An NHS volunteer from Kent is working just miles away from the Russian frontline in Ukraine.

Brian Grove is now helping at a care home in Kharkiv which remains under missile attacks and air raids.

While living there, the 62-year-old, from Murston near Sittingbourne, works five days a week and is helping elderly people receive physiotherapy.

After previous missions to the country, he travelled from the UK to the city at the end of May to offer help to anyone who needed it, and put out messages in Kharkiv volunteer groups.

Within three days of arriving, he was contacted by the organisers of the home – NGO Through the War – and thanks to his background in the care sector, was welcomed with open arms.

Brian said: “We’ve had some incredible improvements. One lady, who’s about 90, was told she would be bedridden for life.

“But we managed to get her to walk the full length of the building – about 50 yards – with assistance.

“Another lady has been in a wheelchair, but now she’s walking with a walker on her own, and that’s just a few.

“Quite a few of them have had strokes while some have long-term untreated broken hips or dementia.

“On top of this, most have been bombed out of their homes, or forced to run away.

“It helps to have a physio who knows how to get people moving.

“Many of them show amazing spirit and determination. They just need to be helped.”

On one of his days off, he volunteers at Hell’s Kitchen which is run by local women who produce more than 1,000 meals a day for hospitals, army units, foreign volunteers and those in need.

Some 1,500 large bread rolls are produced every day as well.

He says life is a “lot quieter” in the city that is just a 45-minute drive from the Russian border thanks to recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian missile launchers which have now been destroyed.

Brian added: “Before those missile launchers were taken out, one week, 19 people were killed.

“The next week – when I arrived – at least nine were killed.

“Since the attack then there have been one or no deaths. One death is still too many, but it’s an awful lot better.”

Despite this, air-raid sirens are still a regular occurrence in the embattled region although they have been cut shorter to limit the impact on people’s mental health.

Brian said that he, like most other residents, simply carries on as “normal”.

“When air alarms take up 10 to 15 hours a day, you cannot spend all your time cowering in a bomb shelter,” he said. “In fact, where I am living we don’t have one anyway.

“You still have to live, you still have to go to work, you still have to eat and those things can’t be done long-term in a bomb shelter.”

Brian spent Christmas 2022 on the outskirts of Lviv where he began a a marathon journey to deliver much-needed aid in an ambulance from York to the city of Odesa on the south coast before heading to Mykolaiv and finally a hospital in Kherson.

When he delivered the aid he found it was damaged, with the maternity ward destroyed by Russian bombs.

Brian is a law graduate, now retired on medical grounds, and is a dedicated volunteer who has helped serve meals at Faversham’s Cottage Hospital and attended Covid-19 vaccination centres across Kent. He also worked as an animal rescuer in Argentina from 2003 to 2012.