Calgarian Paul Hughes can still vividly recount the time he was captured by Russian soldiers.
He tells me the full story as we stand in the yard of his aid organization’s base in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, while air raid sirens wail in the distance.
It was the summer of 2022. Paul and his son Mac had recently founded H.U.G.S., an organization that evacuates Ukrainians from conflict zones and delivers medical supplies and aid to hospitals and the front lines.
Paul was trying to evacuate a six-year-old girl from the Zaporizhzhia region, home to the now infamous nuclear plant. Paul accidentally crossed into Russian-occupied territory — in a white van marked with a Canadian flag on the top.
Russian soldiers stopped him and tore through his vehicle. The evidence was damning: A “Russian warship, go f*** yourself” sticker, and photos from Paul’s days serving in the Canadian military.
For hours, the soldiers interrogated Paul.
“I thought for sure I was gonna die,” he says.
Then, a muscular commander — “looked like Jason Statham, only bigger” — pulled up a chair and asked the strangest question:
“In Canada … what do you do?”
Paul told him he was a farmer.
The commander paused, then smiled. He was a farmer too.
Suddenly, the interrogation turned into a conversation — pigs, potatoes, crop yields. The commander asked if Canadians like hockey.
Paul almost laughed. “Do we like hockey?” He picked a Russian player to be safe. “Ovechkin.”
Wrong answer.
The commander shot up, furious — “Ovechkin is shit!” — and everyone in the room froze. Paul quickly switched: “Tretiak! Tretiak!” The commander nodded. Tretiak was good.
“I think I’m the only foreigner to get taken by Russians and released,” Paul says. “That’s why I always say Ovechkin almost got me killed.”
Paul’s sense of humour about life may help explain why H.U.G.S. — short for Helping Ukraine Grassroots Support — is still operating after so many NGOs have pulled out of the country.
“Almost all of them are gone,” Paul says. “We’re kind of like last man or last woman standing.”
‘I hate bullies’
When I arrive in Kharkiv on a sunny fall afternoon in October, Paul picks me up from the train station in his van — the one with the Canadian flag on the hood.
Paul, 61, greets me with a firm handshake, opens the back of the van, and nods for me to toss my bag in.
As we drive through the battered city, he tells me that his life experiences have prepared him well to lead H.U.G.S.
After high school, he trained in the Canadian military and served in Germany for two years during the Cold War — what he jokingly calls the “Cold Beer War,” since there was no actual fighting and a lot of drinking.
“I was a lucky soldier,” he says.
Upon his return to Canada, he began forging a decades-long career as an activist, focusing on anti-poverty efforts, food security and housing.
He claims to have launched Canada’s only Charter challenge on the right to food, after being charged with keeping six chickens at his home in violation of city bylaws. The challenge was unsuccessful.
He also ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Calgary in 2010 and 2017.
“The military laid a foundation for [my] activism to be organized,” says Paul. “But my activism helped me the most.”
Fort Canada
After driving for 30 minutes, we reach what Paul calls Fort Canada — a large, abandoned garage that is today part shelter, part workshop. Paul gestures to the piles of firewood stacked high against the walls — his insurance for another Kharkiv winter without power.
As he shows me around, Paul explains how he walked away from his activism in Canada to begin helping Ukrainians. It was an impulsive decision.
After Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Paul packed his bags and arrived in Lviv just four days later — despite having no prior connection to the country. “But I have a connection with freedom and sovereignty and not killing people,” he says.
“And I hate bullies.”
In Lviv, Paul saw volunteers struggling to distribute food as hungry crowds pressed in. He helped set up a small kitchen that grew so quickly it was taken over by World Central Kitchen, a prominent food relief agency.
As refugees fled west, Paul then bought a car to help shuttle families to the Polish border.
Word spread, donations poured in — primarily from Canadians — and soon he was renting vans to shuttle food, diapers, bedding and medical supplies from Poland into Ukraine.
“We just started helping and we never really stopped,” he says.
Canada Day fireworks
When Paul says “we”, he is often referring to his work with Mac, the son Paul raised alone after Mac’s mother died shortly after his birth.
Mac joined Paul in Ukraine in August 2022, when he was then 20. Paul says it was a game-changer.
“That just took it to a whole new level. We became even stronger,” he says. “He’s young, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and he’s compassionate as fuck.”
We’re seated now at a makeshift kitchen in Fort Canada; a blind dog named Chara dozes beside what Paul refers to as a “new sectional” — which is really just pieced together office chairs and broken car seats.
Mac, who is built like a Cossack, joins us at the table.
Mac says his first mission with H.U.G.S. involved an 18-hour drive transporting two Ukrainian soldiers to a field hospital in Mykolaiv, where he witnessed intense combat. “You could hear the artillery and mortars going off, and fighting,” he recalls, as Paul nods along.
At another field hospital, he saw soldiers missing legs and limbs in wheelchairs. “It was like, hello — welcome, this is a war zone.”
Mac says that he decided to join the Ukrainian Armed Forces earlier this year after losing a close friend on the front lines.
“I know my dad was proud of me, because his dad was in the army, and he was in the army,” says Mac, without looking at Paul.
Paul admits he was both proud and “extremely worried,” but knew he could not stop him. “It’s an illusion that we have any control as parents,” he says.
