How I helped Ukraine
And how you can, too
People ask, “How can I help the Ukrainian people?”
It’s a blessing of this clarifying moment in history — tragic as it is on a grand scale — that people around the world are giving the finger to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and pouring aid into the country he is trying to crush.
I say clarifying because, for a pampered, complacent and divided West, the tolling of the bell is unmistakable: The rape and destruction of a free European country by a jealous neighbor is what happens when we in the West are, well, complacent, divided and dispirited. A West with a proper understanding of itself and its heritage and role in world history could have prevented this. Instead, we allowed our leaders to enable it.
Enough of the lecture: What now?
If you feel as I do, demonstrations of solidarity — waving or wearing the sunflower-and-sky colors of Ukraine in public squares or within shouting distance of the White House — important as they are, only go so far.
I wanted to help with my hands. I have donated to charities I know are worthy: US-Ukrainian Activists, based in the Washington, D.C.-area, run by Nadiya Shaporynska. Ukraine War Amps, out of Toronto, co-founded by Gene Berezovski. Army SOS, with volunteer Tanya Tarasevich now operating out of Warsaw, Poland, and crossing into Ukraine in armored box trucks. And especially, United Help Ukraine, also in D.C. UHU President Maryna Baydyuk can be seen here in a TV interview. I have known all of them for six years or more — they organized when Russia invaded in 2014.
Nearly tireless, they sell Swarovski jewelry, work in IT, run a successful business, teach at Georgetown University. They keep demonstrations going daily, raise funds, pack and ship donations, account for it all as leaders of registered charities, sell items at Ukrainian festivals and hold down their day jobs. My friends are exhausted but determined.
To non-Ukrainians like me, they are welcoming and appreciative. But their parents or cousins or in-laws or grandparents or classmates are in cities back home — in Kyiv or Kharkiv, Mariupol or Mykolaiv — that are being blasted to hell or occupied with unimaginable savagery by Russian soldiers. There is no way you or I can truly feel their emotional distress or sense of urgency.
Still, I wanted do all I could. I signed up to pack supplies on a suburban Virginia driveway, or in a Ukrainian church near me in Maryland. Volunteers continue day and night stuffing the needs of a nation into boxes, onto pallets, wrapping them in clear heavy plastic and loading them on trucks: packaged food and diapers and wipes, medicine, feminine products, self-clotting bandages, tourniquets, military uniforms. But before I could join in, my friend and United Help Ukraine volunteer Tanya Aldave, a lawyer at a federal enforcement agency, posted on Facebook: Who is flying from D.C. to Warsaw soon? UHU needed more supplies flown over in checked bags, as it often does, even though it also uses shipping companies.
My hand went up. On four days’ notice, despite the small size of our staff, my boss let me take a week off. A coworker asked, “How can you plan a trip to Europe in four days?” I said I’m not planning the trip: Just a few clicks on Expedia and I’m taking off.
It wasn’t that easy, of course. But Tanya and her husband Alan did most of the work. Tanya ordered what must have been 20 boxes of supplies from Amazon to be delivered to my apartment near Rockville, Md. Thankfully, my 22-year-old son lugged them inside.
Alan and I — myself especially — were a bit like fish out of water when it came to packing, and Tanya knew it. She called an acquaintance named Nadiya, who had some protective vests to ship over, to come to my apartment. “I need a girl,” she said.
I watched and ate the pizza I had ordered for everyone. Tanya didn’t eat a bite until the packing was done. Nadiya is a vegetarian, and unfortunately, I had ordered pepperoni. The women worked through lunch. I was soon to witness a similar scene in a warehouse on the outskirts of Warsaw.
Alan took out his hand-held scale — Turkish Airlines had limits on the weight of each checked bag and on the number of bags and on the total weight of all the bags.
He lifted the suitcases that had been donated by Tanya’s fellow churchgoers. We envisioned 10 50-pound bags. The total limit was 507 pounds. Some of the bags could weigh as much as 70 pounds, but a 70-pounder meant we could only take nine bags instead of 10.
It was like a puzzle. Nadiya’s body armor was the heaviest. There also were sleeping bags, knee pads, CELOX self-clotting bandages for gunshot wounds, and sophisticated IFAKs (individual first aid kits). We even packed two big bottles of diabetes medicine, procured from a local doctor.
