‘Smithereens:’ Calgary-based charity’s play space for kids destroyed by Russian drone in Ukraine​on February 6, 2025 at 7:16 pm

The large brown teddy bear adorned in maple leaf flags lying amid the rubble told the tale of a Russian drone strike on a Calgary charity’s children’s hub in an embattled Ukrainian city.

Its founder, Calgary aid worker Paul Hughes, said it’s fortunate what authorities say was an Iranian-made Shahed drone struck at 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday night in Kharkiv when the space that caters to children internally displaced by the war was vacant.

“It’s smithereens, it’s been blown up completely, it was almost a bulls-eye,” said Smith, who heard the explosion from about 2 km away.

“(In the daytime) there are 400 or 500 kids in that space, it could have been horrific.”

The Science, Math, Arts, Recreation and Technology (SMART) hub was located in a densely-packed commercial area that suffered widespread damage from the drone, but there were no serious injuries, said the Calgarians who’s been providing humanitarian aid in Ukraine since shortly after the war began nearly three years ago.

For the past two years, SMART had become one of the most highly-regard NGO efforts in the country, said Hughes, who vowed to rebuild it in different, safer location.

“It’s been a very successful program financed primarily from people in Calgary, it’s literally the envy of so many other programs…we’re not going to let these kids down, it’s not an option,” he said.

“(Continuing) would be the biggest middle finger to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin in Russia for attacking like this.”

Kharkiv, Russian’s second-largest city with a pre-war population similar to Calgary’s, sits a mere 30 km from a front line, one segment of 1,500 km of contact between Ukrainian and Kremlin troops in a vast arc stretching from the country’s northeast and into its southern reaches along the Black Sea.

In the first year of the war, Russian forces marched to the city’s edge, only to be pushed back by Ukrainian troops.

But last spring, Moscow launched another offensive towards Kharkiv that’s bogged down into a bloody stalemate to its north and since then, the bombardment of the city by missiles and drones has intensified.

It was the most fought-over city in the Second World War, changing hands four times between German and Soviet troops.

Tuesday’s attack on SMART isn’t the first damage suffered by its operator, Calgary-based charity Helping Ukraine – Grassroots Support (H.U.G.S.).

Earlier this winter, a Russian rocket scored a near miss, sending a jagged chunk of steel shrapnel ripping through the roof of H.U.G.S.’s main hub, missing a Finnish volunteer by a few metres.