Brian Mayer

A year ago yesterday I was at a restaurant here in Miami with my Ukrainian friends, debating what was on everybody’s mind at the time: whether Putin would actually send his troops then building up on the border into another sovereign nation to invade.

No one at dinner that night believed it would happen.

A year later, look how wrong we were. The last year has brought unbelievable destruction and pain to the people of Ukraine. Having made 5 trips there to date, I’ve seen firsthand how brutal and oppressive Russia’s illegal, unjustified occupation of east Ukraine has been. I’ve seen entire neighborhoods leveled. I’ve seen communities lining up to get dirty water from the ground. I’ve driven for hundreds of kilometers through densely populated regions shrouded in total darkness.

Life has become uneasily normal in many parts of Ukraine, with malls and restaurants open, playgrounds crowded, schools in session. Yet millions of families are burning makeshift wood stoves for heat. Electricity will often cut out for no reason for an arbitrary amount of time. And most importantly, people always have their eyes and ears angled skyward.

This 9-year-old boy we met in Lyman, Donetsk Oblast on Christmas Day was in the middle of opening a present we brought him when we saw — and then heard — some artillery fire. “That’s one of ours,” he said matter-of-factly. “Counter missile defense.”

The fact that a child is identifying rocket barrages by sound while most kids his age are learning their multiplication tables is hard to bear. So, too, is the thought of millions of children who have been forcibly evicted, orphaned, kidnapped, raped or killed in the last year. The young men who have had to go off and die for someone else’s warped sense of history and ambition. The elderly who have frozen to death in the unforgiving winter.

As horrible as the things I have seen and heard in the last year are, they have driven me to keep going. I started this blog when I first landed on the border with Poland, never intending to even set foot in Ukraine. When I first crossed the border, it was to bring one trunkful of aid across, and eventually as I started to make the trip more frequently, entire trucks’ full. Before I knew it, I was organizing tens, and then hundreds of volunteers to do the same. Donor dollars kept pouring in. With the help of generous family and friends, and the support of all of you who subscribed to my blog and followed me on social media, we worked together to bring more humanitarian aid to more civilians, unlocking incredible partnerships with other NGOs all over Ukraine.

Before I knew it, Ukraine Aid International was born, a nonprofit whose focus and purpose has become increasingly clear: to bring humanitarian aid directly to the civilians who need it most. Not to the warehouses of Lviv and Kyiv which are overflowing with donated aid, but to the front-line communities who have suffered the most from this terrible war, and who have nothing.

These communities are the hardest to reach, and we have now built an entire fleet of volunteer drivers and vehicles to organize transport of critical humanitarian aid to the people who need it. Through over 500 successful missions to date, we have delivered over 1 million pounds of humanitarian aid to front-line communities.

We have also created an invaluable Sister City partnership between my hometown of Westport, CT and Lyman, pictured above. This partnership has already unlocked over $250,000 worth of aid which has paid for construction materials, municipal vehicles, police gear, and more.

I’m so proud of this partnership, and I’m so grateful to Westport First Selectwoman Jen Tooker, Police Chief Foti Koskinas, Lyman Mayor Alexander Zuravlov, Dan Woog, Katya Wauchope, my brother Marshall, and of course Liz Olegov and Richard von Groeling without whom this work would not have been possible. And we’re building more of these partnerships as we speak!

Throughout this all, you have all been so supportive of our efforts to scale our impact. You have all donated, asked friends to donate, made introductions, and told the world what is happening in Ukraine and what can be done to help. Thank you all so much for all your generosity in the last year.

Going into the second year of this terrible war, our work is not done. In fact, it’s just beginning.

We’re raising $1 million right now with the goal of delivering over 10 million pounds of humanitarian aid to front-line communities in east Ukraine in the next year. We need your help to tell your friends about this effort. We need your help to keep the spirit of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people alive, even after it has slipped out of the media narrative and the political winds in the US are wavering. People are still suffering and dying, and UAI will be on the ground as long as we possibly can be.

Will you donate now and help Ukrainians survive year two?

We couldn’t be more grateful for your support, and I’ll continue to update you all on our efforts as I can. In the meantime, Slava Ukraini — as long as we’re all in this together, we will prevail.

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through Ukraine,
The missiles were landing on farmlands of grain.
The people of Donbas stood up to the test,
But the houses were dark from the East to the West.

And Putin was sleeping all snug in his bed
While visions of sugar plums danced in his head,
Dreaming of empire, warm to his core,
He couldn’t help secretly whispering, “war!”

When out on his roof, there arose such a clatter!
He sprung to his feet and exclaimed “what’s the matter?!”
“I do hope that something is not out of order…”
“Is it an assassin, or worse, a reporter?”

In his fluffy pajamas he looked out below,
And he couldn’t believe who he saw in the snow!
With robes of red satin and flowing white hair
It was Santa and sleigh, in the heart of Red Square!

“At last!” Putin shrieked with a cry of delight
“St. Nick has come to bring me presents tonight!”
He hopped to the door and he ran down the stairs,
And giddy with glee he shed all of his cares.

He threw open the doors of the Kremlin with joy
And said “Santa, I knew I had been a good boy!”
And Santa Klaus laughed with a proud “Ho Ho Ho,”
And said “there is something that you ought to know.”

