Mending the scars of invasion
11 January, 2025 Volounteering experiences in Kyiv area after the enemy retreated from the city.This is a follow up to the post about the 2022 invasion. As I started interacting a lot more with people who endured occupation by the Russian army, I tried to include some of the stories I’ve heard from them. Note that they may be inacurate or totally made up, I will just repeat what I have heard to the best of my memory. I’m adding trigger warning spoilers like this one to hide some parts of the text.
As the Russians were forced out from the Kyiv theater, life very quickly started to normalize in the city. Many people were returning, shops went back to business as usual and naturally the need to emergency driving fizzled out. But in the wake of a retreating army, dozens of villages and towns laid devastated with supplies making a relatively slow comeback. I was apparently out of the main streams of volounteer communication, but did manage to pick a few quests.
The first one was to Nova Basan, just after its liberation. It was the site of then famous aerial video of a tank battle. I was invited to accompany a French journalist and I tagged my friend along who had a bigger car. I found the trip being somewhat confusing as we were behind the schedule, had a very chaotic shopping session, a long drive on the roads full of shrapnel and checkpoints then basically just unloaded and went back. The little contact we had with the liberated people consistent of a local lady hittig on me out of the blue. It was overal definitely a good deed though, just probably not the most efficient one. To top the experience off we were given the wrong passwords for the day and I got stranded at a charger at night in Boryspil while the rest of the group with the fixer managed to get home. I had no idea about what breaking the curfew would entail, but I just wasn’t comfortable finding that out sleeping in the car. Before long a friend’s acquaintance agreed to host me, and as I was halfway through the town evading possible patrols another one got me the password for the day and a phone of a working hotel nearby. I was told that the local defense units were informed about me, but sure enough this ended up not being the case. The road was going through the most heavily guarded checkpoints in the area. After a quick exchange the password did its job of convincing the reluctant soliders to let me pass. In a sudden rush of brazenness instead of gratitude I asked them for the response password. They bluntly insisted I went on my way, but they did jokingly include the correct repsonse in what they said. I was rewarded with both a proper bed to sleep in and a reinforcement of a crucial behavioural pattern which I never thought I could pull off.
All in all it still felt like a one off gig bordering on the wartime tourism. As I was considering what to do next, my friend from Bucha asked me to check on her appartment. It was the appartment the first photo of the previous post was taken in actually. Unlike the other trip and many of those that would follow, I knew the area very well before the invasion. While the house was in the less devastated part of the town, still there were signs of combat everywhere on the familliar walls and streets. All of the house’s appartments were slammed open with signs of looting, but above all, evidence that the documents were being searched for. My friend had a very good door, as the explosives have apparently been used. Very likely she would turn up in the list of people Russians executed in Bucha due to her active role in the community has she not gone skiing on the eve of the invasion by a lucky coincidence. Even though we have been assured the emergency services did a landmine scan already, the friend’s husband chickened out. I had to be the first one to step in. This broke the impasse and enabled everyone to tackle their anxiety. While we did manage to save a bit of jewelry and other small items, I kept asking myself, am I actually a brave person or just unreasonably crazy?
I have not taken much photos of the horrible parts of Bucha, there was enough by other people already. But there was something symbolic I found on another trip there. In a well known incident the Russians mistook a monument decicated to Afghan war for an enemy vehicle and opened fire. Incredibly they have not scored a hit, only destroying parts of the name plaque.
Another opportunity took me a bit further away. As the siege around Chernihiv was lifted, my colleague invited me to accompany him to the city to get in touch with his friends. The city was completely surrounded during the advance and few people that managed to get away or get supplies in did so in very risky ways. On one of the checkpoints we were asked to drive a teenage girl home who just managed to escape the city. I remember her sitting in the back seat with her cat and telling with a completely chill voice about how she was transported in the cargo hold of a van and was given an axe to be able to break free in case the driver got shot.
