A flag doesn't travel on its own.
I'm a Fredericton resident, and this October I'll spend fourteen days walking the Confederation Trail from East Point Lighthouse, at the island's easternmost tip, to Tignish: 273 kilometres, solo (though I may have company for a few days from a dear friend), carrying a flag from the Alcatraz Battalion, part of Ukraine's 93rd Mechanized Brigade.
My connection to Ukraine isn't new. Starting in 2004, I observed elections there: four elections, two revolutions — East, West and the Middle — four snapshots of a country building its democracy: the disputed 2004 vote that followed the Orange Revolution, the 2012 parliamentary elections, the tense 2014 vote after the Maidan revolution and Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the 2019 election that put Volodymyr Zelensky in office. I watched as Ukrainians built the institutions they're now fighting to defend. I wrote about that experience for Inroads Journal.
Days after the invasion began in 2022, I co-organized a "vigil for victory" outside the New Brunswick legislature with Oksana Tesla of the Ukrainian Society of Fredericton, drawing the line back to those years of election observation. Local leaders showed up too, and we pointed people toward organizations doing real work on the ground. But I never stopped noticing — my toenails have literally been painted as the flag ever since, one foot blue and one yellow.
When the war started, as someone who always wondered what they would have done in World War II, I was drawn to action. I started raising money to bring people to New Brunswick, finding friends with spare rooms to host people, and then I received a contract to do this for the Government of New Brunswick — which resulted in a chartered plane arriving from Poland. I also went in 2022 to bear witness in Bucha and Irpin, to try and understand how I could help. Instead of wedding gifts, I raised money for the orphanage in Kharkiv.
I love Ukraine deeply and believe in an unstable world — it is the key to a future with peace. We have asked them to bear the ultimate price, not just for themselves but for all democracies.
This isn't the first time April and I have done something like this together, either. In 2024, I joined her on a supply run into the Kharkiv and Donbas regions — driving in equipment and handing it directly to the soldiers who needed it. Many of those places are now under Russian control. That trip is where this walk actually started to take shape.
"It's not just about Ukraine. There is so much riding on this for the future of democracy — and the freedom of our children."
My friend April Huggett has spent the better part of the last three years in and around the front lines of the war, and founded Planet of People — a non-profit registered in Canada, with a sister charity in Ukraine, that turns fundraising into fast, direct action: medical supplies, protective equipment, drones, and the small unglamorous things that save lives on the ground.
April walked 700km across Ukraine to raise money for that mission. This walk is its Canadian continuation. I will take the same flag across PEI. My job is smaller than hers: put one foot in front of the other for two weeks, and ask people to help fund what she's already doing — no drones, no dead friends, no deserted communities — but as I walk I will think of the pain and the resilience I have seen in Ukraine and Ukrainians since 2022.