“I know that it’s not quite what you want to hear,
But no, you have not been a good boy this year”
“The kids of the world will be merry tonight,
But not those of Ukraine without any light,”

“Not the kids who you’ve robbed of their fathers and moms,”
“Not the kids you’ve made homeless with missiles and bombs,”
“Not the kids who’ve lost limbs from your terrible war,”
“Not the kids who are orphaned and will grow up poor,”

“Not the kids who you’ve kidnapped while they were at play”
“Not the kids who’ve been trafficked and sold far away”
“Not the kids who your soldiers have raped and have maimed,”
“Not the kids who will suffer in ways still unnamed.”

“So Vladimir you asked if you have done right,”
“And as Santa I’m sorry to tell you ‘Not quite.’”
When Santa was done he pulled on his beard,
And Putin was flustered and blustered “that’s weird!”

“You said things that might make me look bad to some,”
“But you’re here with your sleigh, Santa…why did you come?”
With a gleam in his eye Santa said “time you knew,”
“I brought something special that’s meant just for you.”

And then Santa went deep in his sleigh to the back,
And pulled out a truly gargantuan sack
And heaved it to Putin whose arms spread out
wide
Only to find coal, coal and more coal inside!

“How could you,” said Santa, “to dare have the nerve”
“To think I don’t bring children what they deserve!”
And with that he spurned Rudolph, completely nonplussed,
And left Putin’s coal-dusted face in the dust.

Now St. Nick flies forth for each good girl and boy,
To bring every Ukrainian well deserved joy,
And to those in Ukraine who are fighting the fight,
Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!

I’m sitting in a London-themed coffee shop in north central Kyiv, surrounded by portraits of Queen Elizabeth II artistically shrouded in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. There’s a Big Ben grandfather clock and a classic red telephone booth door for an entrance, and this place looks and feels 100% normal for a cosmopolitan, vibrant city but for the diesel generator humming on the sidewalk keeping the lights on.

On the drive into the city Monday night, the countryside was pitch black for hundreds of kilometers, punctuated only by headlights. Every place I’ve stayed or been since coming to Ukraine has had intermittent blackouts, and in some places electricity has only been available 2-3 hours per day. Forget about internet unless you’re in a 5-star hotel. Despite the restrictions, last night we stumbled upon a nightclub going strong at 10pm (curfew is at 11). Russians be damned, the Ukrainians still know how to party.

But there is a grim fear on everyone’s mind here at all times. Drone attacks are frequent, unexpected and random. Air raid sirens make the thought of a restful night a wishful one. And we’re in Kyiv, still much safer a place than Dnipro or Kramatorsk or Uman or Kharkiv, all closer to the front lines. The temperature is below freezing in the east, and millions of Ukrainians are without heat or electricity. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocent civilians will die from exposure alone, and their blood will be on Putin’s hands.

We’re doing what we can to help. Thanks to Dan Woog of 06880, my hometown’s local blog, we’ve announced a massive sister city partnership with the city of Lyman, Ukraine, a recently liberated town about the same size as Westport. We had a lovely Zoom call last week with Jen Tooker, the First Selectwoman of Westport, and Oleksandr Zhuravlov, the Mayor of Lyman, last week to plan the announcement.

Thanks to this article alone, over $85,000 has been raised already that will be going directly to help the people of Lyman and the surrounding villages, which have been absolutely devastated by Russian occupation. This is one of the former elementary schools of Lyman, which took years to build and only minutes to destroy:

We’ve spent the last couple days in Kyiv taking meetings, which have all been amazing and unlocked new avenues of development which I’ll report on soon. But the most exciting meeting so far has been with Yaroslav, who runs “Wise Water,” a new business he started at the beginning of the war to build clean water filters for destroyed communities. Thanks to his work, and your donations, we’ve already deployed 7 clean water filtration systems in and around the city of Mykolaiv, providing 84,000 people daily with clean drinking water — over 30% of the city. Through other donations, Yaroslav is currently building the systems to supply the rest of the city as well, so it’s safe to say that Ukraine Aid International, in partnership with Alex21 for Ukraine and Wise Water, will have brought drinking water to an entire devastated city of 250,000 people (450k before the war).

Here’s Liz Olegov of Alex21 introducing us to Yaroslav and his work. And the next project she referred to, the below truck, will be ready in two weeks to bring clean water to the remotest, hardest hit areas of Ukraine that need clean water the most and don’t have any infrastructure left.

You can help with this project!! It will cost $20,000 to fit this truck with a mobile clean water system and you can make a tax deductible donation here: https://ukraineaidinternational.org/donate

Thank you so much for all of your support so far and for following along. Will continue to post updates as we prepare our massive delivery run to Lyman.

I’m sitting in a Copenhagen coffee shop during a brief layover on my way back to New York. On my walk here from the train station, I’ve already seen two Ukrainian flags flying. Seeing this vociferous support from the free citizens of yet another European country has been a moving and fitting bookend for my trip.

In the last week, we’ve seen intensified attacks in Mykolaiv and Kharkiv, and a Russian facility holding Ukrainian prisoners of war destroyed in an apparent false flag operation. Some of my Ukrainian friends abroad think that the outcome of the war is heavily in Putin’s favor. I’m not so sure.

What I’ve seen in the past month is dedicated volunteers from Ukraine and around the world working together to repel this unique and dangerous threat. These front-line volunteers, many of them foreigners who have permanently moved to Ukraine to drive trucks, carry boxes, treat wounds, and enlist in the defense force, are at the front lines of a global effort to stem Russian aggression, and the political implications of this war that reverberate far beyond the yellow sunflower fields of this beautiful country. As Russia continues to violate international law in its bombardment of civilian neighborhoods and targeting of humanitarian aid workers, the people and their advocates are not cowed, but are working closely together to evolve their tactics and continue to get aid to the front lines where it’s needed most.

