Putin must pay’: British politician-turned-philanthropist builds humanitarian empire in Ukraine
In the same week that European leaders began discussions on a “Marshall Plan” for Ukraine, former minister Brooks Newmark spoke out in favor of a model of multilateral action on reparations that could securing over £500bn in compensation to help rebuild the nation of Ukraine.
Newmark was one of many experts consulted by the New Lines Institute to develop the legal framework by which Russian assets can be seized, oil revenues billed and dirty money confiscated to create a Ukrainian compensation fund, at the sequel to the precedent of the United Nations Compensation Commission after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Newmark is best known for his involvement in Ukraine as a philanthropist who, through his organization Angels for Ukraine, saved more than 20,000 Ukrainians, including hundreds of orphans and amputees. “What started with one bus,” Newmark said at the launch in Parliament, “quickly grew into twenty buses, three ambulances and a handful of vans.”
Brooks became involved after seeing an Instagram post from an old Latvian friend, Raitis Bullits, who was transporting refugees fleeing the Polish-Ukrainian border on his bus. After Raitis returned home, Newmark continued to expand and pushed the operation into Ukraine itself, starting with Lviv then Kyiv, then pushing east and south to Vinnytsia and Zaporizhia, then Dnipro and Kharkiv, areas completely devastated by the bombardments. Newmark penetrated ever further into the war-torn country, rescuing survivors as Putin’s regime increasingly targeted civilian areas for indiscriminate artillery fire.
This approach of going directly to the most dangerous areas brought safety to those in the most dangerous situations, but also brought Newmark and his team closer to the most brutal scenes of the war. “Most shocking of all was seeing a mass grave in Bucha and knowing that there were 458 bodies buried there.”
The eastward movement of his operation also brought Brooks, in true Dunkirk spirit, into real physical danger. In July, Newmark received a call from the local government to evacuate 1,000 women and children from behind Russian lines beyond the city of Kharkiv. Their vehicles had to evade Russian mortar fire en route to the location, where they organized a path through more than 500 landmines, along which they led the thousand people to safety.
It is perhaps for this feat that Moshe Azman, the chief rabbi of kyiv, dubbed Brooks “the Oskar Schindler of Ukraine”.
Although he is too modest to accept such an epithet, it must nevertheless strike close. He has previously spoken of the effects of the suffering and loss of his own family during the Holocaust, which instilled in him an impulse to “stand up and be counted” when faced with humanitarian crises. “When I see a crisis, I still can’t help but get involved.”
Although Newmark describes his early involvement as a “push”, his parliamentary history suggests otherwise. “Longtime parliamentary friend of Ukraine”, Newmark had been introduced early on to Bill Browder, the financier and activist responsible for the 2012 US Magnitsky Act, which punishes Russian human rights violators, and the movement which led to the imposition of sanctions. of 30 Russians believed to be complicit in the corruption that led to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. Pushing for a similar law on British law books, Newmark was honored with a travel ban from Russia, Syria and Iran.
Reparations for Ukraine, however, would be on a completely different scale than the Magnitsky Act. “We have a lot of tools,” Brooks said. “One is the seizure of assets. Another speaks of the violation of the Genocide Convention. This is genocide by any definition of the word. A third would be the pursuit of assets held by the many kleptocrats closely tied to Putin’s regime.
During the roundtable with MPs Anne-Marie Travelyan, Sir John Whittingdale and Natalie Elphicke, Baroness Hodgson and others, Newmark drew praise for his approach to rebuilding Ukraine. “Ukraine will need $1 billion. Whether it’s the IMF, the ECB or the Fed, they need some form of bridge financing so the reconstruction can begin. But it shouldn’t be directed by the West. They have to be self-determining. We have to allow them – how do we they or they want to modernize? “.
Drawing lessons from his experience in Rwanda, where he built an education charity, a teacher training center and a school for 300 children, Newmark points out that they “didn’t just decide to fix what was was already there” after the Rwandan civil war and the Rwandan genocide. “They rebuilt an entire nation, with energy-efficient, quality investments.” The same is true for Ukraine, argued Brooks, whether on industrial strategy, e-governance or agribusiness, but it must be up to Ukraine to determine its recovery plan itself. .
In the context of Newmark’s philanthropy in Ukraine, his closing remarks in parliament should come as no surprise. “We must call Russia a terrorist state,” he concluded, “and Putin must pay.”
It will take years for Ukrainians to recover from the mental scars of war.
Newmark personally testified before the European Parliament in Brussels last month about the importance of supporting the mental health of children and refugees as they flee such shocking conditions. Alysha Tagert, trauma expert, joined him with Olha Stefanyshyna, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, and together they highlighted the psychological and social damage that suicide drones, death and destruction of houses have on the surviving population. “No matter how strong you are,” Stefanyshyna said, “there’s no way to tolerate it.”
In Westminster, Stefanyshyna told how Ukrainians receive phone notifications alerting them to impending drone strikes. Each of these notifications, she told the panel, marked another innocent life or another critical infrastructure destroyed.
In addition to 38,000 infrastructure, including schools, bridges and hospitals, researchers estimate that up to 20 million Ukrainians will have suffered from trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety or other psychosocial disorders due to to the war and the displacement it has caused. . Newmark stresses how reconstruction efforts must focus on rebuilding people, not just bricks and mortar, including everyone from children to veterans.
Tagert, who set up the Clinical and Social Services Program for Torture and Trauma Survivors at TASSC International, explained to Newmark and the other experts how Russian reparations funding can be organized to provide mental health care. ’emergency. Although children and young people can be incredibly resilient to such trauma, if left without support, the Ukrainian population is at risk of endemic depression, addiction and productivity problems in the future as invisible scars of war. Whole “survivor-focused organizations” need to be established, with clinical response roadmaps designed to ensure responsible and focused counselling. In a country where mental health remains deeply stigmatized, this process must begin by helping survivors “name and tame” the psychosocial illness.
However, there remain immediate options that organizations like Angels for Ukraine can implement to improve the impending Ukrainian mental health crisis. “Having fun and playing with each other has been shown to be very effective in dealing with trauma in children and adults. Ukrainians should consider creating spaces to do this during reconstruction.”
Tagert also highlighted how charities can fund inexpensive but highly effective “coping toolkits,” which are “literal containers full of items that can help them calm down in times of panic or crisis. anxiety by engaging the senses”. Collecting personal and simple everyday objects, such as chewing gum, a stress ball or a spinning top that can bring a person to the present moment by touching, tasting, seeing it and bringing them more Mindfulness can be a powerful tool for managing the mind. conditions.
Newmark himself has spoken with painful honesty in the past about how mental health has affected him since childhood. As the Telegraph reports, it took only a few years for Brooks to forgive his mother for the trauma he suffered early on. Perhaps he sees in Ukraine an opportunity to relieve young Ukrainians of the need for such prolonged suffering.