Well, thank you for inviting me. Yes, I am a student here, a very mature student that I could be talking.
I think probably for the little section Roseland is going to be speaking in, which is student led initiatives.
But I thought I would sort of tell my story of it,
because it is an initiative in a country I really didn't know and have no background in doing what I did.
You know, so my story is really about being a social entrepreneur in a war zone.
And when I think of being an entrepreneur, which is what I was in my previous life before politics, it was about making money.
But being an entrepreneur is also about looking for opportunities out there to do something that maybe other people aren't doing.
And so when I say I'm a social entrepreneur,
I went into a war zone figuring out how could I be helpful in a way that maybe other people aren't being helpful?
And so I had just finished my field research case, Hazelnut in Rwanda, where I'm looking at education policy of Rwanda on February 24th.
And I saw a post on Instagram by a friend of mine who was on the Polish border with
a bus and was moving people away from the refugee centres further into Europe.
And I was supposed to be going scuba diving, but I cancelled my scuba diving and I said to my friend,
Can I come and join you for four days just to try and help out, see what I can do?
And so I went out there, changed my clothes from warm to getting dealing with cold weather.
And I went out there and, you know, we were shuttling people away and I stayed a bit longer.
I was there for two weeks and we were moving people away.
But one of the stories I kept hearing about was that people were charging people a lot of money to get away from the war zone,
particularly from around Kiev. So my friend, who's Latvian, had to go back to Riga.
So I said to him, Can you find me three buses because I want to go into Ukraine.
So he said, Sure, but I'm not letting you have my quarter of €1,000,000 buses.
I'll find you three second-hand buses from Lithuania. So I got these three buses.
He sent a friend with me who spoke, I'm going to say Russian.
He didn't speak Ukrainian. And so we sort of went in and I went in to around Kiev,
and we were taking people away from the war zone to the border back to where I initially started.
And over the next few weeks, as the Russians were pushed away, we found that we were sort of less busy.
And so then the next thing I heard about, there were a lot of people getting away from Mariupol.
So the bus drivers I had, which were from Lithuania, didn't know the roads.
So I figured out I had to contact the National Bus Company and I figured they needed work.
So I contacted one of the national bus companies and I said, okay,
I want to go down to Zachary's operation because there are a lot of people down there who are getting away from Mariupol.
And can I have some buses and a bus driver and how much would you charge me?
And so I negotiated a deal and which, by the way, I was sort of funding myself at this stage,
and I started moving people away from who are from Mariupol and taking them up to Lviv,
which was safer for them over the next month or two,
when unfortunately the Russians then got control of Mariupol, there were less people to move away.
So then I had to go to the east and I decided to go to Kharkiv because I was hearing
that there were a lot of people in some of the smaller villages who couldn't get away.
They couldn't move, they had no money and no means to get away and were under constant bombardment.
So then I had when I went out there and it was difficult to find a bus driver who would come with me because I'm going into a war zone.
So I said, Fine, you know, I'll go in. You know who's coming with me?
And I found two bus drivers to come with me with a bus.
And so once they saw that this crazy bridge was willing to go into a war zone with buses, I got more bus drivers to actually come with me.
But then I had two other problems that I was facing.
Well, that was the first problem was getting bus drivers going to a war zone.
The second problem was, of course, because I was doing this for free, a lot of the people didn't trust me.
They thought that. Perhaps I was taking them into Russia because this is for free.
And maybe this was a secret way to take them into Russia.
So unfortunately, I then had to charge them some money.
So I charge them ten Gridley Which is the equivalent of ten P And they felt, okay, this must be real because they're charging me for money.
This has to be real and they're going to take me to safety. So I started, I spent a lot of time,
I probably spent about six months in the east part of the country around museum and
a lot of the other villages around there just moving more and more people away.
By this time, I had 20 buses that I was working with and paying for.
And I think by by probably the middle of the summer,
I had moved about 11,000 people with mainly women and children away from the frontline villages that were getting bombed.
And then I had a massive challenge. I then the local intelligence, the SBU, contacted me.
They said, you know, we want to try and get a thousand people through a particular checkpoint, but we need somebody who will move them.
Will you do that? So I said, sure. So this was July.
And so I'm I drive out because at this point I'm in Libya.
