When Heraclitus wrote his own version of Immutable Law, that “everything changes”, he wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t completely right either.
Too often changes in our world are made on the whims and demands of despots who should never have been allowed to grip power. The landscape of humankind’s evolving history is pockmarked by tyrants who never once cared about the suffering they’d inflict on so many others. That hasn’t changed at all.
But change is born from hope as well; from inspiration, innovation, adaptation, and, probably most of all, determination. When Volodymyr Zelenskyi broadcast to the world from a darkened street in Kyiv that he wasn’t leaving, he raised the heads and hearts of millions. By dawn, his people realised they had a leader they could rally behind, against the columns of tanks attempting to surround their capital city, and the growing wild rumours of Orc’s inhuman savagery. And around the world, the vast majority of us witnessed Zelenskyi’s quietly determined defiance through digital apparatus, from anywhere around our planet an electronic signal might stretch to.
Nevertheless, along all those vast networked distances, and despite the use of multiple translations, the Ukrainian president’s matter-of-fact statement had reached out and actually touched the “better angels” in many of us.
Back in October of ‘22, I was on my second tour for a humanitarian organisation when I first encountered Ukrainian Patriot (UP). We had run out of vehicle before we’d run out of road, breaking down just outside the capital. I found myself stranded with three hefty Pelican cases chock-full of medical and other supplies destined for our Ukrainian contacts 300 miles to the south.
Despite the war being eight months along, I’d still call that time Early Days. There was much more Wild West about all our humanitarian efforts back then. Well-meaning startup charities were either exhaustedly fading or getting their various acts together toward becoming organisations. Due to the sensitive nature of the organisation’s supply drop and us never having met before, I couldn’t give Lana a lot of detail when I explained my predicament. Yet without really knowing who we were either, she agreed to lend us their only vehicle so that we could complete our mission.
Fast forward 28 months and several missions and collaborations between this organisation (which prefers to remain unnamed) and Ukrainian Patriot across that period, to the moment a UP team picked me up from Hell’s Kitchen in Kharkiv, and I found myself heading back to Izium to help carry out a food supply drop—and as always, with Lana on point.
I was sandwiched between convoy companions: Glib and Bob in Vehicle #2. Glib, a young Ukrainian man still under draft age, had spent the first months of the Orc invasion with his family in Mariupol. That fact alone should give anyone reading a pause for thought. Though Glib’s quiet-spoken, he’s direct in a way which evinces intelligence, and with brain enough to work a computer that he’d used effectively with other hackers to harass our common enemy.
Bob is from Saskatchewan, a big guy with a wry sense of humour. I’m not sure I’ve ever used the phrase “gentle giant” before, but that was my notion of Bob from the get-go. He’s friendly and loud, with firm handshakes and hugs to the men UP was giving supplies to, and then by comparison, with the gentleness of his embrace of the women, as he bends down to their height, finding their eye and quietly telling them, “You are not alone.” There were several times after food distribution was done and we were packing up when I heard him quietly affirming, almost to himself, that “these are good people”.
The whole week prior to pick up, the days in Kharkiv had been oppressively humid, the nights constantly permeated with explosions and anti-missile defences that peppered the storm clouds with dark crimson glows and bright red, repetitive flashes. As our small convoy drove out of the city, the long-waited downpour finally began. Our vehicles were rained on for almost the entire two-hour journey. It only faltered and ended as we zigzagged our way through the old checkpoint outside of town. But Izium and heavy rain was bound to draw flashbacks and memories…
Late in the cold, wet autumn of ’22, Izium was at the sharp edge of the Grey Zone. Some supply drops were accompanied by the distant tak tak tak of small-arms fire. As I write, I cannot recall if Ukraine had discovered those terrible mass graves in the forest yet or not. Most shops were boarded up and checkpoints were sternly manned. After sunset, regardless of correct ID documents, you couldn’t drive through without giving the soldiers that night’s password.
The Orcs in panicked retreat were perhaps 10 miles up the road, having pillaged all they could carry from the houses they’d ransacked, the rooms they’d defiled and needlessly desecrated. Booby traps made from grenades and high explosives were still being discovered, hidden in private gardens and outhouses. We’d come across abandoned uniforms, strewn about in cellars or out in the open; swapped for civilian clothes to facilitate their escape from the multitude of war crimes they’d committed. Our humanitarian convoys weren’t armed unless we had need of escort; unescorted, we were warned to keep to ourselves in Izium because we didn’t know who was who.