At the same time, the war has become a part of everyday life for Ukrainians, as they juggle their normal jobs and errands and social activities with the war effort. One of my partners on the ground is a full time dental surgeon who sets aside a portion of his income to fund the basic needs of displaced civilians and front line soldiers. On the other end of the spectrum, a new friend I made in Kyiv recently proposed to his girlfriend by dropping a ring as a payload from one of his self-made bomber drones.

When I first came out to the border in April, we were in a deep refugee crisis. Now, most refugees have settled abroad or returned home, and most internally displaced persons have created new lives for themselves in new cities, although many will want to return home after the war. When I came out to Ukraine again in May, a deep economic crisis had set in, with diesel shortages and skyrocketing prices, and Ukrainians close to occupation zones finding it harder and harder to procure basic needs.

Now, five months into the war, Ukraine is facing a crisis of character, as Russian occupation has cleaved off large swaths of the country, trapping so many Ukrainians in a new world with a new language, culture and history, under a brutal system of summary justice and arbitrary violence. Families have been forcibly separated and children have been “repatriated” to Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainians close to the front lines face the hard choice every day of whether to escape if they can from the only homes they have, or try to continue to live their lives as normally as possible, as the booms of artillery echo frequently on the horizon.

I wrote in my last update that I didn’t feel like my presence in the country was as necessary anymore, and now as I’m on my way back to the United States, I am more certain than ever that this will be my last trip to Ukraine for some time. That’s not to say that I won’t continue to support key partners on the ground who will continue the work. In fact, that’s one of the many reasons I feel comfortable stepping away: The volunteers I work with on the ground have become almost professional in their efficiency and effectiveness. Another reason is that my best skills in logistics and problem solving are less helpful now that the reality of war has become normalized: We know where the problems are and how to solve them, and what remains is mostly execution, which is best left to the full timers. The last reason I am comfortable stepping away is that the best way for me to contribute right now is to refocus my efforts on raising money in the United States and funneling it to the ground organizations doing the best work, and I can only do that if I stay local.

I’ve been inspired by the front line volunteers who take aid to the remotest parts of the country where even the government won’t go. I’ve also been inspired by all of you who have supported these efforts with your time and money and encouragement. So far, 100% of your donations have gone to support relief efforts for refugees, internally displaced persons and Ukrainians trapped near or at the front lines.

That said, there’s always more to do. Right now, we’re raising money to purchase three water filtration systems for Mykolaiv and the non-occupied areas of Donetsk Oblast, where the Russians have poisoned the wells and no clean drinking water is available. Each system costs $6250 and can supply an entire town’s worth of clean water per day, eliminating the need for the locals to figure out how to get expensive bottled water delivered into a hot zone. We will install these filtration systems ourselves at secure location and facilitate the delivery of clean water to the towns and cities in the region that need it most.

If you’d like to contribute to this effort, please donate to our 501(c)3 now.

Of course, not all the work we do is strictly material. I’d like to leave you with a sweet story. One of our front line volunteers recently learned about a girl in Bucha who missed her 5th birthday while the town was under occupation, so he and other volunteers in the area organized a belated birthday parade for her. Her home had been ransacked by Russian soldiers and she had lost her bicycle, so they also got her a new one as a gift. The video, and this photo of a child traumatized by war now reunited with her favorite bicycle, speak for themselves.

Thank you for all your support, and as always, Слава Україні.

Insulin has to be stored between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius. The only way to transport something over 1,000 km at that temperature during a record-breaking heat wave is a refrigerated truck, which I happen to have. That is why I find myself at the other end of Ukraine this morning, about 20km from the front lines with the near constant echo of explosions in the distance.

I’m here at the house of my friend Nick, who fled this city with many others in the first week of the Russian invasion, although he has since returned many times to deliver lifesaving humanitarian aid to displaced persons here. His in-laws, who are staying in his house and hosting us, had most of their neighborhood destroyed by the initial shelling, and have also lost their summer home to Russian occupation.

Driving through the city yesterday, I was given a brief but intense tour of the various offices, municipal buildings, churches, malls and apartments that have been destroyed in the last few months under almost nonstop Russian artillery fire. “That was the main courthouse,” he said, pointing to an empty shell of a building next to a block-sized heap of mangled metal and rubble. I didn’t realize that the rockets had such a large blast radius, and apartments a block away all have significant damage and most of their windows smashed out, too. Even if the Russians are only ostensibly hitting military targets — which we know they are not — the civilian collateral damage is unavoidable.

And the physical damage is only part of the destruction. It’s hard for Nick to hide his sense of loss as he surveys the abandoned streets and shops of his hometown. “I used to spend 30 minutes in traffic here every morning,” Nick remarked sadly while we flew down the main avenue through dead traffic lights. There are people about, but very few shops open. Concrete and steel barricades block up the roads at key intervals, diverting what little traffic there is into snaking patterns around (currently abandoned) military outposts. Although it does seem like the skeleton economy here mostly exists to support the military defense, there are some faint signs of life as well, like the coffee shop where we enjoyed mojitos last night. There’s a sense of resilience in the streets.