So I drive across the country. I'm supposed to organise this on a monday in July, arrive at 630,
I get a phone call saying I'm afraid we may have to call off the evacuation of a thousand people because the Army have laid landmines.
They lay mines, rather, on the 500 metres between the Russian checkpoint and the Ukrainian checkpoint.
So I said, this is ridiculous. I've come all the way out here to try and move these people.
I said, I want those mines moved by tomorrow or figure out a way we can get a path through the mines.
But I will be there 730 in the morning played. So I went to the bus station in Kharkiv and there were 20 municipal buses,
think these lime green buses there, they were ambulances and they're all ready to go.
And they said, We sorted your problem, Mr. Neumeier, don't worry. So I'm driving.
So I send the buses off ahead of me and I'm busy following them.
I'm about 10 minutes behind them and I'm driving down some dirt road and I hear this loud bang and I think,
[INAUDIBLE], you know, I blown a tire in my car. Have I got a spare tire?
So I say to Igor, I think we blown a tire.
And he said, No, no, no. That was just a mortar bomb that landed seven metres, 70 metres behind us.
So we sort of sped along.
We arrived at the checkpoint and the head of the army in that place said about a hundred people there sort of pointed his finger to me,
said, come with me. And he took me around the corner from the checkpoint.
And they had actually moved these mines to imagine the road on both sides, that they had moved the mines to this side.
Now, I know the difference between what is a landmine, which is you can trigger by stepping on it,
and an anti-tank mine, which is quite big, but you could flick a switch at the side and literally lift it and move it.
So they had cleared a path for me of 500 metres, so so that was one problem resolved.
And I said, Why did you lay these mines when I knew they were coming?
But we thought they were Russians were going to use the people as a human shield.
So we wanted didn't want the tanks to come across following these people.
So the next problem was they then cancelled it again on me saying, well, we're worried that Russians will infiltrate with these people.
So at this stage, I'm sort of standing there wondering, you know, how how am I going to persuade this guy?
This general suddenly turns up. He sort of is like a Norman Schwarzkopf.
I don't know if you guys remember him, look alike with a ponytail and huge guy.
And he comes up to me and he's sort of curious that this Brit is they're trying to sort of organise all this.
So the very first question is he's worried about Boris Johnson,
who is stepping down at this point, and that is all Britain going to still be supporting us.
So, yes, don't worry, the British are going to still support. And I said, But what?
You could do me a favour and tell that captain over there to please let the people I.
So I don't know how many people or the Russian checkpoint,
but if they're willing to walk through a minefield, I think we should let them do it anyway.
He barks and order and they do, and they start coming through and we get the first to go through.
And what was extraordinary, it was sort of dystopian because they were, you know, old people pulling one bag along.
There was a lady with two. Alsatian dogs. There was another lady carrying a cat with her bag.
There was a woman who had pushed her mother 15 kilometres in a wheelchair.
I said, Why did you. Why couldn't you drive out to the checkpoint?
At least the Russians stopped us and said, If I want to go to the checkpoint, you have to get out and push your mother in the wheelchair.
And so at the end of the day, we we ended up getting within three and a half hours,
1015, mainly women and children and elderly people through this checkpoint.
And this is sort of one and certainly one of my abiding memories of my time there.
By the time September came. Most of the civilians that I could evacuate, we had evacuated.
And so I did a pivot, as any entrepreneur would, because there's no more business there for me.
And so I started focusing on evacuating amputees.
And there weren't enough ambulances to to take them from the front line hospitals to get treatment.
And the problem with many of the hospitals in Ukraine was they couldn't deal with severe trauma victims.
So then I started moving amputees to the Polish border to just of and getting them airlifted to hospitals,
mainly in Germany, who could deal with trauma patients.
And my final pivot came when the weather started getting cold because the Ukrainians were doing an amazing job,
particularly in Kharkiv region, where I spent a lot of time pushing people out of a lot of these small villages.
So there were a lot of occupied villages, but that were probably three quarters bombed, but people wanted to go back there.
And so I then started bringing warm clothing or blankets and a lot of humanitarian aid.
And by the time sort of my anniversary had come up in mid-February, we moved,
I realised over 31,000 women and children away from frontline villages to safety in western Ukraine.
And that in essence is my story. And thank you for listening and if you've got any questions for that.