The Angels of Ukraine: Profiles in Civic Heroism
When war threatens to fracture a nation's psyche and services, some step up to hold their country together on the other front lines. These are their stories.
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My friend Daniel and I first crossed over the Ukrainian border on Christmas Day, 2022, aboard a creaky sleeper train slowly headed for the capital, Kyiv. Though we managed to scrounge up a few plastic cups to share our Bailey’s with two kindly grandmothers1, and gamely tried our hand at joining them in a few folk songs we very much didn’t know, any attempts at holiday cheer came with an obvious asterisk—we were headed into a country fighting for its life. As if to punctuate the point, the lights were eerily dim at the few stations we stopped at over the 16-hour journey. Though darkness can sometimes be too easy a metaphor, in times of war there’s often a literal component to it. Electricity was at a premium, and lit buildings are easier to target.
Our first purpose in coming was bringing in supplies. We’d read that conditions were grim enough that citizens had begun stitching together discarded vape batteries just to allow those on the front to keep their phones charged. So we brought in a duffel bag of powerbanks that we’d purchased in Poland. It wasn’t much, but how much can one or two people do really? We were about to be humbled by the answer.
Our second purpose was to get a sense of what we weren’t hearing about much in the west. Even by late 2022 the war had been largely transformed in the public consciousness into a series of headline abstractions—aid dollars, casualty counts, and battle lines moving in tiny margins on an unfamiliar map. While this form of journalism is still valuable, and while many local reporters were and are producing exceptional coverage2, we felt some additional interviews couldn’t hurt in helping outsiders—including us—grasp exactly what life had become on the ground.
In The Gaps and Shadows
There’s a way in which we all know about the more obvious horrors of war—the blood, the body bags, the trauma, the terror. We’ve all seen the movies, and perhaps memorized a poem or two in grade school. Sure, yes, war is hell. But what we’re often much less familiar with is what happens in the shadow of war, in the new and hideous normal that millions are forced to adapt to overnight.
One specific aspect that grew in interest to us was life in the cracks between the official relief programs and the fuller needs of everyday residents. While large-budget efforts are essential, they’re by nature often fairly blunt tools that help with some large surface area while leaving a thousand needs at the edges untouched. Who steps in to meet those? At what personal costs? And what keeps them going?
Daniel and I returned to Ukraine last week to complete a set of profiles on a few volunteers we met back in 2022. But not volunteers in the sense that you or I might serve at a soup kitchen on the odd weekend. The type of people so consumed by empathy and civic pride that they reorient their lives in service of the abandoned, the overlooked, and the overwhelmed—who, compelled by some inner resolve, simply refuse to let the vulnerable face the creeping night fully alone.
We’ve taken to calling these volunteers The Angels of Ukraine. While we can only cover three of them here, we hope these little glimpses into their lives remind you afresh of the radical extent of human goodness.
Though, fair warning, parts of this will be an extremely emotional read. To see and appreciate the beautiful, we must also see the very ugly alongside it.
This piece was co-reported by Daniel Ptashny. He’ll be sharing his own writing, mostly on foreign policy and unusual travels, in his own new newsletter,
.While neither of us are “please like and share” people, the women profiled here are operating on a fraction of the budget that they could make valuable use of. Every boost and/or donation will help them greatly. Daniel and I self-funded our trips and will take 0%.
Katya
We first met Katya and her then-boyfriend Joel at a charming little wine bar in Lviv, a major metro in the west of Ukraine that’s been functioning since 2022 as both a transit point and a general refuge. It’s an intensely stylish city, so rich with culture, and so free of the audible air sirens that define daily life elsewhere,3 that you can sometimes forget, if just for a minute, that there’s a war going on. Though reality quickly reasserts itself when you look a bit closer—like at how many generators there are inside the shops and cafes, at how fast the crowds thin out ahead of curfew, and at how many more young women than men there are everywhere.4
No one in this country is unaffected by the war. Everyone has a friend or sibling or son fighting on the front—or who’s already been buried in the new graves they’re struggling to make room for. And Lviv itself has continued to swell in size as those who can afford to do so flee more dire and violent conditions in the south and east. Another lovely couple we met there5 had been running one the city’s many unofficial shelters in their small apartment, giving evacuees a warm place to breathe for a minute as they planned out where and how they might start new lives.
Insight and Ingenuity
Katya had returned to Kyiv—where she was born and once worked as a business journalist—a few days before the invasion, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince her mother to join her and Joel in the relative safety of Lviv. When the day came and Russian forces began their march towards the capital, she headed on foot for a major highway, hoping to intercept a bus—any bus—headed back west. Some 26 hours later she finally arrived at a village in the Carpathian mountains. When her mother relented and agreed to follow, Katya then went on a seemingly mundane errand—to buy blood pressure drugs, just in case her mom forgot her own supply while escaping.
