Yashchenko Foundation’s Head of Mission, Toby Illingworth, was recently interviewed on Ukraine: The Latest, The Telegraph’s flagship daily podcast on the war in Ukraine.
The interview was recorded from Kyiv during a period of sustained winter power outages, with many residents experiencing prolonged disruptions to electricity, heating and water, conditions now affecting millions across the country.
During the conversation, Toby spoke about the evolution of Yashchenko Foundation and the journey of the team, since the early days of the full-scale invasion in 2022, when the team began evacuating civilians from Chernihivska Oblast, before expanding operations across Sumska, Kharkivska, Zaporizhzhia and Khersonska Oblasts. He also reflected on the Foundation’s formal establishment in 2024, and its decision to honour the memory of former colleague Maksim Yashchenko, who was killed on the frontline in November 2023.
The discussion covered the Foundation’s core humanitarian sectors, including water, hygiene and sanitation, emergency shelter and community-led reconstruction, food security and livelihoods, and, in particular, health. Over the past six months alone, Yashchenko Foundation has supported the delivery of more than $30 million worth of medication to hospitals and communities across Ukraine, including critical cold-chain medicines.
A significant part of the interview focused on Ukraine’s chronic blood shortages, a challenge that pre-dated the full-scale invasion but has since become markedly more severe. Toby described how hospitals are often forced to make urgent public appeals for donors while patients are already on the operating table, and how families are frequently asked to provide donors themselves.
In response to this, the interview highlighted the Foundation’s Walking Blood Bank programme, launched in partnership with DonorUA and Eldon Biologicals and funded by Direct Relief. Through mobile teams using rapid blood typing technology, the programme is already operating in frontline and near-frontline communities, helping identify potential donors quickly and strengthening emergency medical response capacity. In recent months alone, tens of thousands of people have had their blood type determined, with thousands of new voluntary donors registered.
The interview concluded with a reminder that behind daily casualty figures and statistics are individual lives, volunteers, families and communities, many of whom continue to live under extraordinary pressure while supporting one another.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/zelensky-warns-of-massive-attack-ahead-of-sunday/id1612424182?i=1000747206812
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