“The day has finally come, we are buying Bayraktars,” this infamous sentence uttered by Serhii Prytula illustrates the change in the scale of voluntary aid for the Ukrainian army. Even though volunteers have made up an important part of the war effort on the front since 2014, now it is believed that they can meet almost any need of the Ukrainian military, and beyond.
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, volunteers in Ukraine have been searching for, purchasing and delivering equipment to the front – from armoured vehicles to drones; they have been feeding and teaching both civilians and the military, evacuating people from shelling hotspots, providing hospitals with medicines, helping internally displaced persons, equipping sappers, and rebuilding destroyed homes in the territories liberated from Russian occupation.
The range of tasks various voluntary organisations in Ukraine have taken on and the sheer scale of their efforts seem to exceed anything that came before. The Village Ukraine explores the new challenges that volunteers have to confront in light of the full-scale war, and how they cope with those challenges.
Support *
* Paid monthly
5 USD monthly
Donate
15 USD monthly
Donate
45 USD monthly
Donate
90 USD monthly
Donate
monthly
Donate
Support
Volunteering, revamped
Over 1,700 civil society and volunteering organisations have been created in Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion to deal with humanitarian aid alone. Over 400,000 users have registered using the Volunteer Platform, which was first launched by UNICEF in March 2021. The Come Back Alive Foundation [which has provided assistance to the Ukrainian military since 2014] has delivered more aid to the Ukrainian army since the beginning of the full-scale war than in the previous eight years (approximately 55 million dollars).
"There is no Ukrainian volunteering phenomenon, it's just one of the instruments of the nation's total resistance," Come Back Alive founder Vitaliy Deineha tells us. "What [facilitated] it were just two factors: social media and the services that help you send money, from credit card to credit card, from one PayPal account to another."
Between January and July 2022, 86% Ukrainians donated money and 33% helped as volunteers, 39% of whom started volunteering after 24 February. Four out of five donors gave money to the army, and the average monthly donation increased almost tenfold compared to 2021, according to a study by the Zagoriy Foundation and the Socioinform agency.
In addition to this new crop of volunteers, several organisations that were established in 2014, but had at some point suspended their activities, have been revived. Among them is the Zhraia [from Ukrainian for pack or flock], which was set up by a group of friends who gathered in a pub on Antonovycha Street in Kyiv and organised a “night watch” during the Euromaidan [also known as the Revolution of Dignity]. The team then began to help equip the military in the ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operation zone, which designated Ukraine’s military operation against Russian forces in Donbas], which was critically needed in 2014, at the beginning of hostilities. But when the intensity of the hostilities subsided and the state’s ability to provide for the military increased, the Zhraia members resumed their regular work and projects, putting volunteering on the back burner.
“Of course we got organised [again] once the war entered this new phase, the full-scale invasion; we got together and resumed our active work,”
– Yevheniia Talinovska, one of Zhraia’s founders, said. Around 3,000 volunteers joined her team early in the full-scale war.
Talinovska added that Zhraia has grown enormously compared to 2014 and 2015: “Some people may leave, but they come back after a bit of a break. We are in it for the long haul. We have a lot of experience in voluntary work, we’re already past this youthful exuberance when you just work until you burn out; now everyone seems to be able to adequately assess their own strength and available resources.”
Zhraia is one of several organisations with more than one stream of activity: receiving, processing, and fulfilling requests from the Armed Forces of Ukraine; purchasing equipment and medicine for hospitals; and providing humanitarian aid to civilians. However, new challenges created by the full-scale war have prompted several organisations to take up more specific focuses, while at the same time establishing better communication with one another in order to share the military and civilian requests they receive.
Evolving challenges
At first, volunteering during the full-scale war was geared towards “helping everyone with whatever requests they had,” a representative of the Solomianski Kotyky (The Cats of Solomianka; Solomianka is a neighbourhood in Kyiv) volunteer organisation said. Solomianski Kotyky was founded by a community of civic activists: the alumni, students and professors from two of Kyiv’s largest universities: the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (the National Technical University of Ukraine) and the National Aviation University. Before 24 February, this community of activists was involved in implementing improvements at the two universities and in urban projects.