Alan lifted the bags with his scale: Seventy-two pounds, this one’s too heavy. Forty-eight pounds, we can add more. Tanya and Nadiya must have repacked at least three times. It was Alan and I who ate the pizza. Fifty-pound bags are too much for me at the age of 60 with a shoulder recently surgically repaired. Alan carried them all downstairs, shooing me away when I tried to help. Some went into my car, some into Alan and Tanya’s SUV.
We drove both cars to Dulles International Airport outside Washington and had a porter help. Alan and I took the cars to the short-term lot while Tanya minded the bags. With some effort, she found a Turkish airlines supervisor who agreed to discount the price of the checked bags on humanitarian grounds. Still, the price was about $1,500. Tanya also offered to pay for my round-trip ticket, but I said no: This is on me.
The Turkish Airline clerks were irritated, even though we were more than two hours early for the flight. Nine bags? And where is your customs form for entering Poland? I hadn’t known I needed to fill one out. A clerk handed me a tablet. Poland wanted to know: Why are you coming? Where are you staying? For how long? I had booked only two nights at the beautiful Hotel Polonia Palace, in order to keep my options open for visiting other places. I was frazzled. I had to enter the dates differently — day first, then month and year. The airline clerk was losing her patience: Why aren’t you done yet?! You have to be done! The nine bags were in everyone’s way. I told the government of Poland that I was just a tourist and would be in the Polonia Palace for six nights. It was close enough.
The bags went on the conveyor belt, Tanya gave me a hug, and I was off to my gate.
A Washington-based TV reporter for Lilly Broadcasting, which serves small markets like Erie, Pa., had overheard us at baggage check-in. Rachel Knapp and her photographer also were headed to Warsaw cover the refugee situation. She interviewed me with her phone’s camera while we waited to board. Later, I provided her with amateur video I took in Poland. (See her report on my trip.)
Rachel asked me to express my feelings for the people of Ukraine. But my first thought was about the volunteers I was working alongside: Tanya and Alan. Maryna. And Tanya Tarasevich in Warsaw, whom I would soon see again for the first time since my 2015 trip to Ukraine. She and her husband were to take delivery of the suitcases, and shuttle the supplies along with other donations into Ukraine. I lost my composure as I spoke. I could never contain the emotions they felt. I can’t even watch the news anymore, and I skim over the graphic images in my Twitter feed. I don’t want to see more gutted buildings, more bodies of civilians in the streets of Bucha and Borodyanka. All I needed to do was hop a flight.
On arrival in Warsaw on Sunday, I learned the luggage was left behind in Istanbul as our flight had been late. Fortunately, the airline would deliver it to my hotel Monday evening. That night, I met Academy Award-winning actor, director and screenwriter Sean Penn, who also was at the Polonia Palace. He is making a documentary on Ukraine and his humanitarian organization CORE, founded in 2010 after the huge earthquake in Haiti, is aiding refugees. I mustered up the courage to introduce myself at dinner and thanked him for all he was doing. He gestured to his tablemates who, as I had purposely overheard, were continuing to brief him about Ukraine. “They’re helping a hell of a lot more than I am,” he said. I thanked them too and told them the purpose of my trip. Penn and members of his party shook my hand, and thanked me, but kept the conversation very brief. I didn’t want to act like a fanboy, so I quickly withdrew.
On Tuesday, Tanya Taresevich and her husband Pavlo, of Army SOS, along with two British ex-marines, came to the hotel to pick up the luggage. The veterans had driven an armored box truck filled with donations across the continent. Tanya also introduced herself to Sean Penn, who was frequently in the hotel lobby, chatting with his entourage, talking on the phone, or writing in a yellow legal pad. I told Penn that Tanya had been helping the Ukrainian army since the initial Russian invasion in 2014, and he politely shook her hand.
Then we were off to the Army SOS warehouse outside Warsaw, which had received a large batch of donations the day before. “Yesterday, this room was empty,” Tanya said. “A lot of this was brought by the U.K. veterans. This box is mostly medicine. This one is bags for blood.”
Army SOS distributes civilian and military aid inside Ukraine, and also makes a variety of electronic and other equipment for battle, including custom armed drones. They are called Valkyries — angels of death in Norse mythology. “One camera for that airplane can cost a thousand euros (about $1,000), and we need at least three of them (for each UAV),” Tanya told me. “These airplanes are very well known, you can Google it. Probably you saw a lot of videos made by our organization (of Russian armor being destroyed), you just didn’t realize it was us.”
As we began to repack and itemize the donations at the old warehouse building, Steve and A.J., the Brits, marveled at the quality of the supplies our D.C. volunteers had sent. “This is good stuff,” Steve said.
