Reliable Vehicles Save Lives: KSE Foundation Supports East SOS Evacuation Missions
Pothole-ridden asphalt, craters left by enemy shelling, and stretches of dirt or gravel – this is what many of the roads leading to frontline towns and villages look like today. Under such conditions, having a reliable vehicle for evacuation missions is about much more than comfort. Timely maintenance and necessary repairs give confidence that a vehicle can handle difficult roads and will not break down at a critical moment when families with children, older people, or people with disabilities are on board. It means knowing that the mission can go ahead and that both the crew and passengers will reach safety.
To evacuate civilians every day, our Foundation’s vehicle fleet needs to operate reliably and efficiently. Thanks to cooperation between East SOS and KSE Foundation – the charitable foundation of the Kyiv School of Economics – a series of repairs has been carried out on evacuation vehicles, including two evacuation buses and a specialized ambulance used to evacuate people with reduced mobility. These vehicles travel hundreds of kilometers every day across frontline areas of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, helping civilians affected by enemy attacks reach safety.
Work has also begun to refurbish and refit a large bus that will eventually be adapted to evacuate people with health conditions who require specialized transportation. This will allow us to evacuate more people on each trip while ensuring they have appropriate and safe transportation conditions.
As part of the project, an East SOS evacuation crew recently helped 56-year-old Volodymyr evacuate from Sloviansk. He had lost a lower limb due to illness and uses a wheelchair. He was worried that the journey would be particularly difficult for him, but everything went smoothly. Volodymyr is now safe. While talking to our team at the transit center in Lozova, he shared how he had lost loved ones to the war and how unbearable and frightening it had become to remain at home alone. Evacuating was a necessary step to protect his health and well-being.
We thank our partners for their reliable support and for helping us continue evacuating civilians.
The project is being implemented by East SOS with the support of KSE Foundation, the charitable foundation of the Kyiv School of Economics.
