What else do you need? How a Lake James couple built an unlikely bridge between Burke County and Ukraine

On a quiet street along Lake James, about 30 people gathered recently for dinner with something unusual in common: Each had found a way, large or small, to help Ukraine survive a war taking place more than 5,000 miles from Burke County.

They were drone manufacturers and soldiers, translators and Rotarians, humanitarian workers and explosives specialists associated with government agencies whose names were better left unsaid.

They ate borscht and cabbage rolls. There was barbecue for anyone requiring a little Western North Carolina reassurance.

And they traded stories about Ukraine.

The gathering at the home of George and Karen Milner revealed an extraordinary and largely unseen connection between Western North Carolina and a country fighting for survival against Russia.

At the center of much of that connection was a deceptively simple question George Milner began asking Ukrainians several years ago:

“What else do you need?”

The answers have taken the Milners from wheelchairs to Land Rovers to drones — and connected Ukraine’s war effort, remarkably, to Burke County.

About the size of Texas, Ukraine is the second-largest country on the continent and has endured a devastating Russian invasion since February 2022 that continues today.

For more than a decade, the Milners have traveled to Ukraine to assist efforts in adoption, hospital care, war wounds, hunger, transportation, and military support.

They’ve also been pure tourists throughout western Ukraine. Away from the front lines which reach about 100 miles into the eastern border, they’ve embarked on motorcycle tours with the guys and automobile trips with the family, thoroughly admiring the culture and people along the way.

“Ukraine is 99.9 percent a beautiful European country,” Milner said recently. “Even Kyiv, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s great food, great people. … These cities in Ukraine are as elegant or beautiful as anything you see in Europe. It stunned me. Everybody’s doing their normal thing. They have big shopping centers, and the shelves are full of food.”

Restaurants operate with modern conveniences like QR code menus on tables. Civilian life in Kyiv, Lviv, and other cities appears largely normal despite routine air raid alarms, which residents often ignore, Milner said.

Aside from the alarms, the war’s presence is clearest in cemeteries marked by fresh burials and Ukrainian flags.

The Milners are members of the Rotary Club of Morganton. In 2023 they teamed with the Rotary Club of Marion to bring 260 wheelchairs into Ukraine for victims of the war. The Milners, with their daughter, Christy Irons of Greenwood, S.C., traveled to Ukraine to coordinate the shipment of those and medical supplies. (https://www.thepaper.media/news/milners-lead-rotary-effort-to-aid-ukraine/article_39f0b8c3-140b-5b05-8f02-9acec5797daf.html).

In his late 70s but looks like he’s in his mid-60s, Milner has retained an appetite for adventure, says his wife Karen and daughter Jennifer.

It is a bring-it-on attitude that has taken Milner motorcycling in India, mountain-biking in the Blue Ridge, piloting airplanes, and serving in the U.S. Navy as part of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover’s team focusing on nuclear submarine instrumentation.

Friends say that if Milner, who holds an MBA, embraces it, sees that it needs to be done, or should be done, he will make it happen.

After the delivery of wheelchairs, Milner again asked Ukrainians, “What else do you need?”

Transportation, they said. Automobiles, specifically.

Milner collaborated with UK businesses to donate used but robust renovated Land Rovers to Ukraine from the U.K.

Volunteers typically drove the rugged cars solo or in groups roughly 1,400 miles across Europe from the UK through countries like France, Germany, and Poland to designated handoff points.

“What else do you need?” Milner asked the Ukrainians.

Drones, they said. A lot of them.

Milner visited a struggling Ukrainian drone manufacturer in the western borders of the country, far from the war zone.

“I went into his facility, and his manufacturing of drones was just pathetic,” Milner said. “He was making 50 drones a week at the time.”

Fifty didn’t come close to cutting it. He said he needed to make 200 to 500 drones weekly.

“And I said, ‘Okay, I can help you do that. I can get you there.’”

He did.

He connected the Ukrainian manufacturer with another drone supplier in Odessa.

The supply chain expanded through Europe and China. Eventually, that supply chain reached all the way back to Burke County, where an aerospace manufacturer became involved. Because of the nature of the work, The Paper is not identifying the company.

George and Karen’s work has never been limited to Ukraine’s military needs. They focused on the people living with its daily consequences, particularly children, hospital patients, and elderly residents struggling with shortages of food, heat and electricity.

Karen, often accompanied by their daughter Christy Irons, has visited hospitals and orphanages and helped Ukrainians struggling with food, heat and electricity.

On one trip, they traveled to a community 15 to 20 miles from Chernobyl where roughly 70 elderly women were living with few resources. Many had little food and unreliable electricity.

The Milners and others had previously helped provide firewood for the women. On this visit, they brought a large supply of food and distributed it among the residents.

For Karen, those visits were a central reason for making the trip — seeing firsthand how children, patients and elderly Ukrainians were coping with the conditions around them.

Among the guests at Lake James was Oleksandr, a Ukrainian engineer who had lost his right arm and right leg to land mines.

He had survived the war. Lake James nearly got his prosthetic leg anyway.

The morning after the dinner, Oleksandr was riding an eFoil board across the lake when he lost control. His prosthetic leg came loose and disappeared into 40 feet of water.

Two Lake Hickory scuba divers went looking.

Thirty-one minutes later, they found it.

It was perhaps the strangest recovery operation connected to Ukraine that George Milner had yet participated in.