LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Prince Harry visited Ukraine on Friday, arriving in Kyiv with a team from his Invictus Games Foundation to outline his charity’s plans to help rehabilitate wounded soldiers, his office said in a statement.
Harry, the younger son of Britain’s King Charles, also visited the site of one of Russia’s numerous strikes on the capital, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, said.
“Completely destroyed homes speak a universal language. Our pain also needs no translation,” Tkachenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “We are grateful to Prince Harry for his attention to our pain and for his heartfelt compassion.”
It was Harry’s second visit to Ukraine this year, after he visited a centre for wounded military personnel in Lviv in April.
Harry served for 10 years in the British Army before setting up the Invictus Games Foundation, a charity which runs an international sporting event for military personnel wounded in action.
Harry was invited to Kyiv by Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and Olga Rudneva, head of the Superhumans rehabilitation centre, his office said.
He also met privately with Veterans Affairs Minister Natalia Kalmykova and the prime minister, and later laid a wreath at Maidan Square, his office added.
“We cannot stop the war, but what we can do is do everything we can to help the recovery process,” Harry told the Guardian on an overnight train to Kyiv, adding that he received permission from the British government and his wife before travelling.
The trip comes at the end of Harry’s four-day visit to Britain from his home in California, where he lives with his wife Meghan and their two children.
Since he stepped down as a senior royal in 2020, Harry’s relationship with his father has been strained after he publicly criticised the royal family. In a sign of a thaw in relations, the pair held their first meeting in 20 months on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Sarah Young, Additional reporting by Harshita Meenaktshi; editing by William James, Rod Nickel, Ron Popeski and Himani Sarkar)
