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62 trucks convoys with humanitarian aid have been sent by Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center to Donetsk

27.08.2015

A year ago from today, on August 27, 2014, the first convoy with humanitarian aid from Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center arrived at Donbas Arena. It delivered 60 tons of food for civilians in non-government-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Back then the Humanitarian Center's aid was provided and is still being provided to the most vulnerable categories of population: elderly and disabled people, families with many children, orphans, etc.

Today the volumes of humanitarian aid delivered to Donetsk make 600-1200 tons of food products per week. The humanitarian aid is delivered in smaller convoys of 15 trucks, it takes one convoy 15 hours to get from Dnipropetrovsk to Donetsk. The most complicated and long route was through Artemivsk, it lasted the "record" 50 hours.

During its operation period the logistic warehouse of Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center has turned into a real humanitarian hub, where the humanitarian aid is accepted, packaged and distributed to 32 issuing points. These points are located in 17 towns in non-government-controlled areas. Those villages and settlements, where it is not possible to open fixed issuing points, are visited and have humanitarian aid delivered by mobile volunteer groups.

The changes in acceptance and handling of humanitarian goods at Donbas Arena over the year were described by Andrey Sanin, the Head of logistic centre (FC Shakhtar employee):

"When the first trucks arrived at Donbas Arena on August 27, 2014, we all even panicked a little, as nobody knew what humanitarian assistance was, and we had no one to ask. At that moment there were none of international humanitarian missions is Donetsk. But since Shakhtar has always been result-oriented, we pushed away all our worries and set to implementation of goals.

Turned out that the large areas of stadium parking lots are perfect for humanitarian convoys admission. Our absolute record was the acceptance of 47 20-ton trucks at a time, and each of them was unloaded in less than 30 minutes. We learned to use every free meter of inter-stadium areas for storage of pallets and maintain the perfect temperature conditions for food storage.

We have created a model of a typical humanitarian aid issuing centre, which includes not only effective zoning, but also strict standards of service for our beneficiaries, and replicated this model to all issuing points of Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center.

We have done a lot over the past year, and I will not deny we are pleased to hear the words of gratitude from aid recipients and the recognition of international humanitarian missions. After they visit Donbas Arena they usually say: "We haven't seen more effective system of humanitarian aid delivery".

Since August, 2014, Rinat Akhmetov Humanitarian Center sent 62 convoys to Donetsk. These were 2,056 heavy-duty trucks that delivered 41,000 tons of food products. Thanks to this we issued 3,662,619 packages for adults and 259,097 food baskets for children.