During the first few months of Russia’s full-scale invasion the volunteers’ main task was to help equip the Ukrainian army and to feed military and territorial defence forces. They attempted to help everyone who turned to them with ammunition, food, and medicine requests.
“This lasted for the first 50 days of the war. After these 50 days, when tension in Kyiv somewhat subsided, we thought that we have to keep going, but that we also have to change the format of our engagement. We decided that we have to focus our efforts on certain things and help in those areas where we are best equipped to help,”
– Andrii Yerofieiev, executive director and coordinator of Solomianski Kotyky, said.
In another example of similar mobilisation, the community of chefs and restaurateurs in Kyiv came together to systematically respond to the food needs of the military and civilians. Collectively they founded Kyiv Volunteer, a charitable organisation that now comprises around 500 people, 27 restaurants and cafes, and three bakeries.
“Everyone was looking for an effective format for meeting people’s needs,” Alex Cooper, co-founder of Kyiv Food Market and a member of Kyiv Volunteer. “In early March I went to the military commissariat to join the army. They asked me what I was doing at the time. I told them I was feeding the army. And then they told me to keep doing that.”
Kyiv Food Market was launched in September 2019; it was the biggest food hall in Ukraine at the time, and it brought together Kyiv’s best restaurants. For the first three months of the full-scale invasion, the food hall operated as an enormous volunteer kitchen: over a million meals for the Ukrainian military, doctors and elderly people have been prepared there. Around 15,000 meals a day were being prepared at Kyiv Food Market at its busiest. In late March, the team behind Kyiv Food Market launched Palianytsia, a series of free restaurants for the elderly.
In the summer, when the chaos of the first three months of the war was somewhat behind them, Kyiv Volunteer continued to prepare hot food for the military and territorial defence forces, though with the scale of their operations somewhat reduced. Instead, the organisation has focused on delivering food to the recently liberated territories, which have been heavily impacted by hostilities. The organisers have also started setting up an education hub for internally displaced people in order to offer those who lost their employment in the war opportunities to learn and gain experience; they are also planning to offer people employment in the restaurants and cafes that participate in Kyiv Volunteer.
“I think that when different organisations focus on different things, communicate and exchange requests [for aid], rather than everyone doing everything at once – that’s volunteering done right. For example, when we receive a request to help with food, we point people towards Kyiv Volunteer, with medicine – we point towards Zhraia. If someone needs thermal imagers, we advise them to contact Come Back Alive or if they need drones – the Serhii Prytula Foundation. Volunteer organisations have started to focus their efforts on specific things and to swap requests for help,”
Andrii Yerofieiev from Solomianski Kotyky said.
Solomianski Kotyky settled on their own focus during the third month of the full-scale war. The team set up a foundation and started focusing on tactical medicine and mine-clearing operations. Their goal is first and foremost to both train military personnel in tactical medicine and supply them with modern tactical medicine kits.
In terms of mine-clearing operations, Yerofieiev said that it will remain relevant for the next dozen years: “Towards the end of the first phase of our operations, we received a request from sappers, and our team really enjoyed fulfilling it. So we’ve started to develop our expertise and are now helping rescue workers, the police, and sappers; we’re supplying them with mine-clearing kits: metal detectors, explosive devices, and other equipment.”
Solomianski Kotyky are also helping to educate people, especially schoolchildren. Children returning to the territories liberated from Russian occupation must know what to do if they happen to find a mine. The Kotyky team is collaborating with police and the State Emergency Service of Ukraine to deliver mine safety classes.
Winter is drawing closer
The arrival of autumn has brought about new challenges for volunteers in Ukraine, mostly related to preparing for winter, which might well become the hardest winter in Ukraine’s history.
