Ukraine: Drone attacks on Caritas warehouse hurt the needy

Bishop Edward Kawa, the auxiliary bishop of Lviv in Ukraine, described recent drone attacks on his city as “an attack on the poorest and most needy.”

When the drones hit Lviv on the morning of September 19th, a warehouse containing donations to the charity Caritas-Spes was destroyed. “All the relief goods stored there should have gone to Kharkiv and Pavlograd in the following days,” the bishop told Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

There were three hundred tons of relief goods, including food, shoes, and winter clothing, sent by Poland and the Vatican, and more than 100 emergency generators for heat and power.

According to the bishop, a fragment of a drone found in the warehouse said “no brothers” in Russian.

The only comfort, Bishop Kawa said, is that two days earlier, four trucks left the warehouse to bring goods to Zaporizhzhia. He asked ACN’s benefactors to remember Ukraine: “Winter is coming, and the war is not over. God bless you.”

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, ACN has supported both rites of the local Catholic Church with more than $15M supporting 350 projects. Most of the projects in Ukraine help the local Church to address the population’s humanitarian and spiritual needs. 

—Sina Hartert