Prince Harry arrives in Kyiv on surprise visit to Ukraine aimed at assisting veteran rehabilitation

Accepting an invitation from the Ukrainian government, Britain’s Prince Harry arrived in Kyiv on Friday saying he wanted to do “everything possible” to help the seriously injured members of the country’s military recover, the Guardian reported on Friday.

During the trip, the Duke of Sussex and a team from the Invictus Games Foundation are expected to meet with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko, spend time with injured Ukrainian veterans, and detail plans for an initiative to support their rehabilitation, according to the Guardian. 

A charity founded by the duke in 2014, the Invictus Games Foundation supports the recovery and rehabilitation of wounded, injured, and unwell service personnel and veterans through sport and community initiatives.

“We cannot stop the war but what we can do is do everything we can to help the recovery process,” Harry told The Guardian while taking the overnight train to Kyiv.

“We can continue to humanise the people involved in this war and what they are going through. We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitised to what has been going on,” the duke said.

The visit, the duke’s second to Ukraine this year, after he visited a centre for wounded military personnel in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in April, follows the announcement on Wednesday by the Sussexes’ charitable foundation Archewell that it had donated $500,000 (€426,000) to projects supporting injured children from Ukraine and Gaza.

Archewell said that the grants would be used to help the World Health Organisation with medical evacuations, and to fund work developing prosthetics for young people, the BBC reported.