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Evil is a word too glibly employed, when other adjectives perhaps should be found. Often its usage emanates from deeply emotional scars. The horrors of more than 3 million Ukrainians murdered by starvation between 1932-33 during the Holodomor are only amplified by the knowledge that the starving were forcibly confined to their villages, after all foodstuffs, farm animals, and pets had been confiscated or summarily destroyed to speed up the process of genocide.
By any moral standard or judgement, the perpetration of man-made famine is surely anathema. Yet research into that historic period reveals an explainable timeline of events, which, through a twisted Soviet perspective, made the Holodomor ideologically justifiable. It’s the same Marxist-Leninist roots that condone Orc commanders forcing their own seriously wounded conscripts back into battle, essentially to commit suicide “for the greater good”.
For more than a century, the citizenry of Moscow have resented the defiant endeavours of Ukrainian people standing up for their own national identity. Muscovy’s collective approach toward Ukrainians is actually self-defensive, evidenced by their disdain and derision of “Kohkols”. It’s a mindset born out of xenophobia, an unconscious recognition that, despite their cruel efforts to absorb Ukraine through subjugation, they’re actually not the same peoples. A warrior standpoint, and indeed an appropriate response to the abusive citizens of Muscovy, is referring to them accurately as Muscovites. They are not, never have been, never will be “Rus”.
Yet, despite the pernicious ignorance of Muscovites, neither warped ideology nor xenophobia are, per se, evil. Evil is, however, inherent to war-criminality; to the rape of children, the targeting of hospitals, the nightly terrorist acts of denying communities power to warm their homes in freezing winter. It is evil to gather up innocents, to bind their hands then mass-murder them. It can only be premeditated evil that consciously takes direct aim at civilian homes, to cause wanton destruction and death in Izium and in so many towns and cities throughout Ukraine.
By any humane measurement, the iniquity of Muscovites stretches from “shameful” through “barbaric” to “unspeakably bestial”. This spectrum of evil is the reason they’re called Orcs.
Consider this: the principles of Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) begin with the concept of continuing the tactical mission and gaining fire superiority before treating the wounded in relative safety. Or in plainer words, “Kill the enemy first.” Such is the level of defiant determination vital to preventing the foe from achieving its objectives at the forward edge of the battle.
Over three years of war, it’s been constantly clear that the invader’s strategies aren’t just about stealing territory however. Terror, imprisonment and torture, and unrelenting impoverishment—these are stratagems used to subdue the civilian population into darkness and despair. The enemy’s heinous intentions on this non-combatant frontline must also be resisted, and with equal determination. The aims and methodologies of inhumanity must be steadfastly met and eventually overwhelmed by the champions of humanity.
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I’d never been in Izium with Ukrainian Patriot before, but over the next two days, I realised UP had obviously been on the ground in the city for quite a long time. We followed Lana along pot-holed suburban lanes and parked close to a large white marquee with UP’s logo on the side. Emma, a volunteer organiser and part of the local UP crew, came out to greet us. Other local women had laid on a welcoming tea-party with friendly catch-up chatter and home-cooked Ukrainian delicacies.
Emma lodged us in a home where non-drinking water was supplied in large containers. We brought in our kit and took off our shoes before entering. Whilst the others retired quite quickly, Glib and I sat at the kitchen table a while, just getting to know each other. We spoke about his imminent future as potential conscript into the ЗСУ (the Armed Forces of Ukraine) and my recent debriefs of International Legion survivors. Glib told me about the diary he’d written in Mariupol, and inevitably the subject of shelling came up. In turn, I told him that in Kherson, the enemy was so close it was the dogs who gave us warning of incoming ordinance, long before the air-raid sirens.
Eventually Glib crashed as well, and I went out to the garden for a last cigarette. After the nightly explosive disruptions in Kharkiv, the quiet of a moonless, rural Ukrainian night was palpable. Way off in the far distance, the deep silence was broken by a barking dog, and then another. I waited expectantly for what would come next: a muffled explosion, but all some distance away. My response at the Orc was whispered and invective.
