Zaporizhzhia, hero city

The bus from Dnipro to Zaporizhzhia was filling up: its final destination was Nikopol, a city so close to the frontline that it is plagued by the horrific ‘drone safari’ which we witnessed in Kherson, turning everyday life into a deadly lottery. I thought of the driver, taking that route twice a day, his minibus cab festooned with military patches and religious icons, fixed to the dashboard like a plea for divine protection.

Zaporizhzhia is also close to the frontline, near enough to come under attack from the fearsome KAB, air guided bombs which have an extra ‘increased risk’ alert on the air alarm app. Although they often fly there so quickly that they explode before the alarm even goes off.

I had come to visit a French baker, Loic Nervi, who together with his colleague Yves takes his ‘Boulanger Sans Frontières’ van around frontline cities in Ukraine, baking up to a thousand loaves on board and distributing them to local people and internally displaced refugees. We arrived on an unseasonably cold and rainy Sunday morning, somewhere in the north of the city, to find Louc and Yves inside, checking the progress of their dough before baking off a large batch of loaves destined for a city church.

With Loic and his truck

A large generator was chugging away, powering the ovens on board. Loic has been on several trips to Ukraine since 2022 and has become well used to working in blackout conditions. Last year he took the van to Lebanon too, although an attempt to get to Bethlehem in the West Bank proved impossible to pull off.

It was warm and muggy in the small truck, but Loic was not happy with the proof: the weather was too cold, he said, and it had not risen enough. But there was no time to wait around, and so they began ferrying trays holding dozens of loaf tins into the ovens, in order to keep to the tight baking schedule.

It only took about an hour and a half to get everything baked off, white bread and a wholegrain seeded loaf, and a van turned up to take it all to the church. We jumped in too, and headed towards the Khortitsya area to the spur of the city, where a large crowd had gathered next to a tarpaulin waiting for the bread. Music blared out and a young teenager led some children in an impromptu dance class, while the church volunteers doled out the bread and cups of hot chocolate to the queue.

Children collecting bread outside a church

Loic had originally planned to visit Nikopol but the threat of drones was too great to bring his van there: last minute changes of plans are both commonplace and highly in Ukraine. Good local intelligence is everything.

I had also come to visit a British couple, Holly Tann and Adam McGuire from Casus Pax, extraordinary young people who have built a highly effective humanitarian organisation delivering medical supplies and emergency medical training exactly where it is needed. They have partnered with the city emergency services and police in order to work most efficiently and safely - and have strong connections to one of the city universities.

They had arranged for me to give a talk to high school students, and teacher Yuriy brought out a delicious raisin cake which his mother had made before the presentation. Around forty students and teachers came to the college in person, and Yuriy told me that another 200 were joining online: it was a huge privilege to talk to them about my book and the activities of Bake for Ukraine and two of the teenagers presented me with an enormous home made loaf of bread before I left.

Superb cake!

Zaporizhzhia is busier than ever, Holly told me, not just because of large numbers of military, but because so many displaced people have come there from villages and towns where life has become impossible to continue as the frontline and its ‘kill zone’ creeps ever closer.

The air alarm goes off with depressing frequency during the day as well as night: warning of attack drones and incoming bombs. One morning I had just finished breakfast, some fantastic syrniki at a newish cafe called Marichka. I was taking a walk around a small park beside a church, where elderly people had gathered to collect some humanitarian food packages, when a loud explosion went off somewhere to the south, followed a few minutes later by the alarm. A guided bomb had fallen near the bus station, exploding almost as Holly and Adam were driving past on their way back from delivering supplies to a medical stabilisation point south of the city. They were near enough to see the flames.

Local authority post about the KAB explosion

In the last days, Ukraine’s chief of staff has visited the Zaporizhzhia frontline ahead of an anticipated Russian offensive. As well as Shahed and cheap Molniya drones, the Russian army is able to shell Zaporizhzhia city with MLRS artillery - although it’s been forced to move many artillery positions further away to avoid being targeted by Ukrainian drone strikes. Guided bombs have struck supermarkets, blocks of flats and civilian infrastructure, causing wide scale damage. Life in this major city looks busy and bustling on the surface, but it is anything but ordinary and the work of courageous people like Holly and Adam, their Ukrainian medic friends and international volunteers like Loic Nervi, are an important source of solidarity and practical support.

You can donate to Casus Pax here. https://linktr.ee/casuspax