by Britta Ellwanger, Ian Crookston, and John Vsetecka
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Britta Ellwanger is a graduate student at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy in their flagship Anti Corruption Studies program. Once the full-scale invasion began she went full swing into volunteer work in Ukraine. Originally planning to do her research on the use of environmental, social, and governance factors (ESGs) as a mechanism of oligarchic legitimization, she's changing her topic to be more relevant to the war. She has been living, working, and/or studying in Ukraine for ten years. She has a B.A. from Stanford University in Political Science. |
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Ian Crookston has worked as an outdoor and backcountry guide in the western US national parks of Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Ian received his MA from the Davis Center's REECA program in 2016, where he studied state-building, war, and international humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Russia after WWI. He left his PhD program at Stanford in 2022 and joined the forPEACE team soon after Russia's February invasion. |
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John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University. With a specific focus on the Holodomor, his current work seeks to understand how people make sense of tragedies and come to terms with difficult pasts. After being evacuated from a Fulbright placement in Ukraine to Warsaw, Poland due to Russia’s war, John became involved with humanitarian work that assisted refugees who fled to Poland from Ukraine. He serves as an Academic Advisor for the Ukraine Relief Project team at forPeace. |
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We want to write about Ukrainian volunteer war relief efforts but before we do so, it seems right to spend a moment on that one word. War. Every morning at 9 am Ukraine holds a moment of silence for the fallen. We, too, want to hold a written moment for the void that we peer into when considering people—their lives and deaths—in war.
December 16, 2022 Kryvyi Rih, Dnipopretovska Oblast, Ukraine The logistical home of forPEACE, the umbrella organization for the Ukraine Relief Project
In the days leading up to the 16th, Kryvyi Rih’s critical infrastructure had been struck multiple times by missiles. Around 8 am on the 16th we heard the familiar sound of an incoming hit.
Telegram news channels updated slowly. Reception throughout the whole city (and country) is poor after strikes, and proper security protocols require location and damage to be withheld as long as the air raid risk remains. Local volunteers Svitlana and Yulia, who were with us that morning, do not rely on official news, though. On their home turf, they know the news before the news does. They are the news. Svitlana read out informal updates from soldiers, firefighters, policemen, and local residents: people at the scene of the strike personally dealing with its aftermath. Svitlana and Yulia tried calling their children, but the reception was too weak and kept failing. Never in the midst of this did they stop their volunteer work. Svitlana and Yulia picked up five generators their friends, once locals who had emigrated to Western Europe, had sent them. They were on a timeline to get them passed on to the frontline troops they support nonstop.
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Britta messaged Dr. Sichar, a bright, young ENT surgeon at Kryvyi Rih City Hospital No. 2, the largest hospital in the city and, up until the liberation of Kherson, a critical first-stop stabilization center for the hundreds of wounded coming in from the southern frontlines. During the peak of the counteroffensive, they were receiving upwards of 400 soldiers a day. We know Dr. Sichar and the rest of the maxillofacial surgical department because one of forPEACE’s programs is a long-term in-country surgery program. forPEACE’s medical advisor, Dr. Aragon Ellwanger, joined their surgical team after fourteen years of service in the US Air Force as a maxillofacial trauma surgeon trained at the US Department of Defense’s premier level-one trauma center in Texas.
Dr. Sichar told Britta that their department was stabilizing thirteen wounded. He informed her that seven-year-old Alina was in critical condition and would be referred to a different hospital. The necessary angiographic system was not functioning under blackout conditions, when the hospital runs on generators.
The death toll rose to four. Olha Andreychuk and three members of the Korniychuk family - mother Liudmila, father Oleksandr, and one-and-a-half year old Timofei– are no more. Their seven-year-old-son Maksym survives them because he had been spending the night with his great-grandmother.
We remembered then when the Russian military first began targeting Kryvyi Rih. August 25, the day after Ukrainian Independence Day and just before Ukraine launched its southern counteroffensive. On that day Russia lobbed cluster munitions into Kryvyi Rih. Oleksandr Vilkul, the former governor of Dnipropetrovsk and current head of the Kryvyi Rih Military Administration, warned Kryvyirizhians through his personal Telegram channel to be careful when walking. Clustered munitions run a risk of delayed detonation. The danger to civilians was high.
Dr. Y, a peace-time oncological surgeon part of a frontline medical evacuation team that forPEACE supports, sent us pictures from his field hospital as he relayed urgently needed supplies for us to source. They were horrific. Bodies shredded from the torso down.
We were struck when we saw the blasted human bodies. Bodies are not bounded; they are not finely delineated and fixed. A torso—something we relate to as firm and upright, smoothly integrating disparate parts of our body into a unified whole– we see now as its own blunt massive “piece”. It lays horizontally on a metal table, a trash can perched at the end to catch what is falling out. Yet this is not a thing, it is not an it. This is a person. Importantly, this is still a living person. A person with the potential still to survive. The safe, tight, bounded assumptions and definitions we’ve developed about life, death, and humans break apart. It’s all laid open and bare, pouring out.