Lana had warned us the following day would be busy. Glib and I took our van on a search for assistance from a tire repair shop. In three years of war, the constantly recurring feature of humanitarian work is vehicle maintenance and repair, usually assisted by Ukrainian mechanics wherever we can find them.
By 10 a.m., Emma had rejoined us and our convoy was back on the road. We had nine venues to visit in outlying suburbs where we’d hand out UP-packed food supply bags, and though the weather was fine, the dark, heavy clouds were threatening more rainstorms. Our short journeys between venues were often a process of vehicular negotiation around large, deep potholes. Along the roadside, small packs of stray dogs congregated around the detritus of bombed buildings.
There was a waiting crowd of more than 30 people at the junction outside the first venue. Lana gathered the volunteer team beside the van, designating our roles and reminding us of UP’s support purposes on the ground, both practical and social. Whilst Bob, Glib, and Lana took turns to greet each beneficiary whose name was called out from a list to receive a bag of staple foodstuffs, Emma gave each recipient a handful of candies. Lana used the van floor as a platform so everyone could see her as she gave an introduction speech that set the mood and made the crowd clap and laugh.
There were more hugs and handshakes than I could count, and when every family representative had been supplied, we rearranged the remaining supply bags before setting off for the next venue. That’s pretty much how the whole day went, between intermittent downpours.
“We call that a squall,” I told Glib, after a sudden heavy shower had soaked me. “We have the same word, pronounced differently,” he replied.
Glib took over Lana’s speech role at several venues, and I asked him later how he explained the hug requirement to his audience. “I just tell them nothing comes for free; we want a hug from you all. But it’s more than that of course.”
Hugs and handshakes break the ice. They bond strangers for a brief moment and they can change a mood. They remind Bob’s “good people” that they’re not alone in this waking nightmare of air-raid sirens and ongoing war-crimes inflicted on the homes of innocent families. By the end of that day we were all quite tired, but we’d supplied more than 360 food packages—and with those hugs, we had fulfilled Ukrainian Patriot’s motto: Light, Love, Hope, and Connection.
Three years on from my first encounters with Izium, the city was still in the Grey Zone; we kept armour and helmets and IFAKs close to hand wherever we went. All around us, there were signs of the ongoing war and stark reminders that the city had been invaded and occupied and indeed mass-murdered. In the local hills, the ancient Scythian hand-carved monoliths from Ukraine’s own bygone history had been jealously mutilated and destroyed. Air-raid sirens still regularly warned the townsfolk of further impending destruction somewhere close by.
But there were open mini-markets and a pharmacy now, though most of their customers were in uniform. It was still far too early for reconstruction projects, but there were self-sufficiency kitchen gardens springing up everywhere; perhaps the signs of braver souls who’d defiantly returned to the dangerous normality of a rural town in the east of Ukraine. Those communities UP had supported were doing their human best to carry on. Hopefully they’d have the chance to flourish.
Ukrainian Patriot’s next destination was an animal sanctuary for abandoned or traumatised pets, to organise, purchase, and unload building materials that would make their provisional shelters more habitable. Sandwiched between Glib and Bob, as we followed Lana weaving her way back through the old road block outside of town, the three of us were thoughtfully quiet…
Six tours in over three years, I’ve witnessed so many changes in Ukraine, and in the world. Nowadays there’s a new American leader who admires our enemy more than our Ukrainian president. European countries are finally, thankfully, boosting defence budgets. I’ve joined the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) and met the best people online, trying to drum up donations and maintain support and awareness of the ongoing struggle.
I’ve shared warm handshakes and hugs in the direst of circumstances all over Ukraine—locals and internationals have felt like family members I’m unlikely to meet again. I’ve learned with deep sadness about the untimely deaths of friends, and the graveyards, decorated with fluttering blue-yellow flags in the villages and in the cities, have grown larger.
Time and again, I’ve heard quietly murmured confessions of guilt from humanitarians heading home to safety, mostly accompanied by vows to return. I know people in country, bone-weary with war, but with never a mention of leaving or giving up. I feel so much pride and camaraderie with all those volunteers and activists I won’t ever meet, steadfastly organising support in foreign countries, defiantly determined to do all they can in this struggle against darkness and inhumanity. We still tell each other “Slava Ukraini” (“Glory to Ukraine”) with heartfelt passion and meaning, because evil and tyrants have always been met with resistance. That hasn’t changed at all either.
