Eighteen months later, his operation flowered. Vorobiov’s intimate understanding of Ukraine’s bureaucracy means he has been particularly effective in moving sensitive shipments across the border, making him a focal point for other donors. He set up a powerful social media fundraising operation, tapping an international community of supporters to raise money and find supplies. And, traveling back and forth across Ukraine, delivering them directly to combat medics, he has built relationships with units who can tell him exactly what they need and when, creating a military logistics operation personalized from her salon in downtown Kiev. In May, Vorobiov received a call from a doctor working in a makeshift field hospital near Bakhmut, the burned ruins of a town that was a bloody pivot point of the front line in the first half of 2023. They were desperate need help. a portable ultrasound device to scan victims for internal injuries. Vorobiov tapped his network for money and found a used device in Poland for $3,400. When we meet, he’s sitting in his apartment waiting to head east, and he’s focused on getting a portable charging unit for a defibrillator. Soldiers are asking for everything: drones for artillery and reconnaissance units, portable generators, Starlink satellite internet hotspots, 4x4s, everything they need to stay online and alive, which is often the same thing in a war defined by the use of technology on the ground. front line.

For decades, Ukrainian civil society was built horizontally. Rather than relying on help from government agencies, people relied on their personal connections: everyone knows someone who knows someone who can get what you need, help you. This parallel state has been providing vital aid to eastern Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2014. Since the start of the large-scale invasion, it has become very active, using social media and messaging platforms to go global. Vorobiov is just one link in a chain of money, supplies, innovation and solidarity that keeps Ukrainian soldiers in the fight.

The front line The kitchen occupies a few cramped rooms on the ground floor and a shed on a sloping street on the edge of Lviv’s picturesque old town. In the courtyard, volunteer cooks peel mountains of potatoes and beets amid the organized chaos of plastic vegetable crates, cardboard boxes and IKEA bags overflowing with pastries. Inside, refrigerator-sized drying racks are filled with shredded vegetables, meat and mushrooms, waiting to be packed into vacuum-sealed rations.

The cooking began years before the large-scale invasion, following the “Euromaidan” protests and the “Revolution of Dignity” in late 2013 and early 2014. Protests against the Kremlin-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych over the Independence Square in kyiv – Maidan Nezalezhnosti – were subject to bloody repression by security forces. As the violence intensified, protesters formed self-defense forces and medical units, repelling assaults and even storming government buildings. In February 2014, Yanukovych fled Kyiv. Days later, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and its proxies seized government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, declaring themselves independent of Ukraine. They encountered little formal resistance: under Yanukovych, Ukraine’s armed forces and intelligence agencies had been gutted.