It isn’t until you’re on the ground that you realize how large these cities are, and the apparent folly of trying to conquer one by force. The Russians could destroy an entire block every day and still would take weeks to reach the city center. That’s why although so much has been destroyed, many more buildings remain standing and it seems like it would be actually impossible to capture such a place under heavy resistance. I suppose this is one of the reasons Kharkiv successfully repelled the Russians, although from the explosions in the distance, it doesn’t sound like it.

Which brings us back to the insulin. Because of the war, medicine has been especially needed and especially short, and transporting it to this part of the country is expensive or impossible. The hospitals here in Kharkiv are constantly out of critical medications, of which insulin has been a constant need. That’s why our doctor friend in Lviv helped source the largest batch of insulin to date — several hundred one-month injectors — and we’ve been dutifully watching the temperature on the refrigeration unit for the last two days. The scariest times are when we had to open the truck to unload the other cold storage supplies we brought with us — fresh veggies, yogurt and milk — and the outdoor heat would rush in. Thankfully, we managed to keep the temperature from spiking above 15 and happily delivered the insulin, along with many other medical supplies, to the main hospital here yesterday. We also offloaded a couple hundred kg of support into SUVs bound for the front lines, including the remaining combat tourniquets.

After two days of driving, I’m finding myself drained. I’m not the only one. On the ground, the ceaseless adrenaline of the first month has yielded to an uneasy new calm for the Ukrainians here. People have returned to jobs and their families, and behind the front lines live relatively normal lives, albeit often in a new city. The stalemate at the front has become a form of background anxiety for everyone here, much like I imagine it has felt living in many places in the past during wartime. Most everyone has friends or family at the front, and every once in a while the news is punctuated by unexpected developments, like this week’s rocket attack in Vinnytsia. But for the most part, in places even this close to the fighting, people are out again, playing sports again, dating again, and getting speeding tickets again.

Which means the economy is back again. When I first came to the border, even basic supplies were proving impossible to find in Kharkiv and elsewhere in the east, and we would work for weeks, with over a hundred volunteers, to get a single 20-ton truck of food aid out here. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and thousands were living in the Kharkiv metro, living off of donated food. Now, it’s possible for most people to buy the food they need here and most displaced persons have found temporary homes with friends or family here or abroad. The economic shock of closing supply chains has lessened: Even truck lines at the border have returned to manageable levels. And donations have been pouring in for months, which means the warehouses in the west are stocked with medicine, clothes, food, and hygiene products. The effort and cost of obtaining and moving a couple hundred kilos of humanitarian aid — when it’s not lifesaving medication that can’t be gotten anywhere else — just isn’t worth it in many cases, which is why we have become a lot more selective about what we spend our efforts on to make sure it goes to where help is needed.

And where the help is needed, still, is at the front or near the front lines, where commercial routes are still struggling and villagers are either trapped by the advancing enemy or recently de-occupied. That is why I’m going to be refocusing my efforts on transport and supply to these hard hit regions through the network of front line drivers I’ve built over the last few months, and spending most of your donations on funding these trips, in a country where gas is somewhat available again but prohibitively expensive. Your ongoing support is appreciated and I will continue to keep you posted on our progress.

Thank you as always for your ongoing support of the Ukrainian people!

After a couple false starts involving bum paperwork and a particularly ornery Polish border officer, I’ve finally crossed into Ukraine and made my first delivery drop of the week in this sleepy town about two hours west of Kyiv. My new truck carries at least 8 pallets although under the weight of almost 2,000 kilos it was running a bit overloaded and sluggish — something that has not boded well for many of my driver friends here. Fortunately, the roads west of Kyiv are still pretty good so I didn’t encounter any car trouble.

Not meaning to offend the locals, this is one of those towns that I would never visit under normal circumstances. That said, it has been a major delivery point for our aid efforts, given the relationship between the Catholic Church here and the Mexican-Jewish NGO, Cadena. I’ve helped organize at least 30 pallets of shipments here so it was nice to finally meet the folks we’ve been helping. One of the running jokes we’ve shared with the Ukrainians is how many thousands of tortillas we’ve brought into this country unaccompanied by any salsa, guacamole or cheese — those will have to wait until we open our taqueria after the war.

For the last couple days, I’ve also gotten to play Santa Claus with the suitcase of 250 military-grade CAT combat tourniquets I brought with me, handing them out to volunteer drivers bound for front line soldiers and field hospitals. They’re a hot commodity and I’m doing my best to spread the love, but it isn’t enough. Calls for medical aid from tourniquets to IV catheters to even flu tabs have reached fever pitch. We’re working on a major shipment of insulin right now which has be taken in a refrigerated transport across 900 kilometers in the middle of summer.

The more we improve our ground operations — and they do really run efficiently — the more frustrating European bureaucracy has gotten. At least in Ukraine, you can usually grease the wheels for twenty bucks or a pack of cigarettes. The Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have a pathological addiction to red tape, and I fear it’s killing almost as many Ukrainians as the Russians are. These tourniquets I’m handing out now took two months to get into the country because they were held up in Polish customs for weeks. Another medical shipment we sent from the states was sent back, and is only now on its way to Lviv via an alternate route.

I’ve been in and around humanitarian efforts here since the first weeks of the war and I don’t know anyone who has successfully established a medical supply route. The best that anyone has come up with is sending volunteers to fly over with checked bags, which is grossly ineffective and horribly expensive. I just today found out that there’s one company that does it, but you have to break large shipments into smaller shipments. I’m going to reach out to them tomorrow to find out the deal, because there’s several pallets of aid we’re trying to move from Chicago…fingers crossed.

