This is United Ukraine co-founder Adam with your latest update on how your donations are helping where it matters most in Ukraine. Since our last letter to you, we’ve distributed an additional $7,833.68 throughout the country while working on new connections and projects that will start distributing even more aid in the coming weeks. We get into all of that below, but first we wanted to share some more photos and stories with you from our recent meetings with our long-time partners in Ukraine.
We’ve previously written to you extensively about the tireless work of our partner Sergiy, organizing and delivering food, fuel, and basic supplies all over the country. But nothing could have prepared me for actually meeting Sergiy and his crew while accompanying them while they worked. To put it mildly, the amount of effort and care that goes into this work is simply astounding. Sergiy’s work represents United Ukraine at its best: a collection of regular people donating their time and resources for free in order to accomplish hard work that can’t be done any other way. I met Sergiy’s team while they were loading up supplies for the day behind a small retail store that they use as a home base.
This was truly an international group of volunteers all working together for the common goal of doing work no one else can or will - working around administrative and logistical barriers to make things happen. The international character of this work is a necessity borne from the reality of war. Sergiy cannot personally leave the country personally because of legal restrictions on combat-age men going abroad. So he relies on others, including his wife from Moldova and his friend Tomas from Estonia, to make the cross-border treks required to bring so many supplies into the country. This gives the actual delivery runs the feel of a road trip undertaken due to extreme conditions: friends from aboard arrive, meet with one another, and then immediately pile into a new van together to do something they all believe in. The atmosphere is light - it’s a conversation among close friends - but the subject matter is inherently intense. While we waited in a vehicle line to bring these supplies outside of the Kyiv metro area, Tomas told us all about how his contacts had begun using spent anti-tank missile tubes as makeshift rain barrels to deal with interruptions in the local water supply. Later, he showed me an example of this kind of wartime ingenuity: an American supplied munition collecting precipitation for locals to use as bathing water as the need arises. Without setting foot inside this country, I’d never have considered using spent missile cartridges as my daily shower supply; but that’s the reality Ukrainians live with today. The former instruments of war increasingly have become essential features of their daily lives.
This set of deliveries supported a unit that had recently returned from fighting in Bakhmut, a city that has been the site of some of the most intense conflict during the war. In the last six months, Bakhmut has become essentially uninhabitable; losing nearly 90% of its population during fighting to combat casualties and emigration. The troops we visited had been on that front line for months, and were now on rest and rotation while bunked in the large common room of an old soviet-era community center. These are young people living through tough conditions; most of the troops I spoke with were between 23 and 27 and had never been part of any fighting until Russia’s invasion. The majority were from rural areas and had left their families and homes behind to protect the country. They were spending some of the prime years of their lives living through hell.
All wars are really fought by the young - the product of decisions made by their elders to throw them in front of dangers only their bodies can handle. The costs of war continue for so long in part because we inflict them on those with so much life left to live. That’s why it was so important and wonderful to see the real relief and gratitude on their faces even while they were getting only the small creature comforts of real food and bottled water. One of the non-commissioned officer core, a man who spoke with me in a HEAVY Surzhyk and insisted that I refer to him by his nom de guerre of Koka Kola, could barely contain his joy that more American aid arrived.
This is what your aid and support can accomplish in only a single afternoon. It brings aid and comfort to the people most heavily impacted by the most serious conflict of our lifetime. It’s a small dose of humanity in inhumane conditions. This unit was so grateful they sent us back with a signed champagne bottle, produced in Bakhmut. They don’t take your support for granted; they try to pay it back tenfold. If you want to support Sergiy’s invaluable work in the field, the best ways are:
Via Debit, Credit, or Paypal:Â Â At this link
Via Venmo: @UnitedUkraine (under the business tab)
And we accept checks via mail at:
225 Bright Poppy
Irvine, CA 92618
But, of course, that’s not all. Back here at home, I met with Katya, a woman from Kherson who set up a fundraiser for a local organization, Dziva, from her hometown of Kherson. Her city was only liberated two months ago and the local infrastructure has been completely decimated in recent weeks. Because of the state of the roads and nearby bridges, it’s been increasingly difficult for us to find local partners who are making regular deliveries in the region. So I drove down to San Diego just to make this connection and learn how we could work with more partners to help the people of Kherson.
Katya put us in immediate contact with Dziva after this meeting and we have already incorporated them into our larger network of funding and supplies. The impact of that connection has been visceral and immediate. Dziva has been sending us regular updates of what they’ve been accomplishing with your help, including these photos of young families who were given diapers and high quality food - some of them for the first time in weeks.
And starting with our next update, we’ll be bringing you photos and stories from our newest effort - a partnership with New Hampshire native Brian Nolen. Brian has collected tens of thousands of dollars and will be personally distributing humanitarian supplies in Eastern Ukraine. This will be his third trip since the start of the war and his passion and zeal to help the people of Ukraine is palpable. I can’t wait to share with you everything he brings back.
We do all of this because Ukraine is special and full of special people. During my most recent trip I was constantly in contact with people who didn’t emphasize why their lives were hard. Instead they wanted to tell me all the reasons that life remains beautiful. Daughters who had been charged with taking care of disabled mothers, a year into war, focused on the extra time they’d been given to spend together. The shared experience of struggle is ultimately a bond that forges these families together more than it could ever tear them apart. Russia wanted to break these people. Instead, they’ve simply become even more intensely themselves.
For me nothing more powerfully symbolizes the Ukrainian stubborn insistence that the horror of war will not ruin their lives than recent efforts to transform tank barriers, ugly steel structures by nature, into public art. The essential core nature of Ukrainians as a creative and beautiful people shines through, even in times of chaos. The most poetic resistance to an imperial force is simply never letting them change who you are. Ukraine will survive this war because the spirit of Ukraine is indominable. Bombs and bullets cannot transform the strong into the weak. And Ukraine is a symbol and example of strength for us all. Thank you so much for helping this place, and this people, get through this conflict together. Nothing has ever meant more to me. And I know your help and support means the world to Ukrainians too.
As always, with love,
Adam