But it quickly occurred to Katya that her mother was far from an isolated case. Evacuations were chaotic, and both supply chains and retail operations were being disrupted across the country. Surely others would forget their medications too, else run out and find themselves short on options for replacements. Where could these people go? Most hospitals were fighting to quite literally keep the lights on, and existing aid networks had limited abilities to solve last mile delivery problems.
Trusting her intuition, Katya got to work. She recruited partners in the most war-affected regions to take orders for needed medications, bulk purchased them in Lviv, shipped them to the nearest safe collection point, and then tasked her local helpers to get them door-to-door to those in need. This project soon became a wildly efficient distribution network, able to serve places that others couldn’t easily reach.
Katya also applied this same shrewdness to management itself. Feeling an admirable sense of accountability over every donation received, she personally vetted every assistant and instituted a strict two-strike rule. She wanted donors to know that every last penny was accounted for and put towards the best possible use.
One case story: in late 2022 a kindergarten teacher named Tetyana—in a not uncommon incident in post-occupied villages—stepped on a land mine. Though six surgeries saved her leg, the drugs she needed, including a special blood thinner to prevent fatal clots, came out to about $80 USD per month, or about 75% of her total government benefits. Katya’s team was not only able to supply her those medications for free, as they do for all recipients, but to secure a walker for her so that she could keep her circulation active and walk again. It’s not that the state or other large NGOs are oblivious or insensitive to people like Tetyana.6 There are just some needs that require a leaner and more responsive approach—and for someone to see them.
This mission of serving people in the gaps has since blossomed into Katya’s Medicine.7 Thousands of people—including those living in refugee shelters, subway stations8, and children’s homes—have now received critical medications when needed thanks to her and her team’s work, which can be supported directly here.
PS - We’re also happy to report that Katya and Joel are now married. Beautiful things can still grow in the present darkness—and by growing also reject that darkness.
Maria
Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, sits a very uncomfortable 19 miles from the Russian border. Though Kharkiv still stands today—in spite of multiple waves of ground attacks and nearly three years of daily bombardment—something like a quarter of the city is now in ruins. [EDIT: See footnote.] 9 Its pre-war population of roughly 1.5m people initially dropped as low as some 250k, with a slow rebound made up of those who couldn’t stay away and those with nowhere better to go. Over our 26 hours in the city back in 2022, the air raid sirens went off five times. Given its location, there can be no meaningful safety in Kharkiv so long as the war persists.
One thing that’s missing in those broad numbers though: the number of children left behind. A deeply unpleasant fact about every war is that some parents flee alone, else without the kids that represent the biggest burden. This often includes children with special needs—including those just weeks or days old.
We met Maria outside her apartment building in Kharkiv on a cold day in late December.10 She was pushing a stroller with a bundled-up baby sleeping inside, Alisa, a precious little girl with Down’s Syndrome. Maria had first come across Alisa at a local children’s hospital, a familiar place where Maria had donated groceries and medications during the initial assault—when employees were unable to leave and supplies were scarce. Maria had gotten to know the staff well, and thus got to chatting with them when bringing in her son to deal with an infection about a month into the war. And so it was that she learned that they’d since taken in several babies, including two with an official determination of abandonment. Which is to say the parents weren’t just displaced or missing. They were alive, but not coming back.
Alisa’s birth mother had fled abroad with her healthy children. A few cribs over from Alisa was Anechka11, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, who had been signed over to the state upon birth. The two girls had been placed together in a hospital too short on resources to deal with much beyond acute emergencies, and Maria couldn’t bear to look away from the pair—nor, ultimately, break them apart.
Her first instinct was to foster only Anechka. Maria just didn’t know if she could offer sufficient support for a child with Down’s. Even so, she returned for Alisa about a month later. While Maria couldn’t offer the kind of economic security we often take for granted in the west, she could offer a mother’s love—and a mother’s tenacity and resourcefulness. These are not small things.
When we first met Maria, she was about to take home yet another child—a young boy with severe congenital defects, whose birth mother, unable to escape her basement shelter, was forced to give him contaminated water, leaving him for a time unable to eat except through a tube. Even today, two years later, he’s still only about 15 pounds. He became Maria’s eighth child, and the seventh that she’d taken in since the war began. One has HIV. One has hydrocephalus. Another, an infant boy named Demyan, was nearly blind and had a respiratory condition severe enough that, in Maria’s own words, “at any moment he simply might not breathe anymore”. Our translator later marked in her transcript notes that Maria’s voice almost broke while saying this.
We’re devastated to report that Demyan didn’t make it. He had a cardiac episode and died in a local hospital after a failed attempt to restart his heart. He was just two.
