On Friday, three more trucks carrying 255 generators set off for Kyiv. The total amount raised is approaching PLN 11 million. The organisers say the fundraiser marks a breakthrough in Polish-Ukrainian relations. They are also taking legal action against right-wing politicians who are spreading fake news about the campaign.
At around 4:00 p.m. on Friday, three trucks departed from Bytom and Wilkowice near Leszno, loaded with generators purchased with funds raised through the “Warmth from Poland for Kyiv” campaign. This second shipment heading to the Ukrainian capital includes a similar number of generators as the previous one — 255 units.
These are mainly 5.5 kW generators — 240 units (Vakariten SL6500 EDX), as well as 10 units with 32 kW capacity and 5 units with 48 kW capacity. The large generators were manufactured by the Polish company FOGO. The transport is expected to reach Kyiv on Saturday, 7 February, in the evening.
Generators will heat children in kindergartens
Who will receive this batch of generators?
“Smaller generators will be used by schools, kindergartens, healthcare centres, shelters for internally displaced persons, orphanages, etc. We are also expanding the campaign to frontline regions of Ukraine. Local municipalities will collect them from us and join the distribution process,” says Bartosz Kramek from the Open Dialogue Foundation, one of the co-organisers of the campaign.
He emphasises that they have received a very large number of requests from kindergartens — these facilities have enormous needs. In total, such institutions are to receive 400 generators with a capacity of 5.5 kW each — further transports are planned.
The large generators, in turn, will be used in Kyiv to heat hospitals, hospital wards, entire residential buildings, public utility buildings, etc.
Another transport of generators is scheduled for Friday, 13 February.
The “Warmth from Poland for Ukraine” fundraiser will continue until 24 February — the fourth anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The main organisers are: Stand With Ukraine Foundation, Sestry.eu — a Polish-Ukrainian portal, and the Open Dialogue Foundation. Polish companies and businesspeople have been very intensively involved in the campaign, including the Entrepreneurs Help (Przedsiębiorcy Pomagają) initiative, Employers of Poland (Pracodawcy RP), the Polish Business Roundtable and the Entrepreneurship Club.
Logistics partners — delivering the generators to Ukraine free of charge — are InPost, DB Schenker and Raben. The largest single contribution to the campaign — PLN 500,000 — was made by Dominika Kulczyk through her company Polenergia.
Success on many levels
Currently, over PLN 9,886,000 has been collected in the “Warmth from Poland for Kyiv” fundraiser account, but the total amount is nearly one million higher — companies made donations to separate accounts. In total, the organisers have already raised nearly PLN 11 million for generators for Ukraine.
Initially, the organisers planned to collect PLN 400,000 within one to two weeks. However, this amount was raised at lightning speed — within 28 hours. The target sum was then increased multiple times, as Poles were so eager to help freezing Ukrainians. The campaign’s success exceeded all the organisers’ expectations. However, the initiative achieved much more than just collecting a huge amount for urgent aid to Ukrainians.
According to research by the Institute of Media Monitoring, during the first four days of the fundraiser, as many as 13,700 materials/posts about it appeared in the media and on social media. In traditional media, not a single negative publication about the campaign was found, and in social media 86% of the content was neutral or positive.
This marks a huge change — for some time now, anti-Ukrainian hate speech has been highly visible, if not dominant, on social media. Here, it became marginal.
The fundraiser is a turning point in the assistance Poles provide to Ukrainians. At the beginning of the war, this aid was enormous. Over time it diminished, and in the past year it had become almost negligible. Foundations and activists collecting funds to help Ukrainian soldiers struggled to raise even relatively small amounts.
“Warmth from Poland for Kyiv” reversed the situation.
“Two weeks of this campaign reshaped a part of our soul, and that is a phenomenal phenomenon for me,” says Jerzy Wójcik, publisher of Sestry.eu and one of the driving forces behind the initiative.
Bartosz Kramek notes that other initiatives followed the Poles’ fundraising effort. The government quickly responded to this surge of solidarity by sending nearly 500 generators from the Government Agency for Strategic Reserves (RARS). Warsaw joined the initiative, as did the Archdiocese of Kraków and Caritas.
“Warmth from Poland for Kyiv” also radiated to other countries — Czechs collected twice as much money for generators in three days as Poles did in three weeks. Fundraisers for generators were also organised in other countries, for example in Lithuania.
In Poland, a very positive attitude towards the spontaneous initiative of several organisations and pro-Ukrainian activists has been maintained. When politicians from the Confederation party, Braun’s party or other right-wing groups spread fake claims that the generators were already being sold on OLX in Ukraine, several fact-checking media outlets (including Demagog and Konkret24) immediately stepped in to correct these falsehoods.
State authorities also intervened — the Ministry of the Interior and Administration warned against these false claims.
The media widely published information correcting the lies about the fundraiser. Poles set their course toward helping. “Some people donated several times, persuaded their friends so that a wave of warmth would flow to Ukraine,” describes Jerzy Wójcik. We once again believed that we can be good and selfless, focusing on what is most important here and now — helping people in need.
“I receive hundreds of emails, blessings, prayers, text messages thanking us for the campaign. My world looks much better than it did three weeks ago before the campaign started,” Wójcik adds. He praises the government, which — despite spreading anti-Ukrainian sentiments — joined the initiative. “This is the deepest foreign policy possible,” he concludes.
Bartosz Kramek: “A breakthrough has occurred in Polish-Ukrainian relations. It is a solid dose of a vaccine against apathy, propaganda and disinformation. These antibodies will stay with us for a long time.”
Authors of fake news will be prosecuted
Bartosz Kramek adds that legal steps have already been taken against right-wing politicians who spread fake news about this initiative supported by over 70,000 Poles. “If the slanderers do not correct their defamations, we will take the matter to court,” he declares. Lawyers’ letters have already been sent to the authors of the false information.
Source: oko.press
