The charity will send regular consignments — about 250 tonnes of aid per month — to those in need. The shipments will mainly be composed of food, toiletries, baby care products and medicines, it said in a statement.

The consignments will be sent to Transcarpathia, where the number of internally displaced persons are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, and Ukrainian cities including Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Poltava and Cherkasy.

The charity will establish a new storage facility in Berehove and an international humanitarian centre with a logistics base in Lviv. The two facilities will be staffed by fifty employees and volunteers of the organisation.

The programme will be financed from donations, the Hungary Helps scheme, and international donors, the charity said.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian Maltese Charity sent 35 tonnes of products to Ukraine in cooperation with the Hungary Helps programme. State Secretary Tristan Azbej, who is in charge of the programme, said the government’s priority was to preserve the country’s security and peace, while it was “a moral obligation to help innocent victims of the war”.

Lajos Győri-Dani, managing vice-president of the charity, said they had delivered 110 tonnes of food to Ukraine, primarily to Transcarpathia, since the outbreak of the war.

This time, he said, the charity would reach out to beyond Transcarpathia because they are “not only responsible for Hungarians on this side of the Carpathians but for anybody suffering because of the war”.

Hungary to Provide Asylum for Families of Ukrainian Disaster Management Staff

The families of Ukrainian disaster management staff, some 200 people, have arrived in Hungary where they will receive asylum.

László Kuti, Hungary’s consul in Uzhorod (Ungvár), who helped organised their transfer, said the wives and children of 50 disaster management employees working in the Donetsk region occupied by Russia have arrived in Mérk, in northeast Hungary.

They will be housed in a recently renovated elderly care home, and they will receive health care, legal aid and help in finding jobs if necessary, he said.


MTI Photo: Noémi Bruzák