Volunteers from the Gift for Putin initiative yesterday handed over a U.S.-built Black Hawk helicopter called Cestmir to representatives of Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR), donated by Czech and Slovak citizens in an online collection, according to Martin Ondracek, a representative of the initiative.
Ondracek noted that Ukraine is “full of volunteerism”, including other fundraising efforts to buy weapons for the Ukrainian army, but said he felt the collection for the Cestmir helicopter was unique, as he wasn’t aware of citizens anywhere else joining forces for such an expensive piece of military equipment. More than 20,640 donors provided CZK 72.64 million for the purchase. It was symbolically presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by Czech President Petr Pavel in March this year.
The helicopter is in Ukraine in the HUR air unit. Ondracek said he did not know how the vehicle was transported to the country. He explained that its transport was organised by Ukrainian military intelligence and paid for by the Czech side.
Other collections for 500 drones with ammunition, and for an operation called Stefan, which aims to buy five aircraft for training Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilots, are now being hosted on the zbraneproukrajinu.cz platform. Ondracek said that well-trained Ukrainian pilots could be an investment in the security of the Czech Republic.
Ondracek said he did not feel the public had become tired of the three-and-a-half-year conflict. He noted that more money has been raised to buy military equipment for the embattled country in the first few months of this year than in the same period last year. “We think that more and more people understand that the essence of war is weapons,” he said.
The Russian army invaded Ukraine on the orders of President Vladimir Putin on 24 February 2022, unleashing the biggest armed conflict on the European continent since the end of World War II.