Here in Ukraine, life is death as long as there is a war.
And war relief is what Ukrainians do on an instinctual basis daily when they maximize their social networks to fight for life and win this war. Ukrainians set a high standard. They are targeted, fast, and efficient. War relief—in the Ukrainian manner— is from the inside out, bottom up, and amongst very specific groups of locals.
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forPEACE’s aim is to integrate and empower this model, to work with those whose feet and hands are creating, together with thousands of other “ordinary” Ukrainians, the headlines we read in the news. A chapter of the liberation of Kherson is that Dr. Y had mobile carriers, medicines, field beds, an ambulance, and vascular clamps from forPEACE for the hundreds of wounded he and his team saved from the frontline. The wounded civilians in Kryvyi Rih that The Kyiv Independent writes about are being treated by doctors who are part of the forPEACE surgery program. We don’t sit with them in an administrative office. We stand alongside them and work with them where they work.
forPEACE’s Ukraine Relief Project began in a Warsaw Airbnb after John Vsetecka, Anna Kravchuk, James Berk, and Britta evacuated out of Ukraine. We started small, focusing on body armor, radios, and thermals. Today, forPEACE works with an entire slew of frontline needs. We supply paramedics with ambulances and medical evacuation equipment. We procure medical aid for neonatal centers tending to a marked rise in pregnancy complications. We support frontline hospitals and field hospitals who treat casualties of war. We supply defenders with vehicles, trauma first aid kits, full sets of ballistic armor (helmets and level 3+ or 4 vests), summer and winter uniforms, and other tactical gear. We provide food to grayzone areas caught between the Russian and Ukrainian fronts. We provide water filtration systems to entire communities shut off from clean water. We house refugees abroad and support resource centers for internally displaced persons (IDPs). We provide, in collaboration with Lifting Hands International, industrial equipment so liberated communities can provide for their own winter heating needs and provide needed public services to restart life in their villages.
But that’s the physical stuff. And in a way, that’s the least important. What’s important is the living system of thousands of Ukrainian social networks that we work to become part of and support. Some are official humanitarian organizations like “Capable People” in Pokrovsk, “Halabuda” when it was still in Mariupol, “Good Works” in Bakhmut, and “Chervona Kalyna” in Kryvyi Rih. Some are informal networks of locals like Svitlana Yanovych, Mykola Piddubny, Katya Sporysh, Nikolai Tunyk, and Yulia Bondarenko. Others are local village leaders like Halyna Lukivna and Serhiy Pylypenko in Kherson Oblast or Krystyna Mandach in Stariy Saltiv, Kharkiv. We empower them with the capital and resources to do what they do best because this is their home. For a small organization on a tight budget, we do a lot because we’re working with the right people– the supposedly “little” people.
Every town in Ukraine dedicates public space to the war dead: dozens, often hundreds, of photographs of locals who have died since Russia began this war in 2014. The sober faces staring back at us in these photographs in Kryvyi Rih are mostly of older men. Their thick, worn skin testifies to a life of hard labor. The burdens of this war rest upon the shoulders of a class of “ordinary” Ukrainians whom we will never know. Victories on the battlefield are in large part due to the mass deaths of such ordinary people we will, again, never know. And it is these ordinary working-class Ukrainians who carry the freedom and future of Ukraine. They sacrifice everything: their time, their money, their well-being, their lives.
As the working class, they also reveal an intimate reality of Ukrainian life from the “inside” that only they are privy to. They are accustomed to stretching resources to their full extent, implementing a host of DIY solutions, and getting around seemingly insurmountable corruption, grift, and policy gridlock. These are resilient, self-sufficient communities that are used to surviving economic inequality by banding together. They are also anything but isolated. Centuries of emigrations and yearly cycles as migrant workers connect Ukrainians from the smallest of villages to European and American metropolises. They use all of this to their advantage now, and it has resulted in the unbelievable (to outsiders) relief efforts that have saved millions of lives and thrown back the full might of an industrial superpower.
The invasion is their lived experience. From the first day of the invasion there was a critical gap between these “insiders” and the “outsiders” straining to help. The insiders (Ukrainians directly experiencing the war) commanded a micro-detailed knowledge of the war. They knew what their communities needed, where it was needed, and how to get it there fast. They held the answers. On February 24th they immediately began organizing to address those needs. In contrast, foreign governments, international agencies, and foreign humanitarian organizations often lacked hyper-localized viewpoints essential for targeted and timely aid.
