The heroic postmen of war-torn Ukraine putting Royal Mail to shame

[RobertT]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consu ... oyal-mail/

The Telegraph joins the Ukrposhta postal service, which remains one of the highest-performing in Europe

Volodymyr Semenenko’s yellow delivery van is littered with shrapnel holes.
As he carries out his deliveries in the villages of the war-torn Kharkiv region, he casually recalls the moment he came under fire only a few weeks ago.

Three Russian attack drones descended just as he was stepping towards his van. With a little luck, he escaped with his life.
Such incidents have become routine for Ukraine’s frontline postmen. Since the invasion began in February 2022, Russia has killed 45 Ukrposhta employees, levelled 47 offices and destroyed hundreds of vehicles.

Despite the relentless bombardment from Russian troops, the efforts of Ukraine’s dogged postal workers have kept the national postal service running, with the delivery men and women of Ukraine today treated as national heroes.

Remarkably, Ukrposhta says it makes 98pc of deliveries on time, making it one of the highest-performing postal services in Europe. It was hailed by the United Nation’s Universal Postal Union last year for maintaining its operations during the war.

Meanwhile, at Royal Mail...

It puts into particularly sharp context the performance of Royal Mail, which is failing to meet almost all of its delivery targets.
Last year, it delivered three quarters of first-class mail within one working day – against a target of 93pc. It missed its target of completing 99pc of routes, completing only 12pc.
It even failed to hit local next-day delivery targets in any single postcode area in 2024-25.

Ofcom, the regulator, has fined Royal Mail more than £36m in the past three years over repeated delivery failures.
Kevin Hollinrake, a former postal services minister and now Conservative Party chairman, said Royal Mail’s performance was a damning indictment of the postal system in Britain.

“When posties dodging Russian missiles are outperforming Royal Mail, you know something has gone very badly wrong. The management must take responsibility,” he said.
“Fined three years running, failing in every postcode, and still no grip being taken. The public deserves better and the leadership needs to up its game.”

On Tuesday, Royal Mail vowed to invest £500m to tackle its performance issues, confirming second-class post would be delivered only every other day, with second-class Saturday deliveries scrapped altogether.
It published an improvement plan following discussions with the Communication Workers Union, which has been in dispute over pay with Royal Mail since 2022, resulting in repeated strike action.
The “improvement plan” includes watered-down delivery targets effective as of this April, requiring postmen to deliver 90pc of first-class letters by the next day, down from 93pc previously.

‘In order to claim my pension, I have to survive’

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Mr Semenenko carries out his rounds armed with a small side arm, a tourniquet in his pocket and drone detectors on the windscreen of his van.
The Telegraph joined him on his route to three settlements near Zolochiv, a village in the Kharkiv region just nine miles from the Russian border.
A commute through the city, past checkpoints patrolled by pacing soldiers, gives way to remote roads flanked by expanses of untilled fields criss-crossed with deep trenches, barbed wire and dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles.

The roads are lacerated, tossing the van up and down. But wearing a seatbelt in these parts can be a death sentence: if a Russian FPV drone targets the vehicle, there will be just seconds to disembark before impact.
“It was scary at first,” Mr Semenenko, who has worked for Ukrposhta since 2022, says. “But now we’re used to it. We go driving through these parts and we just pray that we make it back.

“What I like most is that when we go to the villages that are constantly under attack, people are still laughing and smiling.”
Iryna Ikramova, the cheerful head of the regional mobile postal department, explains how she fled to Turkey during the first year of Putin’s invasion, but felt compelled to return.
“I spent a year watching everything happening here. I cried, I wanted to go home to Ukraine,” she said. “You help people. You do something important. That’s how I see it. Of course we’re afraid; that’s only natural. But we have to go.”

For the pensioners in these villages, far from the nearest town, this small van is their lifeline.
Sometimes without internet coverage, or the ability to navigate the internet, it is how they settle bills – always in cash, which some residents still refer to not as Ukrainian hryvnia, but as “rubles”.

It also carries essentials – groceries, toiletries, medication – as well as packages and letters.
On this day, the delivery carried more significance than usual: residents were stocking up for Provody, the Orthodox commemoration after Easter when families bring food to graves to share a symbolic meal with the dead.
“We pay for everything here – waste collection, gas, electricity,” says 79-year-old Margarita who, like several others, affectionately calls Mr Semenenko “Vovchyk”.

Without a mobile phone, she relies entirely on his dependable weekly visits to make payments and collect her pension.
Not long ago the remote village would have stood in near-silent fields, but today there is a continuous soundtrack of shelling, mortar fire and drones.
As residents queued at the van, the screech of yet another nearby drone could be heard.
Some will not come out here any more, where roads are monitored constantly by drones, and buildings are struck with guided aerial bombs and missiles.

But Ms Ikramova feels she has no choice: “People are there. People need their pensions. They’re sitting there without money, they still haven’t evacuated. Many are bedridden. And where would they go?
“You go out, and you don’t know if you’re going to come back.
“I have one more year before I can claim my pension, but in order to claim it, I have to survive.”

A spokesman for Royal Mail said the company had “great respect for postal workers in Ukraine who continue to operate under extremely challenging conditions”.
But they said comparing the two services was “misleading”.

They said it was “not like-for-like” to compare “parcel deliveries in Ukraine, including targets of two to four days in cities and up to seven days in rural areas, with UK letter deliveries, which include next-day and three-day delivery targets.”
They added: “At Royal Mail over 92pc of letters arrive on time and 99.4pc within a week. However, we know our service isn’t where it needs to be and we are taking action to improve performance, including £500m of investment over the next five years.”

[baldrick]

The Ukraine postal service is 100% owned by the Ukrainian government.
Royal Mail was privatised in 2014, which was supported by the Torygraph.