We had a minibus for that trip and we decided to crowdfund a bit of food for the local volounteers so that we don’t come empty handed. I posted a request on my social networks the day before, but didn’t expect much. After all I was no public figure and not a “real volounteer” compared to others, so why would anyone trust me? And I could not have been further from truth. The sum on the account started rapidly growing, with donation both from people I know well, but also from those I never heard about. I felt an odd mix of gratitude and confusion. It did seem that I have some social capital to myself, could that have been something worth exploring further? With those thoughts I helped pack the bus according to the wishlist and we set off. Before I had any opportunity to reflect on those emotions I was hit with tragic news, my groupmate went missing during combat and later on confirmed to have been killed, something I was told from inner circles and should have not told anyone else for some time. This sent me into agonising doubt about whether what I was doing was of any good compared to being in the army, something I tried my best to conceal from the people I was interacting with.
Soon after I was introduced to the guy involved in humanitarian relief. He was well networked and had a steady flow of aid coming in. He needed a driver partner since the fuel was still hard to get by and he had a team of young assistants I could recruit to help with more socially oriented facets of work. My car is not exactly a big delivery van, so I could take somewhat modest amount of packages per run. But on the flip side I could drive for almost free and without real limitation. We’ve picked up a good pace and it started to feel like a proper job, even through nobody was obviously getting paid.
The missions brought me mostly to the notrthern part of Kyiv oblast and the bits of Chernihiv one for a change. The majority of the places I visited were logistical dead ends so I had no prior mental image of them from before the invasion. My first impression of them would thus forever be the war one, with destruction, charred tanks and impact potholes dotted all around. Which isn’t at all fair as many of the villages were undoubtedly very cozy places to live in had it not been for the catastrophe they went through. This part of the oblast is also well known for its nature which felt like a forbidden zone due to landmine threat. To this day I hesitate walking on tall grass, to be honest.
Whenever I was shown a house which Russian soldiers took for living, there invariably would be a huge mess. Having stayed for week in the same place, they would just throw litter right where they ate and otherwise made not even a minimal effort to keep the place liveable even for their own selves. I kept feeling a strong projective shame whenever encountering such a den. I may have an overly idealistic image of how an army should behave, but we apparently faced not an army, but a mob of junkies coincidently wearing a military uniform. I honestly used to think that the Russian inability or unwillingness to use a toilet seat properly was our psyops, until I saw the owners of the house on the photo cleaning up after them.
And of course there was looting. For whereever the Russian soldiers originally came from, the Ukrainian villages of all places seemed to be teeming with luxury for Russian soldiers. The most bizarre thing I’ve personally been shown: an X-ray machine from a hospital. My friend was missing the multi-cooker while its pot was left sitting right where it was: the thief likely had no idea what the appliance was in first place. In one of the houses the returning owners reported baby shoes stolen. No matter how I spin it, the idea of returning from an aggressive war with trophy footwear for a toddler just doesn’t sit with me at all. Does one sell it for a shot of vodka? Present to one’s children after washing the smoke from explosives out? This seemed above all an act of spite rather than anything a rational person would ever do.
In one village I heard people say that the invaders insisted that people start speaking English. ‘It’s okay, you can drop the pretense,’ — the Russians told them, being dead sure they were sent to fight the Americans. They seemed to have no situational awareness whatsoever. Ukrainian intelligence often capitalized on this by injecting rumor over the radio, leading Russians to unironically scour the woods in search of the French Legion. I once saw a Russian checkpoint made from stolen aerated concrete blocks. I’m no general, but it takes little insight to realize this material would barely protect against anything, but slignshot. The invasion was not working out so they vented their frustration on unarmed civilians, shooting random people dead as suspected spies and damaging everything they were jealous of.
In Ivankiv town I was treated to a few slices of a very special bread. By all account it was just a regular bread like any other bread in the world. But the thing is, Ivankiv was one of the first towns to be completely taken over and cut off from supplies. The batch of bread I was given was the one that the locals managed to bake while under occupation. The fact that not only they managed to persist, but also share it with me, an outsider, meant so much. And I can confirm that bread does taste differntly when it has such a backstory. A similar story about the war-foraged mushrooms was featured in the Max Miller’s ‘Tasting History’ episode on Borshch and I had to pause the video at that point since it was far too relatable and emotional for me.
