Reddit is a massive social and news aggregation site. It’s composed of thousands of topic-specific forums called subreddits. Subreddits, or “subs”, are overseen by volunteer moderators, or “mods”, who maintain community content standards.
Fundraising for this round of winter gear was a collaborative effort between UFL and the r/Ukraine subreddit community. To you redditors who are reading this and have contributed to Jester’s Hot Winter initiative: thank you!
The needs of Ukraine’s military are so broad and varied, and the means by which volunteers meet them so eclectic, that there’s no such thing as a typical journey from request to fulfillment. Nevertheless, the route our winter gear took from idea to trench is illustrative of the way the volunteer network develops and functions. While it’s perfectly normal to us, we understand that it’s kind of alien to a lot of you, so we thought you might enjoy a glimpse into it. This post will introduce you to the key players on this little project, the bridge between them, and the person writing about it all (that’s me), and take you along as the team coalesces, then sources, procures, and delivers the gear.
The Team
Robin
I’m an American living in the US. I first went to Ukraine as a tourist in August 2012. The country hooked me with its vibrancy, warmth, color, and life, and the ferocious determination of some of its people to shake off its Soviet past. Thanks to a post I made in r/Ukraine before I went, I met some young people in Kyiv who equipped me to understand, at least in a small way, what was at stake when the Euromaidan protests kicked off in late November 2013. Unable to stay out of it, I joined an independent press service based in Kyiv as an English-language editor, then turned my attention to supplying the military when russia illegally invaded and annexed Crimea and then fomented war in the Donbas in 2014. I eventually had to leave the war effort to focus on my own life. When russia launched its full-scale war on February 24, 2022, I had to find a way into Ukraine’s fight all over again. I found it in r/Ukraine, where I met our partner Mykola.
Mykola
Mykola is a Ukrainian living in Kyiv. In his own words:
“A former film producer who turned to live streaming from his home city of Kyiv when Covid hit in 2020 and continued into the invasion of 2022, as well as navigated the first intense months of invasion as one of the few Ukraine based moderators of the biggest Ukraine-focused community on Reddit. Spent a year in Ohio and is therefore afraid of nothing.”
With his permission, I add that he was also active in the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity.
The Reddit community he’s referring to is r/Ukraine, which used to be a pretty niche sub–it had fewer than 400 subscribers when I joined it in July 2012. Subscribership to the sub grew steadily but undramatically from its creation in December 2008 until February 24, 2022.
This spike in this graph is the abrupt upswing–upswing seems too gentle a word; violent upward rocketing would be better–in subscriber numbers triggered by russia’s full-scale invasion.
This picture doesn’t even tell the full story: as of this writing, the sub now has 845,000 subscribers.
r/Ukraine is part of a network of European-centric subs who aid each other in times of crisis. When r/Ukraine’s numbers suddenly rocketed violently upward, they appealed for help.
Kat
Kat is a German who grew up in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic, or East Germany) and still lives in Germany. When the full-scale war began, she reached out to check on a longtime online friend in moscow whose online activity had become increasingly less frequent and more cautious since publicly decrying russia’s invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“Don’t worry about me,” the friend told her. “We’ll be fine. Do everything you can to help Ukraine.”
Kat’s biggest assets, in her own words, are combating propaganda and knowing people, and with longtime experience moderating communities, offering to help r/Ukraine was the logical choice.
That’s how Mykola met Kat.
Arcaist
Kat’s friend Arcaist, another German in Germany, is a former soldier who, in civilian life, works in an industry where he has Ukrainian colleagues. When the full-scale invasion started, his memories of his own time in the military, combined with what he was seeing online and hearing from his Ukrainian colleagues, forced his hand: he felt he had no choice but to do something. A hobbyist blacksmith, he connected with another NGO through Kat and began making items for them to auction, but it wasn’t enough.
Kat put Arcaist in touch with Mykola and me, and by extension UFL.
And that’s how we came together.
The Idea
NATO and some individual countries agreed to provide winter uniforms for Ukrainian soldiers, but as we’ve said before, there are always units who fall through the cracks. Mykola wanted to help fill those supply gaps, so we set about sourcing winter uniforms ourselves, too.
Arcaist proved to be a tremendous asset here. With his military connections and experience, he knew where to look and how to get good prices on it. He sourced all of this gear–40 Bundeswehr parkas, 40 sets of Gore-Tex and insulated undergarments, and a night vision goggle for the 5th Separate Assault Regiment–from a vendor near Berlin. Mykola raised some of the money through r/Ukraine; UFL raised the rest.
From Germany to Kyiv
In order to avoid slow shipping and tax hassles, Arcaist took a day off work, drove 375 miles/600 km from his home in Bavaria to the vendor near Berlin, picked up all the gear, and drove 375 miles/600 km back, all in one day and on his own dime 10 euro cent coin. It was his contribution, he said, as if he hadn’t done all of the legwork to source the gear in the first place.
It was a long day for him. Arcaist mein Freund, wir sind herzlich dankbar! Vielen, vielen Dank!
Arcaist knows a woman named L who prefers to remain as anonymous as possible. L has a team making regular delivery runs between Germany and Kyiv. A couple days after returning home with the gear, he delivered it to L’s warehouse, where L’s team packed it up for delivery to Mykola.
Her driver left Bavaria with our gear on December 8 and delivered it to a city in northwestern Ukraine on the 12th. Another driver received it there and delivered it to Mykola in Kyiv on the 14th.
Mykola arranged to meet the delivery driver at 8:00 on the morning of the 14th, which happened to coincide with russia launching a volley of Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones at the city. Ukrainian air defense shot them all down. A few buildings sustained some damage, there were no casualties, and it didn’t stop Mykola from picking up the winter gear. Kyiv’s subway doesn’t run during air alerts and taxi fares double when the siren starts, so his round trip cost more than it would have if it hadn’t been for russia’s mostly fruitless attack, but he still met the driver at the appointed time.
That’s Ukrainians for you.
At this point, Mykola switched from recipient to distributor.
First he met with my close friend Glib, who responded to my post in r/Ukraine in 2012 and subsequently befriended me on my first trip to Kyiv, to hand off the night vision goggle for the 5th. Glib passed it to a soldier from the 5th who was on leave in Kyiv, and the soldier took it with him when he returned to the front.
Next, Mykola used Nova Poshta, an inexpensive and efficient private parcel service, to send a few uniforms to these defenders in the Sumy region. I assure you that they do have heads.
A couple weeks later, just in time for Orthodox Christmas, Mykola finally loaded the rest of the uniforms into a borrowed ambulance and set out for Donetsk Oblast. They drove from Kyiv to Dnipro, spent the night in Dnipro, and then spent the weekend playing Saint Nicholas for soldiers and children alike. In addition to the winter uniforms, they handed out hot sauces, hot chocolate, coffee, candy, wool socks, tacmed supplies, and other quality of life improvements–most donated by redditors–plus a load of toys for refugee kids.
There you have it, folks: the story of how one minute component of the volunteer network coalesced, sourced equipment, partnered with more volunteers to get it to Ukraine, and ultimately delivered it to soldiers at the front. This is the kind of work your donations sustain.
Thank you.
So proud of all of you. Robin’s mother in Virginia. Thank you, Robin, for sharing this info.