But Maria’s grief hasn’t deterred her. She’s since grown her family by three, with ten children now in total—one biological, two adopted, and seven in her long-term foster care. Only two of them don’t have physical and/or psychological disabilities.
This is a mission of love. After rent alone, she’s left with a little over $500 USD per month for everything else in their lives—including groceries, baby formula, and all uncovered medical expenses. While she’s received intermittent lump sums from UNICEF in modest amounts, she can’t rely on them or budget around them. Like many in her country, she simply has to make do, which often means going without, especially when it comes to anything for her personally. Her kids come first.
How does she get through it? She gushed through our first interview about the many kindnesses of others—including one friend who came to walk with her children every day, no matter the weather, even on days when public transit couldn’t run for power or safety reasons, when that meant about a 10 mile round-trip journey on foot.
But there’s also just pure resolve. The granddaughter of a general, Maria still commandeers an ad hoc mix of local aid efforts. While the city was still emptying out, she used donated funds to import an old ambulance to help with evacuations, with rides for the disabled, and with delivering needed aid to those the system couldn’t easily see or help. In a more dramatic example, she recounted saving a medic who’d been shot seven times, whose unit flagged her and a friend down on the roadside as a hail mary. She gave him emergency care herself, as best she could, which turned out to be just enough.12 Her gloss at the end of telling us that story: “We are not ashamed of ourselves. We managed to do a little good. And this is the best thing.”
What for most of us would be the most dramatic good we’ve ever done was, to Maria, “a little good” done as a sort of side quest. But they were there, and they weren’t going to pass by or not try. It’s less a decision for them now, and more just muscle memory.
As a much happier update, that medic made a full recovery and is now serving his country again as a full-time instructor.
At the end of our first interview, we asked Maria a somewhat inappropriate question—about hope. Her reply?
Hope? (Laughs) I realized that even if we could all get away now somehow, then who’s left there? Who’s going to do it all? I know the old people won’t run away. My father stayed, as well as my stepfather, and my 96 year-old grandmother. … Some of my friends ran away, leaving their mothers here. I felt so sorry for them, and I thought that I’m able to do something about it.
This is the rub. There are some people in life who simply believe that they can do something about it, whatever that it is, whatever it may cost them—to whom the idea of civic duty isn’t some loose concept, but just what’s required of everyday people to hold the line in a war they refuse to lose.
I knew how to shoot in my time, I even rode tanks. But I went to the military enlistment office and they didn't take me. They said that I’m too old, and I’m a mother, and I can't. Therefore I have a different front. I’m fighting here.
As a fitting PS, Maria decided to rename Anechka to Mriya. While this translates directly to something like “inspiration” or “dream”, the word has a special contemporary meaning for Ukrainians. At the beginning of the war, the Russians destroyed the sole existing Antonov AN-225 “Mriya”, a plane notable for lifting loads once thought impossible, including massive quantities of humanitarian aid. In the aftermath, President Zelensky promised to build a new one—a new dream for his people. While we’d love to see that dream come true, we also note that, so long as Ukraine has citizens like Maria, they already have Mriyas aplenty.
You can support Maria directly via PayPal at dobrotak2020@gmail.com. [EDIT: If you’re blocked by PayPal from sending directly, you can send via Jeremy’s.]
Oksana
Ukraine is divided into a series of oblasts, or states. One of the most besieged is Kherson, now the southwestern front of the war. The oblast capital, also called Kherson, sits on the west bank of the Dnipro River. But from the east bank of that river comes death. Russian forces were pushed back across the bridge when the Ukrainians recaptured the city in November 2022. Frustrated by their inability to take it back, the former have since maintained a campaign to make the area uninhabitable.
Before the war, Kherson Oblast had about a million residents, of which some 300,000 lived in the city of Kherson. Those numbers are now down to roughly 150k and 60k respectively. The remaining city population has endured engineered flooding, airstrikes, sniper fire, and now a daily “human safari” of drones dropping grenades and mines—not just on civilians, including the elderly, but on city buses, ambulances, and even fire trucks responding to blazes created by Russian artillery fire. It’s one of the most dangerous places on earth today, with no truly safe havens at any time.
Life in the larger oblast isn’t considerably better. While most drones have a range of about 10 miles, artillery can reach a bit farther in, and rockets farther yet. Those who still live there are either unusually defiant13 or just can’t afford to escape.
Oksana was born in Kherson, and now works as a psychologist in Kyiv. Or rather she’s based in Kyiv. Pinning her down on any given day would require a very active tracker. She might be in her clinic, or off somewhere teaching, or offering free counselling sessions to internal refugees. Or she might be back in the Kherson area itself along with her team of unusually brave volunteers—who bring down food and other needed supplies to those still living in the villages outside the main city.
