Volunteers: What We Do and Why

To Americans who have never experienced war on their own soil and are accustomed to having a well-supplied military, what we do is strange. With the US, NATO, the EU, and friendly countries around the world backing Ukraine, why do groups like Ukraine Front Line work to supply Ukrainian soldiers?

To Ukrainians, the diaspora, and their friends abroad, working to supply Ukrainian soldiers is as natural and insuppressible as breathing.

In our Grassroots post, we touched on the role of volunteers in the Donbas War, which putin ignited after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity proved unequivocally that Ukrainians are determined to wrest themselves free of russia’s influence once and for all. In brief: decades of Soviet misrule and Yanukovych’s own mismanagement left the Ukrainian military criminally underfunded and underequipped. It was caught flat-footed when russia illegally annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas in March 2014. Ukraine had a brand-new post-revolution government then and no NATO support—not ideal conditions for repelling an invader.

Ordinary Ukrainians in Ukraine and diaspora communities around the world wasted no time stepping up to fill the gaps. We scoured the globe to procure everything you can think of and some things you might not have known to think of. By way of illustration: I helped source and purchase everything from combat tourniquets and ambulances (really just old Soviet vans, because that’s what was available at the time) to shock blankets, smoke grenades, and stretchers. I even helped source IFAK components and injectable morphine for an organization headed by Ulana Suprun, who later became Ukraine’s Minister of Healthcare. I was just one American with a handful of Ukrainian friends (Ukraine Front Line didn’t exist then), but I was one of thousands of people doing the same.

Global attention waned, but the war continued. The volunteers kept procuring and running supplies. Those established channels were able to respond instantly when russia attacked on February 24, 2022. With their fundraising, procurement, and delivery channels already established, they leapt into action while the big war machine was still grinding into gear. More volunteers mobilized themselves. More initiatives sprang up.

There are thousands of us and we are all kept busy 24/7 because the needs never, ever stop.

Yes, pipelines exist between Ukraine and the world’s governments, but they’re big and clunky and war happens fast. Your guys in the trench have diarrhea? (Gross, I know, and I’m sorry, but it’s common.) A shell hit too close to your ambulance and it needs a new windshield? You lost another drone? You got stationed somewhere stony and need jackhammers to dig your trenches because your military-issue shovels can’t hack it? Sure, you can go through the official channels for your antidiarrheals, your new windshield, your replacement drone, your jackhammers. Fill out the forms, send them up the chain, get them all approved, then wait for the bureaucracy to deliver.

Or you can text your friend with the fundraising and delivery networks, the one with contacts on three continents. He can get your antidiarrheals and electrolyte drinks from his local drugstore (none of the ones near you are operating because of the war), he can find a technician who can come out to replace your windshield tomorrow, he’s got a guy in the US who can send a new drone over with a friend flying into Warsaw and you’ll have it next week, he can pick up your jackhammers at Epicentr K and run them out to you next weekend.

Multiply that by thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians and supporters doing similar work, and the result is a robust informal global network that serves as a crucial supplement to the official channels.

That, in a nutshell, is what we do: we supplement the official channels by responding in ways they can’t.

In the coming weeks, we’ll have a post detailing the full journey of the winter gear you helped us purchase, starting with an idea in our partner Mykola’s head and ending on the soldiers at the front. It’ll be a glimpse into the way the volunteer network functions, particularly this part of it that you fund. (Thank you.)

In the meantime, here are two videos from the YouTube channel Volunteers About Volunteers (Ukrainian with English subtitles). They’re comedy, but they capture the process and the culture perfectly.

In Volunteers Abroad, our heroes tap friends in Europe, the US, and Israel to equip a friend in Ukraine who got called up. (Please note that we do not condone smuggling tactical vests through Poland. Or at all.)

In Volunteers [sic] Envy, our heroes meet some burly volunteers getting generators for the front line while they themselves pick up household items for residents of Makariv, a town brutalized by russian forces and recaptured by Ukraine in late March 2022.

“Volunteers”: Page from a coloring book produced by the Ukrainian company Dodo Socks.