BUFFALO, N.Y. — Ukraine has been very much in the news since the Russian invasion in February of 2022, and the battle there has now become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Since that time the United States has approved $175 billion in aid to Ukraine, including nearly $70 billion for weapons, equipment, and other military support according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
In this week’s News 2 You Extra, we turn the clock back 30 years to a time when Ukraine was just three years into its independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the summer of 1994, Channel 2 reporter Rich Kellman and Photojournalist Jerry Gasser traveled to Ukraine and produced a series of reports outlining how the blessing of independence had brought the burden of freedom, particularly when it came to the availability of public services, food, and medical care.
Kellman and Gasser logged hundreds of miles over five days with a medical team from Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, which had been providing medical hardware, medicine, and expertise in an exchange program which had been developed with five partner hospitals in Ukraine.
They described their mission as a delicate partnership in a perilous time, driven by idealism and duty.
Along the way we see what was, at the time, still a rare glimpse of life behind the only recently lifted Iron Curtain including the rebirth of religious freedom and the growing impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which had occurred eight years prior.
Watch News 2 You on Mondays as part of Daybreak and Most Buffalo on WGRZ Channel 2.