There's not a lot of good news happening in Ukraine right about now. But some of the stuff that gets out of Ukraine is very good news indeed:
It's 9:15 a.m. and Bryan Stern is waiting outside a Kyiv hospital. The sound of shelling in the distance forces him and his team to hurry. They need to get two premature babies into an ambulance and out of the besieged Ukrainian capital.
This is Operation Gemini, named for the American twins he has been tasked with evacuating.
That sounds like the daring one-off mission at the start of a Bond movie or something. But it's very real.
The babies in question were born to a Ukrainian woman who agreed to be a surrogate for a Ukrainian-American man and his partner who live in Chicago.
They were too small to move in the days after they were born into a war zone. But as they grew stronger, Kyiv grew weaker. Now, they are making the run for the border with Stern and his specialist evacuation team of U.S. Army veterans.
It's a treacherous journey that will include Russian shelling, complex border crossings and a snowstorm.
Spoiler alert: The babies make it, they're fine, everybody is happy.
The lifesaving undertaking was carried out by Project Dynamo, an evacuation nonprofit "run by extraordinary civilians... attempting to do the impossible."
Specifically, the heavy lifting is done by "a veterans coalition locating at-risk individuals and transporting them to temporary safer locations."
That's our people, folks. That's our country.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
