Interview: The ‘crazy Brit’ spearheading Ukraine’s fightback against Russia

  LVIV – It’s not unusual for British politicians to criticise Western policy on Ukraine from the comfort of Westminster or clubland and perhaps to write cheques occasionally for Ukrainian charities. Brooks Newmark’s frustration over the appeasement of Russia, however, galvanised him instead to arrange the rescue of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and wounded soldiers from the front lines before starting a defence tech company designing cutting edge drones that have helped Kyiv to take the fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin to Moscow.

 Newmark, a former Conservative MP and minister in British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Government, millionaire businessman and philanthropist, set up his Angels for Ukraine charity soon after the Russian invasion. He spent months persuading bus drivers to enter hazardous front line areas to move women, children and the elderly to safer areas such as the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Initially Newmark got involved responding to a plea for help from a friend who was trying to bus out civilians.

 “I just thought I’d come out here for four days and help him,” the former MP for Braintree muses at a tranquil outdoor café in the relative safety of Lviv. “Four years later I am still here.”

 Although he was able to deploy considerable financial resources from his own pocket to buy buses and petrol for the rescue operation, he was only able to persuade reluctant bus drivers to risk their lives by leading literally from the front.

 “In Kharkiv I had the buses but I couldn’t get the drivers to come with me because the towns and villages were being bombed,” he recalled in an interview with the Lviv Insider.

 “I said to them: ‘I am going, who is coming with me?”

 “Four drivers with two buses then said they would come with me and the others were guilted to go. They thought if this crazy Brit is going there then they couldn’t hang back,” he says with a smile.

 Newmark’s charity diversified to bringing tens of thousands of wounded soldiers out of front line areas as well as civilians. When the Russians were driven out of Kharkiv by Ukrainian forces, dozens of nearby villages were de-occupied. Newmark helped distribute warm clothing and food donated in Britain to the refugees returning to their homes. In August 2024, however, he pivoted from humanitarian work to also helping Ukrainians to defend themselves, founding the defence tech company Tyrpillian with Ukrainian partners.

 “I was getting very frustrated with the Western approach to Ukraine, which was basically that you could defend yourself but you couldn’t punch back – this strange Biden administration approach, particularly by Jake Sullivan.”

 “I was contacted by a guy who had been in private equity, as I had. He had been wounded at the front, at Bahmut, and was in hospital. He suggested that we should start our own business.”

 Their company, Tyrpillian, initially aimed at designing a cruise missile for Ukraine, but it became clear that would take too long. Instead they turned to designing a low cost glide bomb, but came up against the challenge of getting drones past a 40 km wall on the border over which Russian defences knocked down 90 percent of Ukrainian drones fired at Russia.

 “I decided to attach my glider to a balloon that would be carried by the wind over the wall,” he said.  “We have three other drones that were and are on the front lines.”

 “Now we can use a dlrs 5000 glider to target Russia. It’s a low cost way to have an impact.”

 Tyrpillian coordinates with the Ukrainian military, which also keeps a watchful eye over Newmark’s security.

 Developing the drones, “we were constantly out there with the guys on the front line,” he adds.

 Doesn’t he think he may be taking too many risks?

 “I’ve been doing this for four years. To me the silence would bother me more than the noise” of shelling, he says. “You become either immune or addicted. But if my number comes up there would be nothing I could do.”

“I am more likely to be stabbed on the streets of London. Sometimes you wake up with a jolt and think there is a thunderstorm outside. Then you realise the room is vibrating.”

 “I have been lucky. The closest call was when a mortar shell landed 60 M behind me. I thought we had blown a tyre.”

 During the humanitarian operations rescuing civilians from areas under fire “I wouldn’t even wear body armour. The people we were evacuating didn’t have it, so why should I? I would look stupid.”

 “I wore it twice – only when a military guy said ‘look, there’s a sniper.’ I have never been to a shelter,” during an air raid alert, he added.

 He’s heard of muscular men with tattoos being deployed to the front line and freezing. As a former MP he had no training for a hazardous environment but evidently has nerves of steel. “How somebody looks doesn’t determine how their brain reacts.”

