I arrived in Valky soaking wet.
The moment you enter the town, there is something impossible to miss.
In the center is a square filled with the faces of servicemen who lost their lives defending Ukraine.
I thought about speeding this part of the video up. People do not have long attention spans online, and three minutes is a long time to ask someone to watch.
But some things should be hard to look at.
Every one of these men deserves that second on your screen.
A brother.
A son.
A father.
An uncle.
A friend.
A soldier.
Someone who had a life before their photograph ended up here.
I started this walk for my soldiers. But somewhere along these hundreds of kilometers, after meeting servicemen who stopped beside the road to shake my hand, thank me, tell me their stories, or simply walk with me for a while, I started to understand something.
I am walking for all of us.
For every serviceman and woman still fighting.
And for every one who never came home.
We deserve to be seen.
They deserve to be remembered.
A few hours before reaching Valky, I had been walking through a flash flood. I had no food. My feet were aching. My clothes were soaked completely through.
And standing there, none of it mattered.
What mattered was stopping.
What mattered was giving these men a few minutes of my day.
What mattered was bringing you with me so that, for a few minutes, you saw their faces too.
Valky itself had a prewar population of only around 8,500 to 9,000 people, with roughly 28,000 across the wider community.
It took me almost three minutes just to walk past the memorial.
Three minutes of faces.
In a town this small.
That is what war looks like in Ukraine.
Not statistics.
Faces.
And every single one of them mattered.
#героямслава #standwithukraine