At the beginning of the week, Mr Savidi, 29, was in Kyiv helping to organise supplies to the resistance within the city. The president of the Enotita, Nina Plechak-Paskal, was also in Kyiv sheltering from the Russian bombardment with her family. Mr Savidi had sent his wife, who is five months pregnant with their first child to stay in with relatives in the western Ukraine and away from the fighting. Both he and Ms Plechak-Paskal left the Ukrainian capital this week.
Ms Plechak-Paskal paid a lot of money to find a driver that would take her and her children out of the city, said Mr Savidi. She was now sheltering in the country’s west with his relatives.
“Yesterday, I was in Lviv for volunteering purposes (and then went on) to two other places and now I am in small town near Ivano Frankivsk,” Mr Savidi told Neos Kosmos.
Like many Ukrainians who are out of work because of the fighting, he is volunteering his services where they are most needed.
His peacetime job was manager for the cultural organisation House of Europe that fostered cultural links between Ukraine and European Union countries. Now he uses his organisational skills and contacts to help people affected by the fighting.
On Thursday, he was looking for ways to help a young mother with her baby daughter trapped in a basement by the fighting in Irpin, a city to the north east of Kyiv.
“One of my relatives has asked for help, he has a close friend who is in sheltering from the fighting in a basement with her 13-month-old baby. They don’t have food for the baby and they cannot find anyone to go and get the food because the fighting is all around them. We are now looking for volunteers who can find them and give them some food,” he said. He has turned to social media to see if help can reach the stranded mother and her child.
He is coordinating efforts to gather information on the movements of the enemy. He is also in contact with the Ukrainian-Greek communities in Kyiv, as well as Kharkiv (Ukraine’s second largest city) in the east, and Mariupol, the coastal city on the Sea of Azov in the south – all areas that are in the thick of the fighting.
“Ukrainian unity is greater than ever. Everyone is volunteering to help in any way they can to organise supplies and medicines, to help refugees fleeing from the war or to join in the fighting.
“Two of my friends stood in queues for two days to volunteer to fight but in the end, they were turned away because they were taking volunteers with previous military experience,” Mr Savidi said. “We have more people who want to fight than we have arms to fight with.”
“My friends and I have formed a group of volunteers and we have pooled our money to buy medical equipment to get through to our soldiers, we are collecting food and clothing for the refugees. Some are working in medical centres or supplying medicines, some are translating documents and news for information. Everyone is helping as they can in their own capacities. Like millions of other Ukrainians we are not getting paid.”
“In the east, the people in the towns affected by the fighting and bombing are blocking the roads and protesting openly against the Russian invasion.
“Now the Russians are even bombing Russian-speaking settlements, such as Sartana near Mariupol which was a village of 10,000 and an important cultural centre of the Greek community with a theatre that put on plays in the local Greek (Rumeika) dialect.
“The Sartana community was able to get some children out. All they took with them was just an icon and clean underwear, Mr Savidi said.
Yesterday afternoon reports came in that Russian forces had taken the key port city of Kherson in the south.
In Mariupol the Russians have all but encircled the city and the corridor to safety was now closed.
The Greek consulate in Mariupol was sheltering in the building’s basement and there were 10 Greek journalists who were also sheltering there.
He said that while Greece had pledged military supplies and had taken in up to 1,000 Ukrainian refugees much more was needed. He said the Greek consulate in Mariupol had given help to Greek passport holders to get them out of the city but that the ethnic Greeks were not given the same consideration.
He again praised Australia’s support and the Australian-Greek community in particular.
“We feel their support and know that the Greek-Australian community is with us. We know the Greeks will help to restore our homes and cultural centres after the war but we also need diplomatic and material support.”
He said Western support for Ukraine had been poor in recent years. France and Germany were pro-Russian while the UK had been far more critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin. But that support was little compared to the aid the West had given Afghanistan.
“We got some missiles as the crisis developed, but NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was hardly prepared for what has happened. They claimed they are helping us but they have not really supported us.
“The big surprise (to NATO) has been that we are fighting and beating the Russians. We appreciate the support now, but we have won it with a lot of blood.
“Russia has not been able to get what it wanted (when they invaded Ukraine), so now they are mobilising their police and auxiliary forces. They have suffered up to 8,000 casualties which is already more than the casualties they suffered in the entire Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979-89).”
The BBC reported on Thursday that Russia had admitted to taking heavy casualties – 498 troops killed and 1,597 injured. Ukraine claimed that Russian losses were in the thousands.
Mr Savidis said there were reports that the Russians were not even taking their own dead from the Ukrainian battlegrounds for fear that the large number of coffins would alert the Russian people to the realities of the invasion.
“Pressure needs to be applied to the Russian people, who need to wake up to what is really happening here. There is such tight control of the (Russian) media and there is talk of imposing martial law and mobilising the population, but they are being used as ‘meat for war’, their forces are not motivated and they are not well-trained and Putin does not care.”
Mr Savidis said that while his father was descended from Pontian Greeks who came to Ukraine as refugees 100 years ago, his mother was a Russian-speaking Ukrainian from the east of the country and he himself was a Russian-speaking Ukrainian and had never felt that his rights were ever ignored. He said that while he had been a critic of Ukrainian president Volodmir Zelenskyy (also a Russian-speaking Ukrainian), Mr Savidi backed him completely in the current crisis.
He said 93 per cent of the Ukrainian population supported the government and those who wanted to unite with Russia were really harking back to the days of the USSR.
“It is more an affiliation to the USSR than to Russia. Putin has always said that the collapse of the USSR was the great catastrophe of the 20th Century.”
Absorbing Ukraine back into Russia is crucial to that dream. The country’s mineral and agricultural wealth were another aspect but Mr Savidi said Ukraine’s technological advances in space, military and engineering were also important.
“Putin claims we are a neo-Nazi state but with an ethnic Jewish president and minister of defence (Oleksii Reznikov) how can it be a “Nazi” state? Seventy-three percent of the population voted for President Zelensky who comes from a Jewish community that is just one percent of the population. It shows that Ukraine is unique and that there are no ethnic problems like there were in Yugoslavia. There is a great level of tolerance and there are no language or ethnicity concerns as Russian propaganda claims.”
The question that needed to be asked was how many former Soviet states wanted to return to the Russian fold after 1991.
“The Russians want to make Russians out of the old Soviet states. We are not playing that game. If Putin takes the Ukraine easily and without international outcry it will enable other dictatorial nations to follow suit. What happens here, will influence the world,” Mr Savidi said.
“We Greeks of the Ukraine stand with the Ukraine. We are its citizens and this is our country.”
