Craig, a 30-year-old father-of-four from Northern Ireland with medical training and experience in emergency situations, described his time in Bakhmut helping Ukrainian civilians survive the war
A Co Derry man who spent several weeks rescuing civilians from the front lines of the Ukraine war has said he hopes to return to continue humanitarian efforts.
In the city of Lyman, which had recently been liberated by Ukrainian forces when he arrived, he adopted a dog that belonged to a woman named Olena who had helped co-ordinate relief efforts when the humanitarian workers arrived in the town.Mr Patterson decided to take the dog with him and, despite a lengthy wait in quarantine for the rescued pet and bureaucratic delays, it is safe and sound with him at his Co Derry home.
“It was a long, long journey. I left Ireland at the end of September, and I was in Dnipro in three days later,” he said.“It was black out conditions - no lights because the pilots use the city lights to navigate”, he said. “Every town, every village I went to there were soldiers everywhere.
“We were lying in the hotel room, talking, and suddenly there was this massive explosion. The windows were shaking, dust was falling from the ceiling and the lights went off. “That’s the next time I knew I was really in a warzone. The first time was just seeing the complete stark difference, the soldiers and everything when I was first arriving in the country. The second time was when the missiles hit in Dnipro. The third time was in Bakhmut where missiles were flying all over the place, you could hear things pinging off stuff, there were bodies in places.”
“We weren’t just in Bakhmut. We were also in villages like Siversk, we were in Lyman. When we went to Lyman the Ukrainians had only moved back into it when we turned up. It had been Russian occupied and then the Ukrainians had moved back in just before we turned up. That was very bleak in that place. It is the place that still sits in my mind.”
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