The following experience from early March 2022 illustrates this critical gap between insiders and outsiders. Anna Kravchuk, a well-established eco-activist from Pokrovsk, introduced Britta to volunteers across Ukraine whose local relief efforts she recommended we support. These were trusted community members with reputations for their service to others. One such contact was Natalia Frolova, a volunteer who had taken on the herculean task of responding to the needs of IDPs and local defenders in Pokrovsk. Natalia told Britta the field hospitals were in need of hemostatic sponges. We went about procuring them in Poland. We asked Natalia about the best way to get the hemostatic sponges to her, she responded, “Transportation is easy. Just let me know when you have a shipment ready.” A week later we had gathered the 300 sponges. “Great, let me make some calls,” she replied. Thirty minutes later she had the number of a bus driver, Oleksandr. “He’ll be driving through Warsaw today.” Britta agreed to meet Oleksandr at Warsaw West Bus Station. What Britta saw when she arrived stunned her.
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An assembly line of about 25 people was transferring medical, humanitarian, and defensive aid from various sprinter vans into a large yellow tour bus. The bus’s storage and seating area was stuffed to the brim. Britta learned this was not Oleksandr’s first nor last stop.
Nor was all the “stuff” in the bus headed to one place. Each person had brought just a few boxes of aid. Each box was intended for a specific recipient. People had lists of requests so accurate they were down to exact sizes and quantities. This small, direct, people-to-people aid seemed so much more impactful than what dozens of pallets sent by huge humanitarian, international, and foreign organizations could achieve at the time.
The aid in Oleksandr’s bus was going to hot spots that large foreign organizations still could not reach. It was going directly into the hands of locals who made sure the aid got used immediately as intended. Humanitarian aid handled in this way truly is something better than “aid;” it becomes a grassroots system of relief. Those involved are also those directly affected if the aid is misused or misappropriated. When vetting partners and managing transport routes, Ukrainians often told us, “It’s in my interest to make sure that this gets to the end recipient,” because the end recipient is a family member, a friend, a colleague, or a fellow Bakhmutian, Khersonian, etc. Ukraine still stands because ordinary people came together to respond to the precise needs of their communities. As Britta stood there in awe, beholding the scene, she snapped a few pictures of this little spontaneous ant line thinking to herself, “This is how the war will be won.”
A friend who had been working for USAID in Ukraine happened just then to forward Britta a message from a European embassy. The message said, “Can someone with boots on the ground write a list of urgently required items so I can forward to the [redacted] Government?” Britta looked at the feet of migrant Ukrainian workers and snapped another picture in response. “Doesn’t get any more boots-on-the-ground than this.” She approached a woman who looked to be in charge of the assembly, showed her the text, and asked for help compiling such a list. The woman gave her the numbers of various additional people and told her to talk to them, as well. Britta asked her how this tour bus aid run had been organized. She smiled mischievously, “I work for an international bus company. I’m in their customer service center here at the Warsaw office. Oleksandr is one of our drivers. We know the routes and we coordinate aid runs at every stop on the way back into Ukraine.”
As outsiders, we all missed it. It was only in asking a blue-collar Ukrainian from Pokrovsk how we could help that we were connected to an existing transnational supply chain between migrant Ukrainian workers and their in-country colleagues, friends, and relatives. This supply chain had immediately and spontaneously transformed into one of the most effective relief networks we had seen. While foreign governments, organizations, and individuals such as myself were still struggling to access information about the unfolding situation, Ukrainian boots around the world were already running relief straight to the warzone.
The “secret” to their logistical ingenuity was no secret at all. It was simple and obvious: practical know-how. The practical know-how to turn to a local bus driver you know and instrumentalize his empty bus returning from Poland to Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians agilely transformed their pre-existing economic and social systems to fit the needs of a war. The response of international bureaucratic experts paled in comparison. Due to their outsider position, they had no natural access to the fast logistical solutions those on the ground quickly materialized.
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For the forPEACE Ukraine Relief Project, it was all a matter of initial positioning to support those on the inside responding to needs at the local level. War is horrendous and the various humanitarian crises that it causes might seem like an insurmountable, endless quagmire. On top of the overwhelming task of trying to alleviate industrial-scale violence, aid work can have negative consequences that must be combatted as well, such as corruption and undermining a fragile local economy. But the answer is very simple: work amongst those on the ground from within. They know how to address these problems within the nuanced context of their localities. All Ukrainians need right now is your help to empower the solutions they have already come up with.
One localized network connects you to other networks in other localities. Working with a local node of residents in Chernivtsi leads you straight to areas on the frontline or occupied Donetsk. Listening to Ukrainians living in Krakow, Poland brought us into contact with those providing medical treatment to Mariupol evacuees who had fled to Kryvyi Rih. Supporting crowdfunding efforts of a Kyiv-based academic connected us to a Ukrainian diaspora group running aid from Chicago through the Slovakian border down towards the frontlines of Kherson. From one person, you can learn and reach the needs of so many across Ukraine because of a hyperactive network of working class Ukrainians that extends across the world.
This is the power of Ukrainian war relief from the inside out and the bottom up.
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