More than getting food and supplies most people were eager for the stories of their experience throughout the occupation to be heard. They had just experienced the most horrendous times of their life and they wanted to share. One particular story I remember came from an older woman whose house was caught in crossfire. An explosion sent pieces of glass flying as she took cover. She heard voices but was unable to tell friend from foe and thus decided to lay motionless until daybreak. As she did, blood from the wounds slowly flowed all over her head, but she was too scared to give herself away by wiping it. ‘Like this,’ - she told with a downward palm movement over the face. I listened with all the empathy I could muster, but the stories were often way too much and I coped by disassociating. I was after all doing a job, I was to be dilligent and responsible. I kept a friendly and composed façade only to burst in tears whenever I got back home.
When one does charity with limited resources, it’s so difficult to allocate aid fairly. People generally are always grateful, but the individual reactions fall on a very large spectrum. There was that one woman in Kyiv that staunchly told us to stop providing her with aid as her son’s military rotation would bring him back in the city. On the very same day another person was cursing at us for not being able to find her house quick enough. And then there were people who were clearly well off at least compared to the rest. It feels bad when one is given a delivery list like that, but at lest somebody else made that decision. And if one just has a number of packages and has to decide who needs them most on the spot? I can’t feed everyone and nor do the donators of relief, but it was always sad to look at people who didn’t make it into the cut or were just a little late. I wished I was omnipotent at the moment like this and I was genuinely sorry that I was not.
A word needs to said about the municipal authorities. They seemed to have been instrumental in guiding the restoration efforts and many of them in my experience knew the community very well. We often would just head straight to the village council and ask for the people in most need of aid given our humble resources and were usually given directions and asked for feedback to maintain balance of distribution. In one of the villages the lady in the council pulled up a spreadsheet of inhabitants and printed us a handy table with priorities and addresses. Ironically we were asked by one of the grandmas from the list who we were sent by and she just would not believe us. ‘Don’t lie to me, the village council are wankers, they never cared about us!’ — she said. Good old Ukrainian anarchism, both the boon and the curse.
When the local food relief started drying out and my partner with their donors refocused on more long range trips towards active front line, I still stayed in business for a while as a specialty volounteer delivery. Many people with pets had trouble with getting their animals fed or transported around. So my trips started being a lot less social and a lot of the time I would drive alone. Experience wise it was less thrilling and now that I think of it I don’t even have much episodes to remember. But someone had to do it either way. So I kept going.
Eventually the requests started to become increasingly rare and I stopped driving altogether. There were still people to be helped out there, but the volounteering landscape evolved so much over that time that a lone driver on a city car wouldn’t really make much of a difference. I was so much not done yet however. With experience giving a slight reassurance that I am in fact a decent volounteer and together with similarly traumatized friends we have established a charitable organisation and started being involved in a more structured and less boots on the ground kind of way.
Was I making enough of impact to make it worthwhile while I still drived? We were but a small stream in the river of aid and volounteers at the time, but I like to think that from where I stood the activity was justified. Not only was I still alive, but I was so much more privileged compared to people who experienced the occupation. I could not have stopped the suffering around me, but hopefully I did my almost best to minimize its effect given my resources and abilities at the time. As a man with an inflamed sense of duty I always had long dialogues with myself on the merit of driving versus straight up joining the army. A part of me was still insistent that driving around with food is but a creative desertion and I would take some time and an area of expertice where I fit like a glove to silence such thoughts. But that’s a tale for another time.
And then were the memories that were reigniting hope. I complimented an old lady’s dog, but she told me he wasn’t hers. It was either abandoned or the owners have met their doom, nobody really knew. The dog started tagging along with the lady, but she couldn’t really keep him for long so she asked me if I could make a facebook post looking for owners. I did just that and a volounteer colleague reached out and said she was ready to adopt the animal. She has always had a dream of having a malamute but hesitated each time she would get close to fullfilling it. She reasoned that if there ever would be a sign then it was staring right at her. We did try to find the original owners and left a contact to the lady just in case. Nobody ever called and thus the dog who lost everything and survived through hunger and fighting got a new loving family.
I want to think there will be a happy ending for all of us after all.
