King Charles‘s goddaughter, India Hicks, has shared an Instagram update from her recent trip to Ukraine with two of her sons.
The British businesswoman, now based in the Bahamas, travelled to the war-torn country with Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), a non-profit organisation providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief.
The 57-year-old, who is the daughter of Lady Pamela and David Hicks, helped to provide aid to the country with her sons, Conrad, 22, and Amory, 26, Flint Wood.
India explained that Amory chose to spend his birthday in Ukraine, working alongside GEM, which encouraged her younger son Conrad to also travel to the area.
In the first Instagram image, India stood with her sons, each dressed in protective gear, against the backdrop of a damaged building.
‘When Conrad heard that his brother Amory would be spending his birthday in Ukraine, he wanted to be there with him,’ India wrote, adding, ‘Love you both so much.’
In the second post, India shared a clip of Conrad standing in a location with battered buildings, which he had previously visited in January. She wrote, ‘Conrad, standing where he stood in January, ‘It keeps getting worse.’
She went on to share a selection of images and clips from the trip, including her meeting an elderly local woman. ‘She tells me everyone is exhausted by this war,’ India recalled.
India Hicks travelled to Ukraine with her sons, Amory (pictured left) and Conrad (pictured right), to help contribute to Global Empowerment Mission’s humanitarian efforts
Elsewhere, she also shared a clip of a man ‘teaching school children how to load weapons,’ she wrote, adding that it’s a ‘horrific reality’.
India added that the GEM boxes providing relief for Ukrainians are a ‘lifeline,’ writing, ‘The GEM boxes are a lifeline. They are also a sign of hope.’
In another post, India, who also visited the country’s first underground school, encouraged her followers to donate to GEM via a link in her bio, writing, ‘Social media can be astonishingly powerful in support of humanitarian work.
‘Its greatest strength is speed, information shared in real-time allows individual stories to spark immediate responses. Shares become donations, likes become awareness, and DMs become lifelines.
‘Social media can do more than just entertain; it can inform, inspire, and ignite curiosity. A single post, a shared story, or an image from the field that clearly catches someone’s eye and lingers in their mind might prompt them to want to know more.
‘This week, many people have reached out to ask how they might donate to’s incredible and varied work around the world.’
It comes after India, who was a bridesmaid at Charles and Diana’s wedding, recalled a ‘nerve-wracking’ encounter in her younger years.
Photographer India remembered the occasion that her ‘thoughtful’ godfather tasked her with taking the family Christmas card photo – despite being ‘young and inexperienced’ at the time.
India said she spoke to an elderly woman (pictured), who told her, ‘Everyone is exhausted by this war’
India visited Ukraine’s first underground school – dubbing it ‘An extraordinary necessity born from devastation’
King Charles’s goddaughter was reunited with some familiar faces during her latest trip to Ukraine
The 57-year-old was invited by Charles to photograph himself alongside his former wife, Princess Diana, and their sons William and Harry.
She revealed in an interview with Hello! magazine: ‘So, I went to Highgrove and photographed him and Diana and the boys, which was quite nerve-wracking.’
At the time, India had recently finished photography school and was ‘quite young and inexperienced’, but her ‘thoughtful’ godfather entrusted her with the job anyway.
She said that Charles had taken a big ‘risk’ when employing her as photographer since she ‘could have been a complete idiot with a camera’.
The fashion designer called the King ‘a very considerate godfather’, and spoke affectionately of his dutiful habit of always remembering to write Christmas and birthday cards.
She also praised the monarch’s vision for the future, as well as his long-standing commitment to combating climate change and backing for green energy. She said he was ‘ahead’ of the curve’ in his progressive beliefs.
India was one of five bridesmaids at Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 and was aged 12 at the time. Her mother was a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen Elizabeth II and cousin of Prince Philip.
The mother-of-five caused a stir recently after sharing domestic tips – drawing parallels with Meghan Markle‘s Netflix cooking show.
India’s son Conrad (pictured) revisited a location he previously took to in January, and told his mother, ‘It keeps getting worse’
India added a photograph with her sons and other charity workers, writing, ‘Me and the lads: Amory, Conrad, Vitaly, and Igor’
The business mogul took to Instagram where she shared her tips for hosting, declaring even ‘an unskilled culinary idiot’ can do the job.
In the clip, she shared how she recently prepared to host guests, supermodels Jerry Hall and Helen Christensen.
It drew parallels with Meghan’s performance in Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, in which the former actress shared her own vision of domestic bliss, including how to arrange aesthetically pleasing fruit boards.
‘It seems that trays and platters laden with edible displays are on-trend for a reason,’ India said. ‘First, even an unskilled culinary idiot like me can gather together some inventive ingredients and lay them out temptingly.’
India’s account of hosting drinks at her Bahamian island home is refreshingly ‘unpolished’, self-deprecating and chaotic.
‘It’s hard to say what creates the perfect drinks hour,’ India said. ‘In reality, who has the time to make it perfect, especially since most of us haven’t slept since 1997.’
Revealing her tips, she said: ‘Jerry Hall and Helena Christensen came over for last minute drinks.
‘I ran around like a headless chicken lighting candles, putting on music and setting up our plastic folding table, and spreading out my newest Pomegranate tablecloth, which didn’t quite fit.
‘I worried, only briefly, about them seeing our dining table also laid up for a family supper in our courtyard, would they think they have been included for dinner as well as drinks?
‘Unbreakable plastic plates (also from Pomegranate) and good fake palm leaves were rushed out onto the drinks table and lots of stinky cheese, which David says, doesn’t go off, it just changes it’s name. Intimate, unpolished, and slightly haphazard, this is how I entertain.’
India, who moved to the Bahamas to embrace an ‘unconventional’ life, married David Flint Wood in 2021, having already had five children together.
She had long insisted there were no plans to marry the former advertising executive, even after five children together.
‘Having lived a fairly unconventional life together on a small island in the Bahamas for more than two decades, we decided that our wedding should, in contrast, be very conventional,’ India wrote in an article for Vogue.
Speaking to the Daily Mail before the big day, she said: ‘He very much asked me to marry him. I said: ‘I love you dearly, but no. I don’t want to be a wife.’ I didn’t.
‘I wanted to be this fiercely independent woman. I wanted children, and I wanted them to have his name, but I didn’t want to be married.’
She later admitted: ‘I didn’t really expect being married to feel any different than not being married. We had been locked in a loving relationship for 26 years already.
‘But it took my breath away to find how spiritual it felt to walk into the church on the arm of my eldest son and to say those vows to David in front of all our friends and family, in the church where I had been christened and where my father lay buried just outside. It felt intensely intimate.’