Sault’s Robert Peace tells of work with Ukrainian refugees in war-torn country (3 photos)

The Sault’s Robert Peace, Rolling Pictures community relations director for the film company’s Sault Ste. Marie operations, felt compelled to take some vacation time from his job to travel to Europe in April to assist Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion.

Since April 18, he has been in Romania at a spot near the Ukrainian border, travelling daily into Ukraine to help families escape to safe places for refugees in Romania.

“This is something that I’ve never done before and so you really have no idea what to expect before you go,” Peace said, speaking to SooToday from Romania by Zoom on Thursday.

Peace is working alongside Diana Nistor, a Spanish woman with European non-profit group ADE to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion.

Peace travelled April 18 to Warsaw first, then to Bucharest.

Peace packed his drone and other supplies into a rental car, he and Nistor then taking a seven-hour drive to a location in northern Romania, bordering Ukraine.

The two are staying with a woman who is donating rooms to humanitarian volunteers and Ukrainian refugee families.       

“On our first day a phone call came in and there was a mother and two daughters, one of them 11 and the other 19, who a couple of days before had decided it was getting too tense in Odessa, where they were from. The husbands are not coming, if there are husbands. They are having to stay behind (to defend Ukraine). There had already been some bombing and all reports were that the Russians wanted to move in and take over all the port cities and the worst thing for them would have been to be occupied and not able to leave,” Peace said.

The mother, Peace said, is a journalist on a Russian death list for having written articles criticizing Russia during its 2014 war on Crimea.

“It was a 20-hour train ride for her and her kids. She came into a town in Ukraine and we picked them up. That was my first morning there and my first exposure to a family in shock. They had one suitcase, two backpacks and a cat.”

Peace brought the family to Romania where government authorities registered them before being placed in accommodation not far from the Ukrainian border.

“I’m in Ukraine once or twice a day. We pick up many women and kids and take them out of Ukraine.”

“There are also millions who have fled Kyiv or any of these other cities and they’ve decided they need to get out but they don’t necessarily want to leave the country. It’s no different than Sault Ste. Marie being attacked and you had relatives in London, Ontario. Would you cross the border and live in Buffalo or would you go to London, Ontario? Or you’d go from London to Toronto until that was attacked, then you’d go somewhere else. So, you have people moving sometimes two or three times as troops move in and air raids happen,” Peace said.

“The refugees end up gathering in small border town areas. There is a huge need in those areas. One of the towns where we went yesterday, there’s 9,000 people in the village and there’s 2,000 refugees that have entered in the last couple of weeks. That's a huge impact on a small town like that. They need resources and accommodations and all those things and these are not big towns with hotels, these are small villages. So, everybody has to come together.”

“It’s sad to see small babies when their fathers don’t know if they’ll ever see them again. They’re staying in a small classroom that’s been converted and maybe there’s five families in there, relying on the kindness of the community.”

“You also see the joy and the gratitude when you bring these people some help or are there just to listen to them, because a lot of them want to speak,” Peace said.

“I think there’s the realization too that this isn’t going to end tomorrow and even if it did there might not be anything to go back to and there’s probably a generation or more of people who are going to be affected by this.”

“I also got the wonderful sense that there’s a lot of these small aid groups that come together. It’s just amazing to see how everyone shares resources and information,” Peace said.

Peace expressed his appreciation that a German aid worker gave his $1,300 COVID support payment to Peace’s efforts.

“These are little things that come out of the blue. Everybody hugs each other, everybody feels that they’re contributing.”

“What’s really inspiring, and I’m not downgrading large aid groups, but the ones that are actually doing most of the work on the ground are the small organizations that are going into Ukraine and moving goods and moving people."

Peace said he is concerned that people might soon forget the plight of the Ukrainian people.

“I think we’ve all found that with any natural disaster or war that initially people are very excited and want to help and then it sort of fades from the headlines, people get bored of the same story, and it’s hard to sustain interest even though the need is the same, or greater in this case. It’s been a challenge to see that.”

Peace returns to Canada May 25. 

He said he has been told by fellow aid workers that he will feel a certain emotional crash once he leaves his humanitarian work behind, but he is comforted by the fact that locals will be carrying on the work.

Peace, being involved in filmmaking, is recording what he has seen for presentation back here in Canada upon his return.

“It’s not very practical to be asking people to go to a quiet spot while I set the lights up. Sometimes you just can’t have a camera and when we’re around military things we absolutely can’t, so I’ve got a smaller stabilized camera that I’m using. It’s quite tiny and discreet and I’ve been documenting many things,..I will be putting something together when I come back. I’m going to be doing a presentation with the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce. I really want to tell this story.”

Peace has set up a GoFundMe page so that he can buy and deliver food and supplies to refugees.

“We would love to be able to do more projects. The projects are all sitting there. They just need funding.”

Peace has compiled an ongoing photo and video diary of his helping Ukrainian refugees on the GoFundMe page.

“The nice thing about that is that we’re able to show if you donate $25 we can say ‘here’s what we’re doing with the money, here are the people we’re going to see.’ People have really liked that so far, to see that the money doesn’t just go into a big pot somewhere, so that's been positive.”