On Canada Day, Mac’s unit was hit by a Shahed drone in Zaporizhzhia. The blast threw a vehicle onto Mac, trapping his leg as a fuel-filled truck caught fire behind him. His legs ignited in flames, and his team struggled to pull him free.
“I was asking them to shoot me because I didn’t want to burn to death,” Mac says quietly.
But a teammate finally wrenched him out, tearing tendons in Mac’s foot in the process.
“My car keys and both my phones are in my pants, and I didn’t even think twice, just left it all behind,” he says. “I lost some of my documents and my pistol, which actually happened to be my dead friend’s who made me want to join.”
Mac suffered severe burns from his toes up both legs, and underwent skin grafts and grueling rehabilitation. “I just kept telling myself, I’m alive.”
When I ask what Paul’s reaction was, Mac looks across the table.
“I remember seeing you crying,” he says to his father. Then, turning to me, he adds, “I saw him tear up — he was happy I was alive. But it was hard for him to see me like that. It would be for anybody, you know — someone you love.”
After a months-long stay in a Kyiv hospital, Mac is now walking and continuing rehabilitation in Kharkiv.
Mac speaks quietly about his future — he’s proud of his service, but also realistic about his recovery. He is not sure whether he will ever return to the front.
“I just want to see where my rehab with my body goes first.”
S.M.A.R.T.
The next afternoon, a Saturday, we drive through the streets of Kharkiv. Nearly every building bears the scars of shelling.
“Attacks happen almost daily,” Paul tells me. “There’s not many places in this city [where] you can’t see boarded up windows.”
Yet many people have stayed.
In 2025, Kharkiv’s population was about 1.4 million — a mere 11,000 people fewer than in 2022. This is partly due to about 463,000 internally displaced persons having moved to the city since the invasion. Most live in bleak, dormitory-style shelters.
“Not everybody has the luxury of going someplace else,” Paul says.
Paul has brought me along to show me another H.U.G.S. initiative: S.M.A.R.T., an enrichment program providing sports, music, art, recreation and technology for displaced and traumatized children.
In an old, Soviet-style building, we follow dark, stuffy corridors to arrive at a small room filled with toys, games and children’s artwork.
There, Alona, a single mother who has led S.M.A.R.T. for the past 30 months, guides the children as they cut out paper pumpkins, bats and ghosts for a Halloween garland. The kids, who are aged three to 12, add spooky faces with eager concentration, while some parents sit nearby watching.
Sirens wail outside and enemy drones are hovering above the city, but the kids keep working on their crafts.
“In the early days … there [were] no games, there’s no soccer balls, there’s no playground,” Paul tells me. “The kids just had that faraway look.”
Most children in the shelters study online, while a few attend classes deep underground in metro stations or converted bomb shelters. Some haven’t seen a formal classroom in five years, due to Covid and then the war.
“Sometimes the kids want to walk a dog because they can’t have any animals [in the shelters],” Paul says. “Sometimes there are no toys, so we bring board games, tablets for school, musical instruments and art supplies.”
Parents value the program for keeping children engaged and socially connected.
“When they have activities … they forget about the war,” Elizabet, a volunteer with H.U.G.S., says to me, translating for a group of parents.
But the children remain aware of the conflict. “When there are attacks or airstrikes, they get scared and try to hide,” she says.
Holding ground
Operating so close to the front lines means the war is never far away. In February, Barbashova, a large market where S.M.A.R.T. was hosted, was bombed.
“Thankfully, it was at night and not while there was a bunch of programming,” Paul tells me when we’re back at Fort Canada.
“Things shake here and dust comes down sometimes,” he says. He hands me a piece of shrapnel about the size of my hand. “That came through the roof recently.”
Yet in the face of daily danger, H.U.G.S.’ team of volunteers remains resolute.
“I know the severity of the situation, but I don’t think it’s worth anything to stress about it,” says Jordan Roberts, a 27-year-old from Toronto who works as head mechanic for H.U.G.S.
Roberts, who had never left Canada before coming to Ukraine seven months ago, says he was motivated to come by a desire to witness history firsthand.
“I think it was just crazy that something like this was happening on the European continent,” he says. “I wanted to see it for myself.”
Roberts sold all his belongings before leaving; he arrived in Ukraine with just two bags of clothes and a couple of paintings he made with his 11-year-old sister.
“I wore a ring for 15 years before I came here. It was my grandfather’s ring,” he says. “I took that off and left it with my mom before I came here.”
His mom, he acknowledges, now follows the news obsessively and worries that every attack is happening “on his doorstep.”
For him, it’s the people who make the stress manageable.
“I know Canada always gets the rep[utation] of being the friendly country, but people here have been amazing,” he says.
Mac says he is often mistaken for a local, and now has a Ukrainian girlfriend.
I ask him whether he feels more Canadian or Ukrainian.
“I’ll always be Canadian no matter what,” he says. “But I’ve got room in my heart for Ukraine, too.”
Paul has not been in Canada since March 1, 2022 — and he has no plans to return anytime soon. “I don’t have a passport,” he says. “The Russians took it.”
This is a FANTASTIC story. I swear, I want to sell my meagre stuff and go help too, I wish I could. I’m old and sore, but Indidmmake wonderful friends withnthe Ukranian family down the hall, best neighbours ever. Bravo onnthese people and bravo to the Hughes family.