In the meantime, the work continues. Several orgs are successfully bringing in food aid right now, and there are plenty of drivers to take it. We’ve established an efficient communication network with good trust protocols (and believe it or not, burn protocols). There are so many individuals and groups working on the ground here, and it feels like I meet a new one every day. Ultimately, though, no matter what logo you’re representing, when you’re on the open road it’s just you and your truck, preferably with a good soundtrack (“Highway to Hell” always a good starting song).

Keep the donations coming. Every penny is being spent on food aid, medicine or diesel. You also helped buy an ambulance which crossed the border last week, and two water filtration systems for the city of Mykolaiv. Thank you.

I’m at the airport awaiting my connecting flight to Zurich. This time tomorrow I’ll be in Warsaw, and the day after, if all goes to plan, I’ll be back in Ukraine.

It has occurred to me how much has changed since I first flew out at the beginning of April. Then, Covid restrictions were still the norm, whereas now I don’t have to test or wear a mask anymore to get on a flight. The first day I was in Warsaw, snow covered the ground and it was below freezing all the way to Lviv. Now I hear summer temperatures have reached 35 degrees. When I first arrived at the border, the war was front page news everywhere in the world, and it was the most important thing that mattered to Americans no matter what their political leanings. Now, everything from the Supreme Court to economic worries have clouded our collective purpose and dragged us back into partisan bickering among ourselves.

But though it is 4 months later, the war is still on. The looming threat of death, imprisonment or occupation by foreign invaders is the one constant fear that every Ukrainian wakes up with every day and goes to sleep with every night. The importance of this war to the global order has not diminished.

Today is the 4th of July, and it is fitting that on the day we as Americans celebrate one country ridding itself of the yolk of tyranny, we have all but lost the will to defend another country struggling under the same predicament.

I’m not oblivious or insensitive to the real problems facing our country right now, but no matter what my country does wrong, I have always felt more proud of what we get right. Usually on July 4th, in between the barbecues and fireworks I will reflect on how lucky I am to be an American and all the privilege that comes with being able to call the US my home. I’ve also always felt that along with this privilege there is a responsibility we all have to help others defend their own freedoms, not just here but abroad as well. That’s why I am spending today not at a barbecue but at an airport, and I’m spending tonight not watching fireworks but flying a checked bag of tourniquets into Ukraine.

I just re-read the Declaration of Independence, a document whose words are as timeless as its principles. In addition to the ones everyone knows and will be quoted verbatim today, there’s one line that is resonating with me most today, as the Ukrainians are watching their country being chewed up piecemeal and their pleas for aid have fallen on increasingly deaf ears:

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Vladimir Putin is unfit to be the ruler of a free people, and if we don’t stop him today, no one will stop him tomorrow. This is, and continues to be, the fight for freedom of our time. That’s why, for me, to paraphrase a now-classic speech from the movie Independence Day, today is not just an American holiday, but a day when we all must celebrate and reaffirm freedom from oppression wherever it exists.

That’s why I’m proud to be going back, and I thank you as always for your support. I will send updates soon, and if you want to help our continuing efforts on the ground please donate now at UkraineAidInternational.org.

Happy Fourth, and Слава Україні!

I’m writing to you from one of the countless border crossing lines I’ve waited on in the last two weeks. I’m on my way to Poland to pick up several more suitcases of specialty medicine from Sauveteurs Sans Frontières, then I’ll take it back to Ukraine for onward delivery to the east. I’ve gotten pretty good at these crossings, and it helps to have priority access when laden with humanitarian aid for Ukraine. My record cross time so far is 28 minutes. But you don’t want to hear about border logistics.

Stalin said that one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic. I thought about this the other day when driving through the village of Ivano-Frankove and traffic ground to a halt for a funeral procession: A hearse, led by a priest and a coterie of singing babuskas, with a young widow draped in black and two dozen family and friends in tow. It was a simple but mournful procession that might be routine in any other place. But this isn’t any other place.

This scene is being repeated thousands of times over in every town and small village, every day across Ukraine right now. Wives are becoming widows and children are becoming orphans. People are going back to work to find desks of coworkers empty, and so many poker nights are now short a player. And all for the sake of a completely unnecessary war, and a 19th century imperial fantasy in the deranged head of one wrinkly old crackpot in Moscow.

I realized talking to my new friends here that the initial anger and shock that we all felt in the first couple weeks of this war has faded into the background. Anger and frustration are not productive emotions, and you learn really quickly that it doesn’t help make queues go faster or prices go down or gas become available or goods reach their intended destinations quicker. Everything on the ground is harder than it should be, but you suffer it because you must, and there is no other option. You push forward because your anger has yielded to something more powerful and more useful: a desire to win, at all costs. The recent Anne Applebaum column said it best: Putin has to lose. There is no other option.

This is why so few expats I’ve worked with on the border have been able to stay away, even as some have taken much needed breaks back home in Europe or Canada or wherever they are from. Many have pushed harder and deeper into Ukraine, taking on more and more dangerous missions, following the urgency: families that need evacuation, orphanages that need resettlement, soldiers that need medical care, children that need cancer treatment, villages and towns that need food, soap, toothbrushes, underwear, and medicine, all before the Russians close in and martial law is imposed.

