While many in the northern hemisphere were enjoying the warm summer months recently, the conflict in Ukraine continued and so did our work.

Donations slowed down somewhat, but we thank our regular contributors who helped to raise enough to purchase another 25 CAT-7 tourniquets. The purchase was made in co-operation with the charity SMART Medical Aid, who are able to buy large batches of tourniquets. They then offered us the same price they paid, for our smaller number. We thank them for such support and for working with a small collective like Black Flag Medical. Once again, everything was delivered to Solidarity Collectives.

The turn around time from payment to delivery was just two days! The tourniquets were already in SMART Medical Aid's Lviv warehouse. Twenty-five tourniquets may not seem like a huge volume, but they will save lives and even if it's only just one, then it's worth it.

There's been quite some discussion around delivery of cheap, inferior tourniquets to Ukrainian combatants, and it's great to know that we can be confident our purchase from SMART was for the genuine Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT) article. This video link covers the topic and some of the debate (Ukrainian language with English subtitles).

This month we've also helped directly support a soldier with some non-medical gear. The relative of a collective member is fighting with the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade (Edelweiss). He is currently operating in the Bakhmut sector. One challenge while in the front-line trenches is cooking a hot meal. At his request, we deliver 56 bottles of "camping gas." This should be enough to cook a hot meal daily for his unit for almost the next two months.

We also sent wet wipes (it's hard to wash in a trench!), chocolate and Vicks VapoRub.

Thank you again to all contributors. We hope to accelerate the pace of aid delivery in the coming months and kindly ask you to also consider continuing to support our work. If you don't already know, we also have a Mastodon social media account, where we post general, and hopefully relevant, medical news updates with the focus on Ukraine.