When we were put in touch with Oksana, she told us that there were about 80 kids within the families she cared for. So Daniel and I raised some money (including from you lovely readers) to give them at least a small measure of joy. We took her shopping in Kyiv to fill makeshift stockings for each child—with toys, coloring books, Kinder Eggs, and chocolates for each family to share. Your generosity was a delight to her14, and to many children who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten anything for Christmas.
Oksana’s network has now grown to 150 children. The main wishlist item she’s received from their parents is for a playset, as there are currently zero left between the covered villages combined. Their very modest dream is for their kids to at least have a place to be proper kids for all the minutes they can.
Donations towards this roughly $1,000 USD price tag can be made via PayPal at kiyv.perspektiva@gmail.com. Any overage will be used thoughtfully for similar ends.
[EDIT: Some accounts are apparently being blocked from sending to Ukrainian PayPals right now. As a temporary workaround, you can send via Jeremy’s.]
As a final PS, we also included a note in each care package back in 2022, with local translations of the following message:
You have been asked to be brave before your time
And you have been
And the world that watches
Has reached out their hands
To give you this
And to ask you to be brave
Just a little longerA day will come
When the war is over
When you’ll travel far and wide
And you’ll tell people where you’re from
And they will say “Glory to Ukraine”
But they won’t be speaking of the land
They’ll be speaking of you
Our great hope is that these children will get to grow up, that they’ll experience a few more moments of precious normalcy while the war persists, and that we won’t need them to be brave for too much longer.
Our special thanks to Jenya, Lu, and Gala for their translation help. And to Kyiv-based journalist Margo Gontar for her networking assistance.
If the above donation options don’t work for your apps or currency, please comment here or DM Jeremy on Twitter and we’ll happily arrange alternatives. If you’re a Venmo user, you can transfer to our friend in the US here. 100% will be passed on.
Christmas blessings to you all,
Jeremy and Daniel
They also insisted on feeding us, after rightfully and playfully chiding us for our poor planning in not thinking to stock up for the journey. They were a delight.
We initially intended to meet with some of these reporters over our first trip, with the goal of promoting their work. It just didn’t work out logistically. It might this time, though tbd.
Aerial attacks are a bit less common in the west, at a rate of 4-5 per week across the broader Lviv region. But these shelter alerts are sent through a mobile app instead. As a fun side fact, Joel informed us that these alerts are also available in Mark Hamill’s voice.
Most Ukrainian men of fighting age must register for military service, and generally can’t leave the country. Women aren’t subject to conscription, excepting those with medical degrees. Though some women volunteer, and now make up 7-8% of the armed forces.
For obvious reasons, we refused to let anyone pay for anything. Or rather we tried. This couple outfoxed us once, and weren’t the only ones. Hospitality isn’t something some people can turn off, even in times like these.
One wrinkle of this is that the government would prefer, fairly, that residents evacuate from areas closer to the front. But some simply won’t, or can’t. This leaves them dependent on smaller and leaner aid networks that utilize local help.
Their work shifts back and forth as ground realities change. Over the last few months, for example, they’ve been shipping large boxes to refugee dormitories with the most commonly requested medications. Though they still fulfill custom orders too.
Many Ukrainian subway/metro stations, which are some of the world’s deepest, double as bomb shelters and triple as makeshift housing for those without. We noticed a lot of neatly-kept tents inside the stations in Kharkiv especially, at least in 2022.
Original footnote: “For a visual sense, see here. In the largest residential district, Saltivka, local authorities estimate that 70% of buildings were damaged or outright destroyed.” [EDIT We went walking through Saltivka on 12/21. While we don’t want to minimize the horrors of aerial attacks “only” blowing out windows or shearing off balconies, the original text of a quarter of the city being “in ruins” was an overstatement. It would be fairer to say a quarter bears visible scars from the war. While some buildings were truly reduced to rubble, more are in some middle state and are at least partially habitable.]
At the time, she was housing her family across a set of apartments whose owners had left keys and permissions with her on their own evacuations. She’s now in a rented house, where she isn’t dependent on electricity keeping the elevators working.
Ukrainians generally only use their proper first names for documents and formal occasions. Common names all have more casual alternatives, plus a “soft” form used to express special affection. So a child properly named Anna would often be called Anya, and as Anechka when referred to lovingly by their mother. We thus honor Maria’s usage here. .
Amidst what was presumably a lot of blood, she apparently missed suturing one bullet wound. But they got him to the hospital stable enough, which was what mattered.
As one older woman who refused to evacuate said in a recent interview (watch from 35:06 here), “If it is between the Russians shooting me and me leaving, I would tell the Russians to shoot me. I will never leave. My husband and son are buried here. I won’t go.”
There was a moment I wish we could have captured in its emotional fullness for you all, at that toy store, where she pointed out a few more things she thought the kids would treasure, and we were able to say “sure, those too”. Your donations mattered.
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