I am thankful I have a day job, which keeps me grounded and in a routine. After all, I have to be at a high speed wifi connection at 4pm Ukraine time every day. If I didn’t, I could see myself being pulled further east, as the demands from the front lines are impossible to ignore. Many of my new friends here quit their day jobs as receptionists and roofers and bricklayers and students and are now routinely dodging rocket strikes while shuttling crucial supplies across the pockmarked landscape. One of my new driver friends told me their joke: “In the UK, you drive on the left. In Europe, you drive on the right. In the Ukraine, you drive on the part of the road that’s still there.”

I’m closely watching how this war is affecting the expats here. There are no psychological services available for volunteers and aid workers, and certainly nothing to prepare many in civilian life for talking to rape victims or seeing corpses or having friends murdered. When a volunteer (Irish) soldier showed me a picture of his mates and a Ukrainian family they rescued, and then told me “ten minutes later everyone in this photo was dead,” and then proceeded to tell me in excruciating detail what it was like to wear the same pair of underwear for two weeks and fight in the trenches with no food, because humanitarian groups consider feeding soldiers to be outside their purview—well, you don’t really have an outlet for hearing these sorts of stories, let alone experiencing them firsthand.

And this is also the reason why everyone’s anger is pointed not at the Russians — after all, we are united in our common purpose against them and, as discussed, this anger is not productive — but at the governments and NGOs on our side that don’t seem to understand the reality on the ground. The governments continue to make humanitarian border crossings a nightmare, holding up trucks for days, especially the empty trucks going back to Poland to pick up more supplies. Fuel price caps and various other regulations have worsened diesel shortages, and this whole supply effort runs on diesel. NGOs talk about donations going to “humanitarian purposes only” as if it is possible to separate civilian needs from the war effort. Humanitarian aid is useless if the Russians have cut off supply lines. Medicine is useless if the recipients are killed. Most importantly, soldiers are people too, and they need to eat and brush their teeth and have clean socks and underwear. Where is the help for them? And how can we possibly be expected to win this war without it?

I am also shocked by the failure of last mile logistics from NGOs here. I’ve now been at the warehouses of at least four major Internatonal NGOs in Poland, all with the same general pattern: a supply drop of hundreds of pallets of humanitarian aid in a warehouse given to a project manager with absolutely no budget or even a plan for getting the supplies into Ukraine. These poor project managers, many of them first timers, are being asked to move hundreds of pallets without trucks or forklifts or money or local contacts or translators, and many of them are even forbidden from crossing the border. How are these goods supposed to make it into Ukraine, let alone to the front lines where they are needed the most?

The truth is, that task is left to the volunteer drivers working here who are risking their lives every day to bring supplies to the front. They will receive no parade back home, no medals or recognition for their work, and certainly no accolades from the Ukrainian government. They’re paying for their own gas and lodging. Aid convoys have been bombed and volunteers have been killed, and they will receive no military honors or benefits for their families back home. And many of these volunteers are expats who don’t need to be here. They are here because they see this war for what it is: a fight for our civilization and our values. And though diesel fuels their cars, it is duty that drives them to the front.

That is why we need your help more than ever, to cover food, medicine, and most importantly, diesel!!!

We just established our US aid umbrella, Ukraine Aid International, which means we can now take tax deductible contributions. Please Venmo @ukraineaidinternational or email me for wire transfer details.

Thank you for all your support.

I’m back in Ukraine.

In the last few weeks, my work here has become a full time job, on top of the day job I already have. Doing the first from 8am-3pm and the second from 3pm-midnight has left me little time to write. Now I find myself in a relatively quiet spot on a relatively quiet weekend to jot down some thoughts.

There’s a conventional wisdom in military life that routine is important and necessary for success, and I’m getting a real firsthand lesson. As one of my ex-military colleagues here (two tours Afghanistan, one tour Bosnia, one tour Somalia) tells me, the adrenaline wears off in the first couple days, and at that point you “mellow out” which I can now feel happening to me. Although the missions I’m running are becoming increasingly more dangerous, things that felt risky only a month ago seem now to be rather banal. At the same time, the routine I’ve developed — logistics and supply in the morning, my day job at night, and a solid 8 hours of sleep — has kept me grounded and productive even while the situation here becomes more chaotic.

One of the Canadian expats I’ve done a couple missions with over here is part of a group we fondly refer to as the “Eh Team.” A beer brewer back home, he has been driving thousands of kilometers across Europe and Ukraine for extraction and supply missions. He’s also a tall, stout man with an intimidating beard and an encyclopedic knowledge of history. He and I got to talking the other night in Przemysl about how often we cry, and over what things. The most recent thing that got him was learning that due to lack of basic tetanus medication, simple flesh wounds are now being treated in the field with full arm amputations. This is confirmed by reports of the number of amputees coming out of Donetsk and Mariupol that need extraction. Right now, my Canadian friend is on his way to Italy driving a boy with cancer and his family to a safe place for treatment, hopefully listening to the podcast I recommended to him.

A Scottish guy (bloke?) I met at the same pub that night is here with his mom. He has a key chain with five car keys — his van and car in Ukraine, his van and car in Poland, and his car back home. A Pole I met grew up in the UK and is working with a trade union to send supplies to their comrades across the border. I’m working with two teams of drivers here — a British girl with a Gaelic name who is working to supply soldiers on the front lines with basics (toothbrushes, towels, etc) and a Danish girl who has a 5-man drive team doing extractions and supply runs to the far east. Two of her team are medics, and they have intel connections in the military to plot safe driving routes cleared of Russian activity. A Californian ex-pro surfer, now in real estate, is staying in a flat in Lviv and is now running regular missions to Kyiv, Kharkiv and elsewhere with his Ukrainian girlfriend, a police cadet who first mistranslated her occupation as “Baby Police,” a joke we’re having fun with. By far my favorite colleague in the last month has been a Scottish film logistics coordinator who has a gift for gab, a larger than life personality, and a work ethic to match — she drove 7 cross-border missions in just one week, at one point crossing the border twice in one day. She has selfies with all her favorite border guards.

