Frontline 4x4s: 70-year-old drives pick-up 1,200 miles from UK to donate it to Ukraine
Along with weapons and ammunition, one thing Ukraine desperately needs on the frontline is vehicles – particularly 4x4s.
Forces News has spoken to an Australian vet and conservationist who has donated six pick-ups to the Ukrainian military and has just driven one from London to Lviv herself.
Since the start of the war in February 2022, Dr Claire Oelrichs has bought half a dozen pick-ups – paid for with her own money and through fundraising.
To mark her 70th birthday, Dr Oelrichs decided to drive one of the vehicles 1,200 miles from London to Ukraine.
She is working with Sergiy, a Ukrainian based in London, and the team from Car For Ukraine, which sources vehicles for the Ukrainian armed forces.
Dr Oelrichs told Forces News: "So we had Ukrainian drivers take us down to Dover. Then we took the cars through the border issues and we got through, then off we went.
"And we took five nights to get to eastern Poland."
Sergiy and his team buy or are given several 4x4s each month.
At the start of the war, they were used to mount heavy machine guns and even rocket launchers.
Now, they are more often used as supply vehicles or for medical evacuations, bringing wounded soldiers back from the battlefield.
From London, Claire's convoy – including her two sons – set off across Europe, through Germany and Poland, before finally reaching Ukraine.
Dr Oelrichs told Forces News about how "moving" her visit was to Lviv.
"Our first stop was the Field of Mars, which is the soldiers' burial site in Lviv city. It just used to be a green space and they've devoted it to burying Lviv's soldiers.
"They tend their graves with such love and care."
In Lviv, she handed her three pick-ups over to the Car For Ukraine team, to begin their transformation from civilian twin cabs to armoured 4x4s.
Claire herself has strong links to the Royal Navy. Her father, Lieutenant Commander Michael Vaux, won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1942 for capturing 17 Germans single-handed.
And rather fittingly, he was also involved in spying on the Russians.
In 1955, he was on board the submarine HMS Totem when it narrowly escaped being sunk by the Soviets during a mission in the Barents Sea.
Since 2022, Car For Ukraine has given the Ukrainian military 397 vehicles, the equivalent, its says, of $3.2m worth of equipment.
For Claire, this has been quite literally a journey of discovery, a way of offering much-needed, tangible assistance to Ukraine's military as it fights for national survival.
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