But just as in my apartment, when it came to packing, I was slow. I lost count of things like battery packs and antiseptic cream jars and headlamps that I was putting in a box, and Tanya was disapproving. I had passed the point of maximum usefulness in the warehouse. They worked through lunch, and when I asked for a break, Pavlo drove me back to Warsaw. Tanya said that I had seen their operation, and now the better thing was for me to start writing. I enjoyed lunch at my hotel, not realizing I wouldn’t see them again.
I was disappointed. I had thought I might ride into Ukraine with them, as far as the relatively safe western city of Lviv, but it was not to be. Just as well — I had told my boss I would stay out of harm’s way.
On Wednesday, I rented a car and drove toward the border, stopping for a night in the historic city of Zamość. I enjoyed a meal in one of those pandemic-era tents with clear plastic sidewalls in the Great Market Square, where the 16th-century town hall was lit in Ukrainian colors. With an hour’s drive in the morning, I got to a refugee center at a fitness center in Lubycza Królewska, not far from the border town of Hrbenne. I knew a longtime Facebook acquaintance, Keith Culhane, was driving refugees from there to the airport in Warsaw and other destinations and I wanted to join in. Keith, an ex-Marine and managing partner of a construction company in Dubai, had wanted to volunteer inside Ukraine, but his wife, a Polish doctor, vetoed that.
But my attempt to help refugees didn’t turn out as I hoped — it suffered from my lack of planning, since the trip had been arranged on such short notice, and from my lack of time, since I was only in Poland for a week.
I went inside the facility Thursday morning and offered to help. I was given a yellow vest, and a woman suggested I offer coffee and tea to the refugees lying on mats and cots and sitting at picnic-style tables on a basketball court. After a little while, finding no takers and realizing there were plenty of volunteers, I found a Polish man named Conrad, who spoke English well. He directed me to the table where a volunteer and a border guard were arranging transportation for refugees. They told me to come back the next day. Perhaps a new bus would arrive by then.
Friday morning I met the dynamic Keith at his hotel. He had a typically busy day ahead. He was with a young Scottish man, Jacob Wright, who despite his modest career as a delivery driver had devoted himself to transporting aid to Ukraine.
I went back to the refugee facility. But no bus arrived. There was a family of five who needed a ride, but I only had room for four. With time running out on my last day in Poland, I headed back to Warsaw about noon, empty-handed.
Like many of you, perhaps, I was left wondering about the best way to help and wishing I had done more. With another day or two, I could have made myself very useful to one or more families fleeing Ukraine. Before my trip, I should have reached out to refugee aid groups. At Lubycza Królewska, I saw volunteers from the Order of Malta, a lay organization of the Catholic Church, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I heard during the trip that Polish authorities were turning away volunteers who weren’t affiliated with humanitarian groups, but I didn’t find that to be true in my case. I wasn’t able to help as much as I wanted, but I would do it all again.
When I returned to Dulles on Saturday, Tanya Aldave and her husband met me with two cars: theirs and mine. They had kept my car parked at their house. They hugged me again, left me a bottle of water in their typically thoughtful way, and kept a close eye as I drove off, making sure I was OK. I wasn’t really OK after my 15-hour trip, which had again gone through Istanbul, but I didn’t want to let them know. I drove bleary-eyed and a bit disoriented — my car is an automatic, but the rental car had been stick shift — over the Dulles Access Road and the Washington Beltway and made it home.
I am now free to disengage and enjoy the creature comforts of the U.S. of A. But my friends are not. They toil away, unable to understand how anyone can enjoy life right now. At least I’m proud to have done something more than click the donate button on Facebook.
(Postscript: Shortly after I returned, United Help Ukraine volunteer Oleksii Antonov, whom I hadn’t met, was killed delivering donations to the besieged northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, close to the Belarusian border, when Russian shelling hit his convoy.)
Here are links to the charities I am personally acquainted with:
United Help Ukraine — UHU conducts a variety of aid efforts, from helping refugees, humanitarian programs inside Ukraine, protective vests for paramedics and medical supplies like tourniquets and self-clotting bandages for soldiers.
Army SOS — A Ukrainian group that delivers civilian and military supplies throughout Ukraine, and even makes armed drones that take out Russian tanks.
US-Ukrainian Activists — An organization that keeps demonstrations in support of Ukraine going daily in Washington, D.C., and recently held a fundraiser for medical supplies for front-line paramedics.
Ukraine War Amps — A Canadian group dedicated to helping amputee veterans and the families of the fallen.
