Laurent Bourguès is a professional skipper engaged this year in the Figaro Bénéteau Class. He had the good idea to ask all his fellow offshore racing specialists to provide the medication contained in the mandatory first aid kits on board sailboats. Medicines that are usually discarded because regulations require them to be regularly replenished even if they have not expired.
“We have painkillers, products for the eyes, burns, wounds. Instead of throwing these medicines away, or returning them to pharmacies which then throw them away, you might as well give them to the association. United for Ukraine 56″, explains Laurent Bourguès.
The solidarity sailor’s initiative quickly found an echo in the small world of offshore racing. Since the start of the initiative, the donation boxes he has set up have been full. Each week, he collects two to three cases of medicine, which he deposits in Plouay with his optician, whose wife Yulia, Ukrainian – helped by other Ukrainian women – created the association at the start of the conflict ” United for Ukraine 56″ to help their compatriots.
I would like to appeal to the food industry. We need you, please do something for us. And we need transport, I also ask the transport companies to help us. We need your trucks.
Yulia The KindPresident of the association “United for Ukraine 56”
Because Yulia struggles to recover medicines, food, basic necessities and the money worm, by organizing a whole host of events, concerts, solidarity collections, and organizing her humanitarian convoys to her country of origin. Since the beginning of the war, seven semi-trailers have already left Morbihan for Ukraine. One every ten days or so.
The next one will leave in a few days, heading for Kharkiv in the northeast of the country, the country’s second largest city, and one of the first to be bombed, where the Russian noose seems to have loosened in recent days according to the Ukrainian government and where humanitarian needs are obviously huge.