My Conversation With ‘Warmly Wendy’
An hour before I sat down to record with Wendy Francis on the Warmly Wendy podcast, a message arrived from a doctor couple I work alongside near the Russian border. They run a mobile palliative care service through villages most aid organisations will never reach, and weekend missions into communities that have been bombed. After thirty explosions struck their village in a single day, they told me, they had finally made the decision to stop sleeping in their own home. They have not stopped working. They go back every day. They just can’t sleep there anymore.
Sit with that for a second.
I carried that message into the interview, and in many ways it framed everything Wendy and I discussed — because this is the war we’re told is old news, and it is anything but.
As a doctor who has spent decades in remote communities, I’ve learned that the truest picture of any crisis is never found in the headlines. It’s found in the people who keep showing up. In Ukraine, that is not primarily the large international NGOs. It is local churches, small Ukrainian organisations, and volunteers — running clinics by day, sheltering in basements by night, some having lost their own homes, and still turning up for their neighbours. It is the closest thing I have witnessed to faith in action.
We also spoke about the things that are harder to hear. Putin’s ambitions are not hidden; he has stated them plainly, and the comforting idea that “Russia is weak” is a myth that history keeps correcting. My grandfather Nikodym survived the Holodomor, and when the full-scale invasion began in February 2022 I was shocked — even though his own stories should have told me not to be. Authoritarians with imperial nostalgia don’t stop at a border. They stop when someone makes them.
We talked, too, about disinformation — including the claim that Christians are persecuted in Ukraine. The documented reality is the reverse: it is in the occupied territories that churches are closed and believers persecuted. And we touched on an uncomfortable truth closer to home: Australia still buys Russian-refined fuel through Singapore. The war is quite literally in the fuel in your car.
People often ask whether I feel safe over there. Honest answer: no guarantees, sensible precautions — and a fairly firm belief that Ukrainian driving is statistically more dangerous than a Shahed drone.
So what can you actually do?
- Pray. Genuinely, it matters, and it costs nothing but a little time.
- Give something regular — even the price of a coffee a week. A dollar goes a very long way in Ukraine, and every cent donated to OPT goes to the ground.
- Stay informed and gently push back on disinformation. Silence lets the false version win by default.
- Leave a message with your donation. I read every one, and I pass them on. You’d be amazed what “someone in Australia is praying for you” does for a doctor who hasn’t slept properly in weeks.
This is the short version. For the full conversation — Putin’s imperial ambitions, the drone war that exposed Russia’s cracks, the truth about Ukraine’s church, and why this fight is closer to home than the fuel in your car — watch the full episode below.
And if you want to back the people who don’t have the luxury of tuning out, you can donate at https://www.passingthrough.net/donating
or become one of our heroes who stands with Ukraine. What We Can Achieve With 200 heroes
The war isn’t forgotten by the people living it. Let’s not forget it either.