Our saving grace this month came in the form of a direct descendant of a famous European composer and looks just like him (not giving internet sleuths anything else). He showed up in Przemysl with 80 pallets of humanitarian aid donated by an Italian NGO and absolutely no instructions or equipment to get it the last leg of the journey into Ukraine. We’ve partnered with him and his team to transport over 60 pallets of his supplies so far to various destinations in Ukraine: an orphanage, a refugee center, our warehouse in Kharkiv, and another Kharkiv aid office. The two warehouses they are storing their stuff in looks like an Eataly with Nutella, Biscotti, and many other famous Italian brands. We’ll be sending the remaining goods to front line soldiers and a church in Odessa.

We also ran a mission for SSF, transporting large 30 suitcases of concierge medical treatments for survivors of Mariupol and Donbas. By far the most rewarding mission we’ve done so far was to bring 2 pallets of toys and candy and chocolate to an orphanage in Lviv. The children came out to help us carry the boxes in, and we had great fun with these eager little laborers. One of the Italians got her hair braided.

And of course, every time we come across the border now we bring 200-400L of diesel, since none of the supply missions in Ukraine are possible without it, and the gas stations are all out. I’ve started getting texts from strange Ukrainian numbers asking me if I could import fuel for them, at a price of course. I won’t be doing that, even at cost — since everything I do has to be humanitarian only, I’m only importing diesel for our driver networks to run supplies. It is frustrating, however, that the main cause of gas shortages the Ukrainian government itself imposing price caps. I guess I know now how smugglers get started.

There’s no question that I’ve become “established” here, and may even be developing a reputation. I’m frequently fielding requests now that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, and some of which I may not be able to help at all. But I’m doing what I can. Keeping all the available vehicles, supply needs, border crossings and meetup times in my head is becoming a full time job. Everything here is volunteer coordinated, and volunteers frequently disappear and appear from all over the world.

We found out at a presentation from a local NGO that 12 million Ukrainians are now internally displaced. Unlike those displaced persons abroad, internally displaced persons have no easy access to food or medicine. There is little commercial availability of goods and grocery shelves in the east are empty. In the most dangerous parts of the country, the only way to get supplies is through volunteer driver teams, most of them Ukrainians who risk their lives to bring food to loved ones trapped near or behind enemy lines. Since Russia pulled back from Kharkiv, we thought the humanitarian need would be less. It’s greater.

Thanksfully, we successfully got a 10-ton truck to our Kharkiv warehouse this week, after almost a month of nonstop labor from over 30 nameless volunteers from all over the world. The food on this truck will feed the people of the Kharkiv region for maybe a week or two more, before we will have to send another. So far, in May, we’ve spent $1,617.92 on aid, and $1,583.71 on transport costs (mostly fuel). Note that most of the work we’ve done has been transport of existing supply caches, which is where most of the need is right now. The diesel alone to get the 10-ton truck across the country to Kharkiv costs $1,300.

Which is to say, we need more support. Your donations are helping a lot. We have a new Venmo now, @ukraineaidinternational, tied to our tax deductible bank, so please send more if you can.

Thank you all for your support.

Sometime around 2:10am in the morning last night, as air raid sirens were blaring in Lviv along with almost every other region in the country, I found myself asking myself the same question that Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher asked when she found herself watching Scottish festival games in The Crown: “What on earth am I doing here?”

The truth is, although part of my mission here is tactical — I’ve been touring warehouses, and meeting and breaking bread with our partners on the ground who receive our humanitarian shipments and speed them on to Kharkiv and elsewhere — there’s a deeper, more meaningful reason I am writing to you from a coffee shop in central Lviv during a period of high alert right before Putin’s “Victory Day” celebrations.

I want to remember what we’re fighting for.

Since my last visit here a month ago, I’ve been on opposite sides of the world and in opposite worlds. Only a week ago I was soaking up the sun in Southern California, eating in fine restaurants and seeing old friends, blissfully detached from the daily pain and suffering of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters. I had the luxury of removing myself from the heat and fear of conflict, a luxury that so few Ukrainians have, even when they are thousands of miles away.

During this time, I had many sleepless nights regretting I was not meeting my basic obligations to this cause. When I had a chance to order more supplies and raise money and arrange their shipment from abroad, I’m ashamed to say I did not. Now I am back, and the failures of those weeks haunt me. How many lives could have been saved if I had rallied my doctor friends to assemble the medical parts list I had sitting in my email drafts for over a week? How many more kilos of food could we have gotten to needy children trapped in underground bunkers?

Ship times of 2-3 weeks to Poland are common, and I remember a month ago thinking that it was too slow — that the war might even be over by then. But the truth is, I don’t see how this war ends any time soon, and I should have been thinking further ahead.

Tomorrow, during Russia’s World War II Victory Day celebrations, my best guess is that Putin is going to announce a major escalation of hostilities, including direct threats on this beloved jewel of a city in western Ukraine that has become a symbol of hope and defiance.

