Hungarian Ecumenical Charity to launch over EUR 2.7m aid scheme to help Ukraine

The Ecumenical Charity will grant over 1 billion forints (EUR 2.7m) worth of aid to Ukraine in the coming three months, the organisation said on Thursday.

The charity will send regular consignments — about 250 tonnes of aid per month — to those in need. The shipments will mainly be composed of food, toiletries, baby care products and medicines, it said in a statement.

The consignments will be sent to Transcarpathia, where the number of internally displaced persons are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, and Ukrainian cities including Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Poltava and Cherkasy.

The charity will establish a new storage facility in Berehove and an international humanitarian centre with a logistics base in Lviv. The two facilities will be staffed by fifty employees and volunteers of the organisation.

The programme will be financed from donations, the Hungary Helps scheme, and international donors,

the charity said. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Maltese Charity sent 35 tonnes of products to Ukraine in cooperation with the Hungary Helps programme.

Read also: Hungarians raise a huge amount for Ukrainian refugees – UPDATE

State Secretary Tristan Azbej, who is in charge of the programme, said the government’s priority was to preserve the country’s security and peace, while it was “a moral obligation to help innocent victims of the war”.

Lajos Győri-Dani, managing vice-president of the charity, said they had delivered 110 tonnes of food to Ukraine, primarily to Transcarpathia, since the outbreak of the war. This time, he said, the charity would reach out to beyond Transcarpathia because