UKRAINE ROAD TRIP DIARIES: Lviv, Beauty under sirens, our journey begins

Days 1 & 2: Over the next four posts we will tell the story of our eight-day 2000 km road trip across Ukraine last October; we will describe the extraordinary people we met and what we discovered about the country and the war. Lviv looks like Central Europe at peace — cafés full, streets alive — yet missiles still come. We begin our journey through Ukraine in this western city shaped by centuries of empires, and now by war. From historic squares to hospitals treating amputees, resilience is everywhere. This is where trauma meets technology and extraordinary care — and where our journey east begins.

For almost four years MedAid has supported STEP-IN, the charity founded by Dr Zuzana Ulman, which operates eight mobile medical clinics mainly in eastern Ukraine, including in Kharkiv, Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. We wanted to visit these clinics and other delivery partners, in some cases for the first time, and were grateful for the lift east from the Polish border. 

With Zuzana and Martina sharing the driving, Gavin and I covered nearly 2,000 km in a week. Starting in Lviv—where we also visited our partners Moe Kolo- we drove on to Kyiv, then Kharkiv. After two days there we continued to Dnipro, staying about 100 km west of the Pokrovsk front, before travelling on to Pavlohrad and Zaporizhzhia.

Sunday 26th October
We arrived in Lviv via the pedestrian border crossing at Medyka, leap-frogging a long queue of returning Ukrainians by an aspirational move in joining the EU citizens’ line. After switching SIM cards we were met by Roman from Moe Kolo, who drove us into the city. Moe Kolo offer mental health group therapy largely to the wives and families of their menfolk at the front, delivered wholly online. 

Architecturally central European and formerly known as Lwów, Lvov, and Lemberg, Lviv is a city of layers: once part of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, annexed by Poland in 1349, later absorbed into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the Habsburg Empire in 1772, briefly Polish again after 1918, Soviet from 1939, and finally Ukrainian from 1991.

As we would discover moving east, Lviv differs sharply from Kharkiv in many ways—but not in one crucial respect: it also lives under constant missile threat. Yet that weekend the streets around Rynok Square were busy with people shopping, eating, drinking and enjoying one another’s company. We had dinner with our Moe Kolo colleagues and shared an emotional reunion with Pavlo their CEO, freshly back from the front.

In plan and historic origin Lviv resembles Kraków, though Kraków is earlier and more Polish-Renaissance, while Lviv is later, more Baroque and Austro-Hungarian in character.

Monday 27th October
The war has created an urgent demand for polytrauma expertise. We visited two hospitals: Superhumans, the amputee centre funded by the Buffett Foundation, and Unbroken, a specialist unit within a large public hospital. Staff described limbs lost because tourniquets were left on too tightly or too long before evacuation.

We toured surgical wards, prosthetics workshops and rehabilitation gyms. Everywhere—up and down in lifts—we encountered soldiers: men with no legs but immensely strong upper bodies, carrying themselves with a reflective, sometimes surprisingly positive composure.

The explanation came when we met the heads of mental health. Both hospitals integrate psychotherapy into veteran rehabilitation, offering genuinely holistic care. At Unbroken we were shown a nearby house refurbished for soldiers returning from captivity after prisoner exchanges. Veterans live here together, supporting one another through months of recovery. Many have been tortured.

In the art room we noticed a potter’s wheel and asked about kilns. They had none and were seeking a donor. We were delighted that, following a pre-Christmas appeal, our supporters funded the two kilns that they needed.

The next morning we left for Kharkiv in the STEP-IN minibus, driving east into a gloomy rain sodden Ukrainian dawn.

Days 3 & 4