Next stop: Kyiv. After his visit to London, during which he saw father King Charles III for the first time in nearly 19 months, Prince Harry headed straight to the Ukraine for a previously unannounced trip. The Guardian reported that the Duke of Sussex traveled to the Ukrainian capital city for philanthropic reason: He and several members of his Invictus Games foundation met with servicemen and women wounded since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Harry co-founded the Invictus Games in 2014 with the hope of supporting war veterans and wounded soldiers through community and sport. Three years later, the Ukrainian team competed in the Invictus Games for the first time. Harry pledged in an interview with the Guardian to do “everything possible” to help Ukrainians affected by the fighting.
“We can continue to humanize the people involved in this war and what they are going through,” he continued of his goals. “We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitized to what has been going on.” One of his objectives, he said, is to provide assistance to all regions of the country for the re-education of soldiers, a plan he will discuss with Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and veterans. He also plans to visit the National Museum of the History of Ukraine During the Second World War on the trip.
Last April, Harry made surprise visit to the city of Lviv with a delegation from his foundation, during which he visited the Superhumans Trauma Center, which treats soldiers and civilians affected by the war. He had already met the facility’s director, Olga Rudnieva, in the United States. He met with Rudnieva on his first visit, and she invited him for this second trip. “I bumped into Olga in New York,” he said. “It was a chance meeting and I asked her what I could do to help. She said, ‘the biggest impact you have is coming to Kyiv.’ I had to check with my wife and the British government to make sure it was OK. Then the official invitation came.”
“In Lviv, you don’t see much of the war. It is so far west. This is the first time we will see the real destruction of the war.”
The Duke of Sussex has fond memories of the Ukrainian team’s participation in the Invictus Games: “It was remarkable. Every one of the participants had a journey to get to those games, but nobody from any of the other competing nations was going back to war. That is why the Ukrainians stood out. Everyone felt an immense connection to them. Some of the competitors were being pulled off the battlefield and were going back to the battlefield. It means so much to us, because it means so much to them.”
Ukraine’s Minister of Veterans Affairs, Natalia Kalmykova, praised Prince Harry and Invictus’s commitment to the veterans: “It’s thanks to our relationship with the Invictus Games Foundation that we established, and continue to develop, the role of sports in recovery in Ukraine and why it’s included in the veteran policy strategy.”
Originally published on Vanity Fair France.
