a lot less desperate.’
Tom has two travelling units who deliver around 3,500 pizzas a day (Picture: Supplied)
The stories Tom hears daily are heartbreaking. Whether it’s the army captain showing him the hundreds of beds left empty by dead soldiers, their kit still on the sheets, or the bereaved mother begging Tom to find her son when he visits the next bomb-shattered city, stories of loss abound.
He has two travelling units who deliver around 3,500 pizzas a day; the Eastern team who serve the communities behind the frontlines and the quieter, more peaceful Western team, based in Lviv.
It was a system developed through frightening trial and error. ‘In the beginning, it was very intense because we were going into towns that have been occupied and heavily abused,’ Tom explains ‘The Russians scatter landmines everywhere when they leave so you’d hear people getting blown up all the time. There’s no water, no electricity, no food, so they’re very scary towns to go into and a really devastated population who are starving.
A mission made near impossible by the constant threat of missiles and landmines (Picture: Supplied)
‘It was a very full-on time through to the liberation of Kherson in October and November 22, where we went into the city and the Russians had just crossed the Dnipro River in their retreat. As we arrived, they started their revenge bombardment of that city and that was the first time we experienced being shelled by artillery.
‘It was absolutely terrifying. We just finished our fifth day in the city and it had been very loud all day. We packed up very quickly and as we were driving out we had a set of shells come in around the convoy. The explosions started off behind us and the last one came in about 50 yards ahead of me to the right. I just drove as fast as I could. I’m more experienced now and now know that if targeted you stop and throw yourself to the ground away from the vehicle – because the vehicle is the target. But I just put my foot down. We were lucky no one was hurt.’
After the terrifying experience, Tom decided the trucks would remain 25km back from the Russian guns to keep the volunteers safe.
Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 launching a full-scale invasion in 2022 (Picture: Supplied)
It wasn’t his only brush with death. As a humanitarian, Tom and his teams are targets, so he moves around hotels to reduce the likelihood of being attacked. He recently dodged an FPV suicide drone, another experience that has left him jittery and hyper vigilant. The board of the charity have decided he must go back to the UK for a break every six weeks to preserve his mental health.
‘Seeing anything in the sky makes anyone who’s been here too long jump out of their skin. Aeroplanes cause a bad bad reaction. And fireworks are very bad for everyone who has been here too long. They’re no longer a happy sound. It all has an effect.’
Meanwhile, Tom’s parents and siblings at home are left fretting.
‘They are very supportive and proud. But also very worried. They are starting to ask: “When is enough?” But what do you say to that? I agree with them. There is a tax on being here on myself. But if you knew what it was like out there, you would find it quite impossible to walk away from too.’
Tom tells Metro he will remain in Ukraine until he finds someone with the skills and capacity to take the role over. ‘But most people who can do this are living quite successful and having a happy life with a career and a family back home,’ he adds.
So in the meantime he remains alert to the omnipresent danger. The puppy Tom rescued from the side of the road and nursed back to health has to stay on a lead; if he veers too far from the road he could set off a landmine. Trauma is ubiquitous too. In the soldiers broken by the rigours of war and in the children who have lost families. He has become the honorary uncle to one young boy whose dad was killed, speaking to him on the phone every night before bed.
HopeFull’s work is about more than filling bellies – they bring joy Ukranian towns too (Picture: Supplied)
And in the hotels he stays at, Tom meets soldiers on leave who no longer have a home to go to. ‘They sit in the hotels and pour bottles of vodka down their necks to wash the pain away and talk to you about their funeral in a week. The amount of damage being done to the generation psychologically is terrifying.
‘I was in a little village in eastern Kherson not long ago. And three young kids came up to me and told me a story about their neighbour who came out of his house and said “good morning” in Ukrainian, rather than in Russian, so they shot him in the head on the street. They told me that their uncle had been locked in the basement with electric cord around his wrists and ankles. And that the Russian soldiers that sat with them and their mother in their kitchen for three days, flicking the power on and off drinking vodka and listening to him scream. It’s a really horrible story but not a rare one.’
It’s hard to make sense of the evil, but Tom reasons that on the other side of the front line, ‘there are some very terrified young Russian boys who don’t really understand what they’re dying for’.
Poverty is sky high in Ukraine now as the war strips people of their livelihoods (Picture: Supplied)
Poverty is sky high in Ukraine now as the war strips people of their livelihoods. If a piece of pizza falls on the floor, it is picked straight up and eaten. But HopeFull’s work is about more than filling bellies. Coming into new villages and turning on the music brings joy to Ukrainian communities.
‘You can see the instant change in people. They tell me their child hasn’t smiled since the war began. People are tired and they’ve watched the wavering support from the west and they feel deeply isolated and afraid. Toasts are traditional here, but they no longer drink to victory, now they drink to peace.’
Tom is grateful for the help of Dr Oetker and Italpizza who send truckloads of Pizza out to the operation. And he says couldn’t do the work without his two long-term volunteers Audrey MacAlpine and Kevin Fisher, and the squads of people who come over and do two or three week stints serving pizza before heading home.
Despite the danger the majority of HopeFull volunteers return to Ukraine to help (Picture: Supplied)
He adds: ‘There is a healthy bubble of security you exist in, when you can go out, do a job, come back, have a beer and go to sleep. Having had many hundreds of volunteers through, I think over 80% have come back again, multiple times.
‘I don’t think a single volunteer has left without saying that it’s been the most amazing life affirming encounter. To come and purely give and see how much you can give is an amazing experience.’
You can donate to HopeFull to keep the effort going, or sign up to volunteer here.
