Brooks Newmark, an angel investor in the U.K. and former senior partner at Apollo Global Management, was in Kharkiv, Ukraine, yesterday—where he has been trying to evacuate approximately 180 disabled children and their caregivers to safety.
“In a quiet garden listening to bombs dropping in the distance,” he told me via email, shortly before our second call.
The original plan was to move children out of two care centers: One is in Shevchenkove, but that area has fallen under Russian control and is no longer accessible. The second care facility is located some five kilometers outside of the Kharkiv city center. Dozens of the children are bedridden, and would need to be moved carefully via ambulances and small vehicles. It’s an evolving situtation, and they may not be able to move the children at all. Two days ago, Newmark had planned to transport the children to Kyiv—but due to medical concerns in case they needed to be moved a second time, Newmark and others are trying to find a new place further West.
“We should know—I’m hoping in the next 24 to 36 hours—that we’ve got somewhere to take the kids,” Newmark told me late yesterday evening.
This evacuation project is one of several that two European angel investors — Raitis Bullits, an investor and entrepreneur born in Latvia, and Newmark — have taken on since the war broke out at the end of February. With the financial backing of members of Club Changer, a Riga, Latvia-based community of 200 angel investors from 19 European countries, Bullits and Newmark have orchestrated the relocation of more than 7,500 women and children to safety via buses—more than 4,000 from Vinnica to Krakovec; more than 300 from Harkiv and Dnipro to Lviv; and more than 3,000 from Poland to other European countries, according to the club’s latest reported figures. Approximately 274 of the civilians were moved just last week.
European angel investors have bussed more than 7,500 Ukrainians to safetyRead More
