New Delhi: When Brijendra Rana received a call from the Armed Forces of Ukraine a few days ago, he assumed it would be about the medicines he has been supplying to them since the beginning of the Russian invasion last February. But the call was not about restocking.
Acknowledging Rana’s efforts in the ongoing war, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, presented him with a ‘Badge of Honour’ — the highest departmental decoration of the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service or SZRU — on 2 February.
Rana, who lives in Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine with his wife Oksana, imports medicines from factories in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar and sells them in Ukraine through his company ‘Ananta Medicare’. Over the last year, he has been at the forefront of providing life-saving medicines to those in need in the war-torn country.
“I didn’t even know about the honour I have been conferred. I was just helping out as any good citizen should be, and will continue to do so. It always feels good to be recognised,” Rana, originally from Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat, tells ThePrint.
The citation on the ‘Badge of Honour’ conferred on him states that it is presented for a “significant personal contribution and comprehensive assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, under the conditions of Martial Law”.
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‘Ukraine is my country, I will not leave’
Rana, who came to Ukraine over three decades ago, has seen the country develop since it declared itself independent through a referendum in 1991. An engineer by profession, he travelled to the eastern European country to study but ended up settling down there after meeting his wife — a Ukrainian national — while he was in university. Rana started his wholesale medicine business in 1999 and has since embraced Ukraine as his own country.
In February 2022, when most people were trying to flee Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s “special military operation”, he decided to stay back and chose to help the Ukrainian government with medical supplies.
“On 24 February, it would be a year since it all began. We have seen so many bombings every day. My daughter’s school was reduced to debris after a missile attack. There have been a lot of personal struggles but seeing the country we spent most of our lives in suffering was too painful,” he says, underlining that the thought of leaving Ukraine never crossed his mind.
A year later, his mind remained unchanged about moving back to India.
“When you are out on the field helping others, the most troubling feeling is to leave the children behind. During a war, when there is firing and bombing all around, you never know which building would come down because of the missile,” he says, heaving a sigh of relief at the fact that his daughter is no longer in Ukraine. Rana’s daughter Sophia enrolled in the Queen Mary University of London in October last year.
While fighting has ceased in some parts of the country, Ukrainians are still learning to live with the ‘new normal’. But revisiting the horror inflicted on them is still hard.
“The day when Ukraine will win the war and I will visit India again, is perhaps when I’d be able to talk about what we went through,” says Rana, hoping that the war ends soon.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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