 He also has been surprised and impressed by the number of Ukrainian women soldiers and medics on the front line. “They are all young women in their late teens and early 20s, all volunteers.”

Despite Ukraine’s recent military successes Newmark believes the war will continue for some time.

 “This is not ending for a long time. It’s existential for both sides. If Ukraine would stop fighting it would be the end of Ukraine as we know it, as we’ve seen in all the occupied areas where they’ve wiped out any sense of Ukrainian culture, heritage, history, language, currency, everything.”

 “It’s existential for Putin also. Putin’s fighting for his life but not literally, he’s fighting for his political life. My money is on Ukraine …”

 A harbinger for his Ukraine work was an educational charity he started in Rwanda for 18 years. Brooks went to Rwanda first in 2007 as part of a group of Conservative Party members of Parliament, at the invitation of a member of David Cameron’s shadow cabinet. “I said I didn’t know where Rwanda is. I was not into international development. I am a numbers guy.”

 The trip was a life changing experience. Initially he put in 5000 pounds of his own money to help build a school. “Two weeks later classrooms were fixed up and Cameron rocks up at the school.”

 “In two weeks I made a difference. I am not changing the world but you can change the lives of individuals. I’d never had that experience.”

 Later he heard the school, by then with 343 pupils attending, was being closed down by authorities because of purported health and safety issues. “I said I will come over.” He made friends with the education minister. The problem was solved.

 His intervention was the genesis of the foundation of the educational charity in Africa that continues to provide hundreds of children with schooling, aiming to bring in best Western educational practices.

 “The education minister asked me ‘can you build a secondary school?'” Now it has 370 kids aged up to 16.

 While Brooks doesn’t expect an imminent end to the war he has become more optimistic about the future of Ukraine in the past six months. For Putin now that Ukraine is hitting targets in Moscow “it’s no longer a special military operation.”

 The long range kinetic attacks “may ultimately have an impact on Putin” and with so many Russian sons coming back dead and wounded Russian public opinion also is shifting as bonuses promised to the families of dead soldiers are not paid.

 “Hugely disappointed” by US policy on Ukraine, Brooks takes comfort from the fact that the UK has made a difference especially in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. “Boris Johnson deserves a huge amount of credit. We were giving the Ukrainians training and support. There is still universal support for Ukraine across the parties in Britain.  Even Nigel Farage recognises that the British working class still feels it can’t not support the underdog.”

“As much as I loathe Trump he was right to” force NATO allies to increase their defence spending and the result is salutary in terms of increased European defence against the Russians, Brooks avows. “The backbone will be literally the British, the Poles, the Germans and the Ukrainians,” with a contribution by the Baltic states.

 After his epiphany Brooks says he no longer lives, as he used to, as if he had a Soviet or Chinese five year plan. “Every day when I wake up I think about living today.”

 Brooks’ energy for a man in his 60s clearly is prodigious. After he left Parliament in 2015 his old Oxford tutor suggested he return to the University, where he did an M.Sc. in education based on field work. Now he has a year to go before he completes his Oxford doctorate. He shows no sign of slowing down.

 “I am 68. I am intellectually curious and I like to help people. In business and being in politics you are always beholden to someone else. I was miserable but I didn’t know it.” 

 “Hopefully I have another 30 years.” 

 Will he ever return to politics? He admits he sometimes misses political life. “It’s a great platform. I didn’t like having to suck up to people. I loved working with the Liberal Democrats as a government whip.”

 Despite such nostalgia he doesn’t see himself returning to UK politics before the Ukraine war is over.

 Having spent over dlrs 1 million in charitable work and 5 million in his company he feels he has made “ a huge commitment personally.”

 His defence company, he says, is essentially "a Ukrainian project with a British wrapper" that guarantees British quality control and good governance.

 “I’ve put my money where my mouth is,” Brooks says reasonably.

 “Happiness is doing things that have a social impact.”

 jp-mlp