![]() “He was like a warm cup of coffee in the morning, he would brighten up your day,” Oake recalled. “He was my close friend, I wish I was there for him in that moment,” Adam Oake, who spent months delivering aid with Ihnat in Ukraine as explosions, gunfire and fighting could sometimes be heard in the distance, told me after Ihnat's death. That’s exactly what he was doing when he was killed over the weekend, his death an “irreplaceable” loss, according to those who spent time with him in Ukraine. Complete coverage of the war in Ukraine.Delivering humanitarian aid, evacuations, driving a medical team around to different villages.” In his update on the work he was doing, he shared, “I’ve been spending time in the east lately. The last time we spoke was in June, over WhatsApp. The danger is obviously there."īut, he said, "I’m not here just to think about that, I want to use my time as much as I can." I asked the cheerful Canadian if he ever feared for his own safety and he acknowledged, “obviously it’s a war zone, I didn’t know what to expect, I’ve never been in one. Michael’s, not far from the banks of the Dnieper River that runs through Kyiv. It’s a bad time, but it’s going to end and it’s going to turn out on a positive note,” Ihnat said as we stood near the gold domed monastery of St. Here is CTV's Adrian Ghobrial's account of their meeting and subsequent correspondences.Īnthony 'Tonko' Ihnat delivers aid in Ukraine. By that time he’d already spent 11 months there and had developed a deep appreciation for a country he’d never previously visited. 22 about why he left his life in Canada and moved to Ukraine at the beginning of the war. Ihnat spoke one-on-one with CTV National News on Feb. The four were volunteering with the NGO Road to Relief, which posted about his death on its Instagram account.Ī Spanish national who was the director of the organization also died and two German medical volunteers suffered serious burns and shrapnel wounds but managed to escape. The 58-year-old was on his way with three other aid volunteers to check in on civilians near the outskirts of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. On Saturday around 10 a.m., Ihnat was killed when, according to Ukrainian officials, the vehicle he was driving took a direct hit from a Russian anti-tank missile. “Seeing the buildings blowing up and the lineups of people getting out of the country, I felt I had to get over here (to Ukraine) and help anyway I could.” Known as Tonko by his friends, Ihnat was watching the news at home as the Russian invasion began and that’s when he made his choice. Anthony Ihnat was a handyman living in Richmond Hill, Ont., when the war in Ukraine began nearly 19 months ago.
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