Canadian, back home from Ukraine, shares harrowing stories of life on the front lines
CTV
Canadian Adam Oake has returned from the front lines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where he has been working for an NGO. He shares tales of his time in the war zone, where he also plans to return to continue helping Ukrainians in need.
Sitting in an apartment north of Toronto, Adam Oake calmly explains how he’s had to adjust his mind's reaction to the sound of sudden loud noises since returning from the front lines of the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
“Being home, a car door slamming, or some loud noise, it’s a split-second reaction but you immediately think, ‘What is that?’ Because if I was in Ukraine and I heard something like that I would assume it was an explosion,” admits the 34-year-old.
CTV National News first spoke with Oake in August, after he'd left his life in Toronto to volunteer with an NGO in Ukraine. At the time, Oake shared that he “couldn’t sit on the couch knowing that there’s something I can do to help make a difference.”
A devout, lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan, he decided to liquidate his massive collection of Leafs memorabilia in an effort to raise money so he could travel into the war zone. His plan was to join the foreign legion, but when he arrived in Poland he was assigned to volunteer with a Norwegian crisis response organization called Paracrew. For the last five months, he’s been risking his life driving food and aid to an area where most organizations no longer go – within the hot zones, near the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Oake notes that as the war reaches its one-year anniversary and continues to escalate, smaller NGOs have pulled their teams out of Ukraine “because a lot of people aren't willing or are unable to go to the places that need assistance.” That’s leaving organizations like his to traverse dangerous routes to deliver supplies to the hardest-hit areas, which has led to multiple close calls.
One such close call happened recently when he was in the city of Dnipro. Oake was fast asleep in a hotel room when he was suddenly jolted out of his bed as a “large missile hit the city just a couple blocks” from his hotel. Dnipro is the same city where a Russian missile strike hit an apartment building on Jan. 14, leaving dozens of civilians dead.
“I saw the flash of light outside my window” says Oake, who also admits there were times over the last nine months when he wondered if he’d wake up to a ceiling collapsing on top of him from an attack.
