Prince Harry reunited with his father, King Charles, during a busy week of charity appearances in the U.K. Although Meghan Markle, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet stayed home in California for the trip, a friend of the Duke of Sussex said Harry has “not given up hope” on bringing them to England in the future. And when it came to his surprise trip to Kyiv, Ukraine on behalf of the Invictus Games Foundation on Friday, September 12, there were two parties Harry needed to consult.
“I had to check with my wife and the British government to make sure it was OK,” the Duke of Sussex told the Guardian. “Then the official invitation came.” Prince Harry was originally invited to Ukraine by Olga Rudnieva, who works with amputees at the Superhumans Trauma Centre in Lviv, where he’s previously visited. The duke explained that he ran into her in New York and asked “what I could do to help.”
Prince Harry was then asked by the country’s government to visit Kyiv, where the Invictus Games Foundation will announce new initiatives to help injured military personnel in Ukraine. It’s a cause the duke has been passionate about since he founded the games for sick, wounded and injured veterans in 2014.“We cannot stop the war but what we can do is do everything we can to help the recovery process,” he told the Guardian.
Per the media outlet, the war between Ukraine and Russia has “left 130,000 people with permanent disabilities,” and the Ukrainian government is keen to help with sports rehabilitation efforts like the ones offered via the Invictus Games Foundation.
"We can continue to humanize the people involved in this war and what they are going through," the Duke of Sussex told the Guardian. "We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitized to what has been going on."
During his trip, Prince Harry will meet with 200 veterans along with Yulia Svyrydenko, prime minister of Ukraine. Speaking of the Ukrainian team at the Invictus Games two years ago, he noted, "Every one of the participants had a journey to get to those games, but nobody from any of the other competing nations was going back to war. That is why the Ukrainians stood out. Everyone felt an immense connection to them."
Although he visited the Superhuman Centre in April, the Duke of Sussex admitted, "In Lviv, you don’t see much of the war. It is so far west. This is the first time we will see the real destruction of the war."
