'Stop sending clothes!' Photos show mounds of clothing in car park on Ukraine border

A charity worker has shared pictures of huge mounds of clothing donated for victims of the Ukraine crisis abandoned in a car park on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

Volunteer Charlie Hannerton, 27, took photos of the piles of clothing and bedding in the border town of Medyka, near Przemysl in Poland.

He says the donations arrive by the truckload from all over Europe, but volunteers don't have time to sort through unlabelled and unsorted boxes.

Hannerton says he posted the photos to highlight the best way for people to help.

Boxes with required items - like sanitary towels and nappies - are taken to a nearby warehouse and handed out to refugees, he said whereas jumbled up boxes of assorted clothing are left in a nearby car park because staff haven't got the time to sort through it.

Hannerton, from Falmouth, Cornwall, said refugees are arriving on foot, and don't spend long enough at the border point to sort through clothes, and can only take what they can carry.

It comes after a number of humanitarian charities urged well-wishers to donate money or requested items to a reputable charity, rather than send miscellaneous donated items.

Cassandra Nelson works for the humanitarian group Mercy Corps, which is headquartered in Edinburgh. The organisation sent teams to Eastern Europe on 24 February when Russia invaded Ukraine to support those fleeing conflict.

Watch: Polish club in London sort through masses of donations for Ukraine after people queued for hours to donate

The humanitarian worker says that donating money to reputable charities is the best way to help. “A lot of people in Europe are really keen to help by sending goods,” she said, “please don’t do this.”

“Unless there is a very specific request for something like certain types of medicine, money donations are best.”

Hannerton saw the boxes abandoned during his work in Medyka, Poland, and said other volunteers he met were reporting similar piles of dumped items at border crossing points.

He said: "The point I think I was trying to make with the pictures is that when the volunteers on the border say no clothes donations, they really mean no clothes.

"The refugees and volunteers on the border simply don't have enough time to give them to people. When the refugees arrive, they're literally brought into the camp and then immediately put on a bus or ferried into Europe in a car.

"They just get slung on a bus, and there is barely any system.

Watch: Group collects more than 500 boxes of aid for Ukraine in single day

"Volunteers just queue up, get a high vis vest on, and take whoever you can fit somewhere where they might have relatives or friends.

"I took four people to Berlin for example on my way home. You just turn up, get your details written down - often badly, and then they say to go and find people to take with you.

"Volunteers and refugees just don't have the time to sift through packages of clothes and say 'oh that's nice I'll take it with me to Spain' or wherever.

"They just sort of get on a coach and go.

"What they need is nappies, sanitary towels, blankets, really useful things that have a one time use - consumables I guess."

Hannerton, a specialist in supporting special needs and traumatised kids, he says Ukrainian refugees need exhaustible, said the refugees currently arriving in Poland, Moldova, Slovakia and other border countries are "the lucky ones" who can afford to escape.

But even these people, who have money and cars, still have to walk across the border with only what they can carry.

He explained: "I've been in the refugee camps this week. I work with children in trauma in the UK so I took my outdoor setup to the refugee camps to do some outdoor education stuff with the children there.

"I found myself giving things on the border to the refugees crossing over. There are kids that literally walk for days.

"They might lose their families or might be orphans, they just walk to the border with no food and in whatever they are wearing."

Watch: Footage shows mounds of clothing in car park on Ukraine border