Even today, Lviv is a vibrant, cosmopolitain city, and in my opinion, has one of the most beautiful city centers in the world. You walk down cobblestone streets lined with outdoor cafes and Gothic revival architecture: churches, museums, theaters, grand hotels, plazas with statues of old war heroes on horseback. Young people crowd the streets, laughing and dancing and playing live music, defiantly standing up to daily government warnings to stay inside (although I hear that it’s much less crowded this weekend than it is on a typical weekend).

There are juice bars and electric scooters and all the cafes have paper straws. There’s a cyberpunk culture and a gay scene and yellow trams rumbling by every 5 minutes. If you didn’t know there was a war, you wouldn’t know from being in the streets, except for an air raid siren going off every 6-8 hours and people meandering casually to the nearest shelter. And, of course, the soldiers everywhere, lending the city an eerie dread that might have been familiar during the last major war in Europe.

Although this city typically has around 700,000 residents, these days the population has swelled to over 1.5 million. Although most (non-fighting-age-men) here are able to leave, many don’t. And those that stay are living their normal lives, working their normal jobs with the backdrop of this horrible war that was brought upon them. At least they have created a new normal with curfew and restrictions on many common goods, and life goes on.

During an air raid siren yesterday, my dentist friend was in the middle of surgery. Like most residents here, he has learned to reflexively ignore the sirens, probably with the same indifference Americans tune out the latest outrages on cable news. “If there are explosions, then I will go” someone said to another friend of mine in the refugee center. Speaking from experience, when it’s 2am, you don’t really want to get out of your warm bed, get dressed and huddle in a freezing basement.

I experienced my first air raid within 30 seconds of being handed my hotel key. The receptionist made an announcement over the PA system, and before I had even checked in, she led me from the lobby to the bomb shelter across the street where we joined another 50 locals who strolled in. As I found out from my territorial defense friends during the raid, the sirens were going off everywhere in Ukraine due to a scramble of jets from the Black Sea. You never really know where the rockets will hit or how bad it will be, and cruise missiles even can be redirected. So you wait and you hope that this time, it isn’t you. We waited in that shelter, until my as-yet-uncharged phone reached 2% battery, and then were given the all clear to go upstairs.

The people of Bilohorivka weren’t so lucky.

⚡️60 people likely killed by Russian airstrike in Bilohorivka.

30 people were rescued from a school that was sheltering 90 residents at the moment of the attack on May 7. All 60 people who remained under the rubble most likely died.

Source: Luhansk Oblast Governor Serhiy Haidai

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) May 8, 2022

The Ukrainians I have befriended here have universally adopted a characteristic callous humor about the daily dread imposed by imminent Russian threats. “If it’s a nuke, we’ll be dead anyway,” one said. “This could be psychological warfare…or not ;)” texted another. And if my last 24 hours are any indication, the “new normal” here involves gritting through routines with a cloud of anxiety hanging over everything, although even for me this has faded into the background. My new friends and I were able to enjoy ribs last night over beer and intellectual table conversation. I can see that living here is tolerable, for the millions of locals, refugees and expats volunteering in hundreds of makeshift refugee shelters and help sites. For many other parts of Ukraine, the shelling is constant, and the daily threat unbearable.

For those people, especially those in Kharkiv, Sumy, Donbas, and elsewhere in the east of the country, we can’t do anything about the Russian shelling but we can help provide humanitarian aid where it’s needed. With that in mind, let’s talk about the progress of our relief efforts.

I had an opportunity to tour our Lviv warehouse today, and survey the successful delivery of our last shipment, along with the foodstuffs available for purchase from the commercial importers. As a reminder, we make every effort to purchase food aid from legitimate commercial wholesalers in Ukraine, to keep the money and jobs in the economy. It doesn’t hurt that locally grown food is also cheaper, although this is changing now as well with massive fuel shortages.

There’s another element that is shaking up commercial shipping: a new benefit the Ukrainian government just imposed that allows for the importation of vehicles from abroad tax-free. The natural consequence of this policy change has been miles-long lines of imports waiting to cross the border into Ukraine from Poland, which I’ve seen in the last couple days. These imports are clogging up the customs lanes, with the unintended consequence of holding up normal commercial trucks for days on end. Combining this from the near universal unavailability of gasoline and long fueling lines at the few stations with supply, I suppose that prices are spiking everywhere and shortages are common.

This is what makes the work we do importing food and medicine from Poland even more important, especially now, when the urgency of the Ukraine War has taken a backseat to Roe v. Wade and other issues of the day across the world.

By next Tuesday, 40,000 people will be completely out of food.

My partners here tell me that 400 metric tons of food were donated in the first weeks of the war, and their food distribution center in Kharkiv has become the one most depended on by thousands of families without means every single day. Now, donations have dried up, both aid and cash. In fact, the only major food coming in to contribute to this effort right now is from our imports, and by next Tuesday, 40,000 people will be completely out of food.

So, the donations have stopped, and the supplies have dried up, and people will start starving if we don’t help them. That’s why what we’re doing is so urgent, and why I’m asking you to donate again, even if you have already. Lives depend on it.

I ask you to please donate, and if you have donated already, please donate again. The easiest way to send money is via Venmo or PayPal @bmmayer, as we’re still setting up our charitable accounts. Or you can send Bitcoin to 14GNoNvHXdTzFkPNgsWeW9gpQmavkQowki.

We also have a tax-deductible option via wire transfer — please email me directly and I will let you know the details.

Your donations will enable to constant flow of food and medicine to Kharkiv and elsewhere, where it is most desperately needed.

Thank you so much in advance, Happy Mothers’ Day and Слава Україні!