What was Mike Bullard doing in Ukraine?

The initial interview with Mike Bullard is delayed for a few minutes as air-raid sirens and distant gunfire start up.

From a building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, he explains that they go on all the time. Five Russian missiles hit the area two nights earlier, he says.

He says he’s become oddly used to air raids. Bullard has been among the chaos of a country fighting off a Russian invasion, helping to deliver supplies to those battered by the war. After nearly four months of humanitarian work in Ukraine, he arrived back in Toronto this month.

“I followed this from day one and I was sickened by it,” he says of the invasion.

It’s another strange twist in the tale of Mike Bullard. The trip to Ukraine came at a low point for the comedian. Regarded as the only person to ever host a successful Canadian late-night talk show, he had spent part of the past five years living with family and dealing with the legal consequences and public fallout from phone calls deemed to be harassing an ex-girlfriend.

Aside from standup sets, work had dried up. Then, last year, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he says, a friend contacted him via Twitter. He wanted Bullard to meet some Ukrainians in Etobicoke, who asked him to go to the country and try to raise awareness and money for their cause.

In the end, it was former Canadian soldier James Challice who had been in Ukraine and convinced Bullard to make the trip.

“He showed me a video of a mass grave with women and children in it,” Bullard said in a phone interview. “That was it for me, I had to come.”

With the financial help of a GTA butcher for some travel costs, Bullard made his way to Ukraine in November.

Soon after arriving, Bullard would see the horrors of the war first hand. He says he is haunted by one incident in Dnipro, where Russian forces had hit an apartment block with missiles. While workers were digging through the rubble, two search dogs pinpointed one spot. After he and rescuers kept digging, the bodies of two children were pulled out from underneath the pieces of building.

“They looked to be about maybe seven and five, and one of them had pyjamas on. They were both dead,” he says. “I cried myself to sleep every night for a week.”

In another incident, he said, he helped clean out a house hit by ordnance that killed a man in his 20s. The pillow was bloodstained and had pieces of brain stuck to it. The man’s widow and mother-in-law moved back in after they finished.

The strength of Ukrainians throughout the ordeal reminds Bullard of Londoners during the Blitz of the Second World War, he says. But also like in that time and place, there is noticeable trauma.

“What I saw at the train stations was reminiscent of ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he said. “People panicking to get out, just unbelievable.”

In Ukraine, he helped deliver food, medical and other supplies and assisted with evacuating people from hot zones. He also promoted fundraising on social media for organizations helping Ukrainians.

Bullard’s work in Ukraine was a far cry from his recent life in Toronto.

In 2018, he pleaded guilty to making harassing phone calls and two counts of breaching a court order requiring him to not contact his ex-girlfriend, journalist Cynthia Mulligan.

Bullard was discharged from court with a clean criminal record and six months of probation.

Two other charges were dropped, including one of criminal harassment, and a news article containing allegations that he was stalking Mulligan was corrected by the Star. The correction pointed out that allegations made in the story that he was outside her home were not mentioned in the charges nor were they made in court.

When talking about the case, Bullard does not cut a repentant figure. His tone becomes tense and stern, sometimes drifting into anger. He says he was treated unfairly by the media, public and the prosecutors. The criminal convictions and the attendant scandal took a toll on his career, he says; though he still had regular standup work from Mark Breslin and Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto, he slid from public view.

Earlier this month, while still in Ukraine, Bullard was in a car that was hit by a bus going 60 km/h. If he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, a doctor told him, he would have died. Bullard shared photos on Twitter of the gash cut into his head. With the high cost of medical care in Ukraine, the car accident is part of the reason Bullard cites for returning to Toronto.

His return brought some relief to his half-brother Chuck Jackson.

Jackson said his whole family has been worried about Bullard since he left for Ukraine and the concern comes on top of the previous years of concern as the charges related to his ex-girlfriend unfolded.

“We’ve worried about him, we’ve helped out. He stayed with us for about a year,” Jackson said. “We always believed in him.”

Bullard says he’s too old to return to Ukraine for another round of lugging 50-pound boxes, but that he hopes to help Canadian charities doing work in the country. Now that he’s back in Toronto, he hopes to tour the comedy circuit again and return to radio.

Asked if he went to Ukraine for a public relations offensive, Bullard rejects the idea.

“People who are guilty run off to Cuba,” he says. “They don’t run off to war-torn countries.”

Still, he does think his efforts in Ukraine will change how people see him.

“Do I think the trip rehabilitated my reputation? Yeah.” He went to the country, he says, “to help Ukrainian people,” but also “to show the man I always was and always have been.”

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