Volunteer says returning to County Clare after Ukraine aid work was sobering

‘Ambulances are a target’: Irish volunteers detail peril and resolve in Ukraine’s east

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, two volunteers from County Clare describe a battlefield transformed by drones, a frontline that stretches for hundreds of miles and a civilian life that continues in uneasy parallel with nightly air raids.

For Oran McInerney of Doonbeg, the job is speed and nerve. An emergency medical technician who has traveled to Ukraine repeatedly over the past four years, he worked with a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization evacuating the wounded — Ukrainians and Russians alike — from the line of fire.

“It is extremely difficult,” McInerney said. “I think any trauma consultant would find it extremely difficult, not just the level of extreme injuries, but how pressurised and dangerous the situation is.”

Frontline medicine under drones

The danger, he said, has intensified as small, inexpensive military drones crowd the air above the front. They shorten the window for rescue, expose medical crews and turn any delay into a gamble.

“The extraction of wounded civilians or soldiers is an extremely dangerous operation now,” McInerney said. “It has to be carried out extremely rapidly due to drone operations. Ambulances are also a target of these drones and any delay in loading a casualty can be deadly.”

He described a kill zone tens of miles deep, where movement attracts attention and standard medical protocols are compressed into seconds. “The frontline of the war is now nearly 50km in width and in reach of drones, so any operations in that zone can make you a target,” he said. The contested line extends for more than 1,000 kilometers in total, he added — roughly 620 miles of villages, trenches and shattered towns.

‘They really appreciate any help’

McInerney said the welcome for foreign humanitarians is unambiguous in Ukraine, where millions have fled and many more have been displaced or killed. “A lot of people have left Ukraine and obviously a lot of people have been killed in the war so they really appreciate any help,” he said. “One man who I was helping to evacuate said that he couldn’t believe that I had come from Ireland to help.”

But the bonds he formed have been cut by attrition. Some friends and colleagues he worked alongside are now dead. Others have rotated from ambulances to foxholes.

“I was treated extremely well in Ukraine and I think about the ongoing situation for some of my Ukrainian colleagues who worked alongside me,” McInerney said. “They are today in a trench or a bunker in Ukraine facing an uncertain future. For me, I could leave at any time, they cannot. It is their home. That brings it to a much bigger perspective to me. It’s a sobering thing for me to think of.”

Kharkiv’s uneasy ‘normal’

In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where the front lies close and the horizon flares at night, Declan McEvoy spent recent weeks in a kitchen that cooks for emergency services and hospitals. He returned to Clare carrying the contradiction of a metropolis that keeps moving amid bombardment.

“Every night while I was there, the city was targeted by Russian missiles and drones,” McEvoy said. “You get a message on your phone warning of an incoming missile attack and you take cover.”

Yet by daylight, errands resume and shopkeepers lift shutters. “Life in the city of Kharkiv, aside from the incoming missiles and drones, is terribly somewhat normal,” he said. “I struggled a bit to deal with that.”

What jarred him most was proximity. “I could be walking down the street and pop into the bank or into a shop for some crackers, meanwhile the war is going on 20km away,” McEvoy said — about 12 miles. “I found it difficult to get my head around that.”

A long front, a narrow margin

For both men, the through-line is compression: of time, distance and safety. In a battlespace where the effective reach of drones can make a 50-kilometer strip — about 31 miles — lethally exposed, medical volunteers race to lift casualties under buzzing rotors and prying cameras. What once might have taken minutes now must be done in seconds, with every pause risking discovery.

That danger has reordered almost every step of humanitarian response. Evacuation routes pivot by the hour. Ambulances keep lights dim and profiles low. Crews rehearse load plans to shave off seconds. The work remains the same — stop the bleeding, secure airways, move — but the margin for error has nearly vanished.

Resolve amid exhaustion

McInerney and McEvoy both said the public mood in Ukraine is weathered but determined, shaped by years of fighting and the ordinary work of living under threat. They returned to Ireland keenly aware of what they could leave behind — and who could not.

“Many humanitarian workers I worked alongside are facing an uncertain future,” McInerney said. The knowledge colors his days back home in Clare. “For me, I could leave at any time, they cannot.”

In Kyiv, an Irish tricolour snaps in the wind, annotated by the names of Irish men who traveled east and never returned. It stands as both tribute and warning for those who contemplate going.

Official warning

Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade “strongly advises against all travel to Ukraine” and says it is aware of a small number of Irish citizens currently in the country. The guidance underscores what volunteers already know: humanitarian work at the edge of a modern war is both necessary and perilous, governed by technology that narrows the safe paths and lengthens the odds.

Still, the pull persists — from hospital corridors in Kharkiv to muddy medevac points along a frontline that runs the length of a small continent, where every safe evacuation, every hot meal, is a small defiance against a grinding war.

By Abdiwahab Ahmed

Axadle Times international–Monitoring.