“REACH, an agency providing information on humanitarian needs from contexts of crisis, reported that access to shelter, food, medicine, and work are currently the most important issues. We are also expecting an influx of internally displaced people around winter because there is no way to heat [buildings] in the temporarily occupied territories due to the destroyed infrastructure there,”
Illia Bovsunovskyi, co-founder and chairman of the board of SVOI, a volunteer organisation that has helped to set up the Zaporizhzhia Humanitarian Centre, an organisation uniting volunteers in the city of Zaporizhzhia, together with the Zaporizhzhia Youth Centre.
SVOI determined that their major task this autumn would be to set up shelters that could welcome internally displaced people throughout the winter. Together with the World to Ukrainians charitable foundation they opened their first shelter with a 100-person capacity at an industrial plant in Zaporizhzhia in April. Another shelter, this one with a capacity to house 250-400 people, will be opened soon.
The Coordination Centre for volunteers in Dnipro similarly said that the cold season poses a major challenge. The volunteers at the centre have sewn around 5,000 uniforms for Ukrainian soldiers over the course of the summer; it is much more difficult to take care of winter uniforms.
“Everything winter-related is in high demand now: raincoats, sleeping bags, and so on. We’re looking for stoves and making them ourselves, similar to the ones used during Maidan,”
volunteers said.
Now that people are returning to recently liberated territories, there is another pressing demand: to rebuild homes that have been destroyed. It is crucial that as much as possible gets done now, before temperatures drop significantly, because rain and snow, together with freezing temperatures, will significantly damage buildings if they are not properly conserved or restored.
Some volunteer organisations have taken up the mission to rebuild damaged homes, given a widespread understanding that the government’s resources are first and foremost dedicated to restoring public infrastructure, not private property.
The largest humanitarian distribution center in the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine – depositphotos.com
This is how Dobrobat, a thousands-strong volunteer building “battalion”, has come into existence. Dobrobat is helping to rebuild liberated towns and villages in Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv oblasts.
At first, the organisation intended to operate in Borodianka alone: rescue workers in the city needed help clearing rubble after the Russian occupation. So many people were willing to help that Dobrobat had to expand its reach. It currently counts at least 30,000 volunteers who have helped at over 100 locations. Dobrobat’s organisers say that in fact even more people have taken part in this work since some of its registered participants are foremen or team leaders who often bring a dozen additional volunteers with them to each location.
Dobrobat volunteers help with initial repairs: dismantling and clearing the rubble, repairing roofing, replacing windows, restoring facades. Other volunteer organisations are going further: they are building new homes at the sites of the destroyed ones. For example, volunteers from the Repair Together team, are known for clearing rubble in Chernihiv Oblast to the tune of DJ sets. Repair Together volunteers have gone from removing debris and helping deliver humanitarian aid to major construction projects. They are currently building the first six houses in the village of Lukashivka.
New challenges seem to only make Ukrainian volunteers more ambitious. They are setting up foundations and other institutional structures, trying to secure foreign investments, and even making plans for “after the war”.
“It’s not even volunteering anymore. We have a clear vision for what our foundation will become. We want to build expertise in responding to all sorts of aftermaths of man-made disasters and wars,”
Andrii Tytarenko said
Tytarenko is a co-founder of District No.1 charitable foundation, which was founded in peacetime. Its original goal was the renovation of a street in central Kyiv, but during the war the organisation has expanded its activity to all of Kyiv Oblast, and now plans to expand further, even internationally.
District No.1 volunteers have helped 583 families in the five months of the organisation’s operations: they have cleared away debris at more than 100 sites, rebuilt more than 15 houses, and cleared around five hectares of land in Kyiv Oblast.
District No.1, like most volunteer organisations in Ukraine, is struggling to survive on donations alone. The costs of running projects are rising, the economic situation in the country is deteriorating, and most organisations are hoping for donations from foreign investors and looking for sustainable funding from large international organisations.
At the same time, Tytarenko said that volunteers themselves are as enthusiastic as ever: “I don’t know how it works, but now more experienced people are joining us for substantial periods of time.” His words ring true for many volunteer organisations across Ukraine. After all, if you ask any volunteer in Ukraine about how long they are going to continue their efforts, the answer is always the same: “Until our victory.”
