Yana Skakova and her son Yehor who fled from Lysychansk with other people sit in an evacuation train at the train station in Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine, on May 28. Photo / Francisco Seco
Perhaps it was the sight of blown-up apartment buildings, shards of glass embedded in the walls.
Or maybe it was the children's toys scattered about the wreckage that drove home the brutality, Ron Mark says.
The former defence minister recently came home from Ukraine and says he will return again.
"It's not just the military being shelled and bombed into oblivion."
The scale of suffering and destruction is sickening, unimaginable, he says, and he worries about New Zealand's apathy.
Recent reports indicate about 100 Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Mark says civilians are also being slaughtered in Vladimir Putin's invasion.
"Does anybody in New Zealand really care? I'm struggling to find someone who does. We're more worried about where we can get a flat white," he says.
"We can't just sit down here at the bottom of the South Pacific and pretend that the rest of the world doesn't matter to us."
Mark apologises for getting emotional when talking about the war and destruction and suffering.
"It's hard to describe because it's so bloody heartbreaking."
He says one Ukrainian village he saw, a village like many small New Zealand towns, a place with no military facilities, was obliterated.
"I've walked through a village, not one home left standing. These were rural people, farmers ... These are people who worked the land. Every single one of them was reduced to nothing, to rubble."
He says Putin's forces have been shelling indiscriminately.
"When you walk through and you see the children's toys and women's clothing buried in the rubble ... You know that they don't give a shit. Russia does not give a shit.
"It's so unjustifiable. There's no way that a sane person can justify what they're seeing."
Mark says in the city of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, he saw 10 apartment blocks destroyed last month.
"They are bombed and shelled to hell."
He wants to return to help deliver humanitarian aid, such as food and medical supplies.
"Civilians are just being murdered and rocketed and shelled."
Mark is exasperated at what he calls talkfests and UN opulence but says volunteers in other agencies are doing everything possible to help.
He says the UN and its agencies seem to be doing very little but some NGOs and faith-based groups are working hard - and some volunteers are dying.
He says on the Ukraine-Romania border, he saw a Unicef tent with a padlock on it.
How do you padlock a tent? It has to be a pretty flashy tent, he says.
"All the other faith-based NGOs were working their butts off."
Mark was with the Great Commission Society and plans to work with the group again.
"I'm not an evangelist and I'm not a particularly good Christian but I trust these people. And unlike the UN and other NGOs, only 3 per cent of what they take in gets spent on admin overheads."
A recent success was securing body armour for drivers transporting humanitarian aid, he says.
"Our force is totally voluntary. People pay their own airfares to get there."
Ukraine is a huge grain and sunflower oil producer, its agricultural output crucial to global food supplies.
"I do worry about the consequences of them failing," Mark says of the Ukrainians.
The vast flat steppes stretching as far as can be seen look like an ocean of cropland, he says.
Gerry Brownlee, National's defence spokesman, has said Russian blockades of Ukrainian exports will impact New Zealand.
Earlier this month, Brownlee said Putin's description of the blockades was disingenuous.
"You can't be fooled by the Russian offer to let the grain flow out of the Ukraine to the rest of the world - because it comes with the proviso that all the mines and other protections around the ports are removed, which would make the invasion even easier."
The New Zealand Government has imposed sanctions on people linked to Putin's regime and provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine through the UN.
The Government has also sent Defence Force personnel to Britain to train Ukrainians in howitzer use.
Mark, formerly an NZ First MP, says New Zealand's isolation risks making us parochial.
What happens in Ukraine matters to the whole world, Mark says.
"If we only worry about ourselves ... we've reached the pinnacle of selfishness and hypocrisy."
Ukraine under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had some success after the February 24 invasion repelling the Russian onslaught.
But in the past week, Russia has focused efforts on eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists already have a presence.
Russia has been bombarding the Donbas with relentless artillery and air raids, AP reports.
In the past 24 hours, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy visited Ukraine for the first time since Russia invaded.
UK Secretary of State Ben Wallace today said it was for Ukraine to choose the manner of any peace talks and it was vital Ukraine did so from a position of strength.
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