In early June, two residents of Kharkiv, Yurii Hubin and Tamara Temchenko, decided to walk 3600 km from Lviv to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.  The journey covers 9 countries and will take several months. They took only two backpacks and a tent with them. Their daily travel schedule is as follows: 50 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of rest.

"I couldn't find a route from Ukraine to Spain on the Internet, so I had to make my own. That's how we decided to tell foreigners about the plight of the Ukrainian people, and then tell our Ukrainians how they meet us, how they look at us," Yuriy Hubin tells ZAXID.NET  

Before the full-scale invasion, 64-year-old Yuriy Hubin was a lecturer at the National University of Pharmacy in Kharkiv. When the city began to be bombed, Yuriy decided to join the volunteer work together with his friend Tamara Temchenko, a local businesswoman. They helped sort the medicines that came to the city as humanitarian aid. Eventually, the system of sorting medicines was established, and pharmacies in the city resumed operations. It was then that they had the idea to walk from Ukraine to Spain to draw attention to the situation in Ukraine.

Yurii and Tamara set off from Lviv towards Staryi Sambir and crossed the border with Poland at the Smilnytsia checkpoint. Their path ran through the wooded area along the border, and they were stopped several times by border guards.

"In one day, we were checked by border guards five times. It didn't annoy us, on the contrary, we were amazed at how conscious people are about their safety," Tamara Temchenko shares her adventures. The travellers note that if they were suddenly noticed by any of the locals, they immediately reported it to the border guards.  For example, once, when they were walking through a forest where there was a felling, the workers noticed them when they sat down to rest. And almost immediately, two border guards approached them. They checked their documents and gave them a special pass. They showed it to other border guards and were not stopped again.

Yurii and Tamara have a long journey ahead of them, during which they will visit new countries and meet new people. They will tell stories of lost homes, bombed-out cities and dead children. These are stories that should not be forgotten by anyone.