24°C | Sunday October 12, 2025 
“One finger has some strength. The two fingers are stronger, but it’s when we come together in a fist that we have real power,” North Sydney Councillor James Spencley said at the ‘We stand with Ukraine’ event held at Mary MacKillop Place this week.
In this spirit, leaders from all over the district came together to hear stories from the front line and find out what can be done to support Ukraine. The event organised by North Sydney Council heard from Ukrainian refugee Maria Mykytiuk about her confronting first-hand experience of the devastation of the war. Vice president of Ukrainian Council of NSW, Andrew Mencinsky also spoke, galvanising support and providing an Australian-Ukrainian perspective.
Spenceley has visited Ukraine several times since the outbreak of conflict to provide aid and support. His wife Viktoria is Ukrainian which helped inspire a strong personal connection with the under-siege nation and inspired the pair into action.
At the event he explained how his aid effort started.
“In February we were looking for ways to help. And in Australia, it’s really hard to find ways to help Ukraine directly. You can give money to the Red Cross or UNICEF or all these organisations, but it’s almost impossible to know how much actually gets there and what so what it goes towards.”
With a desire to help and no clear direction, they decided to fundraise to buy ambulances, kitted out with medical machinery and supplies. Support came quickly with many donations flowing in immediately highlighted by a $25,000 contribution from Rotary. Spenceley personally accompanied the convoy that delivered supplies to the front line in the nation’s east.
Once dropped off, a commander asked “Could you bring us some ear muffs? My soldiers are all going deaf because they’re firing the anti-tank missiles.” adding “Could you source us some underpants?”. On the next trip they brought in 2000 pairs of underpants and sound-cancelling ear muffs. Spenceley pointed out “We’re getting all of the weapons-related to Ukraine, but some of those basic things are being completely forgotten.”
Food and water are also in short supply, even in areas not as directly affected by the conflict. Yet, acquiring supplies, donations and support hasn’t been the hardest part with the journey to deliver supplies proving to be remarkably difficult.
“There was no access to fuel. They’re either blown up or they’ve gone out of business. And if you could find a fuel station, you could get 10 to 20 litres of fuel per car. We turned up with seven vehicles and we’re driving thousands of kilometres on a trip. So we had to manage fuel very consistently, but we ran out of fuel once.”
Navigation was also a challenge.
“Google Maps doesn’t know about occupied territories and not occupied territories. So you can punch from here live in just about always and it will take you right through Occupy to give some. So you tend to try and check the current situation on the ground before leaving Google Maps. Checkpoints are difficult. We’ve gone through probably 15 to 20 checkpoints a day. Each checkpoint to get close to the front lines gets a little bit more suspicious of strange Australian blokes turning up in ambulances wanting to pass through the checkpoints, so we can often get held up for hours. What can be a 200 or 300-kilometre leg can take 8 hours, with only 10 to 12 hours a day of daylight.”
The Mayors of North Sydney, Willoughby, Lane Cove and Hornsby were on hand as well as councillors, the state member for North Shore, local residents and several groups of students from local high schools. The event wrapped up with a Ukrainian Bandura (string instrument) performance by Larysa Kovalchuk.
If you would like to find out how you can help please visit www.ukrainecrisisappeal.org and ucnsw.org