A PEMBROKE DOCK businessman has launched a self-financed poster campaign which urges everyone to identify with the suffering people of Ukraine. Trevor Collins is so incensed by all that is happening that he has produced several thousand posters in the hope that they will be used to highlight their plight and to detail ways in which monetary gifts can made to relieve their distress.

Asked to explain what prompted him to take this course of action Trevor Collins explained, “They are just ordinary people like us, taking their children to school in the morning, going to work, going to the shops and visiting friends and family on the weekend. The everyday things that we do. And yet, all of a sudden, a ‘gang of gangsters’ has kicked in their front door and said to them ‘You are not in control of your life anymore. We’re in charge and we will decide what happens to you’. It makes me very, very angry I’m afraid to say. In fact, I am deeply, deeply upset”

“We’re seeing the sort of tactics under the current regime – and I want to emphasise the regime not the Russian people – that we witnessed in Chechnya” he continued. That was another horrific conflict. They are besieging cities and I heard someone say not so long ago that starving people into submission is a medieval tactic. We have even heard reports of a child dying of dehydration because there was no water in the city. We should not forget that Ukraine is a modern European democracy and yet it is being subjected to medieval levels of violence by what is nothing but a group of gangsters”

Why a poster campaign? “My skill set is design and printing; it’s what I can do to make people aware of the problem” he continued. “But it’s more than that.  I want to have visible signs everywhere to show our politicians and our leaders the strength of feeling that exists in the country.

The campaign has several simple objectives.  “I would like to see people putting these up as well as giving monies to the charities mentioned on the back of the posters” he said. “I want to see people all over Pembrokeshire talking about this tragic situation, and even writing to their local politicians to say that they want maximum pressure placed on the regime and that they are prepared to take the economic pain that might result. Goodness knows any economic pain we suffer is a lot less than the pain the people of Ukraine are suffering”

And Trevor has a simple warning for anyone thinking that Ukraine a distant country and events there have little significance for the people of West Wales.  “We should get involved because this could be us tomorrow’ he said.  ‘We’ve seen the regime do this in Chechnya as well as in Georgia, Syria and Moldova. They are now doing it to the rump of a major European country, and it reminds me of the dismemberment of pre-war Czechoslovakia. A little bit at a time and then you take the whole lot”

Posters are available, free of charge, from the following locations across the county:-

•             The Pembrokeshire Herald – Milford Haven

•             Modern Print & Design – Pembroke Dock

•             Pembroke Town Hall – Pembroke

•             Tenby Observer – Tenby

•             Café Rio – Haverfordwest