January 12, 2023
48,570 people evacuated from danger to date
9 trips into deoccupied and frontline territories
While the battle for Bahmut and Soledar keeps burning and smoldering in the East of Ukraine, our teams completed another week full of important and meaningful work. Thanks to your donations, multiple teams continue to bring food, water, firewood and other items essential for survival to civilians remaining close to the frontline. Dozens of trucks visit people whose villages have been severely damaged in previous months, and thousands of refugee families with identified needs continue to receive aid across Ukraine. Despite the holidays, and various challenges unique to each team, almost all of the teams we support continue to operate near their peak capacity and push forward larger projects.
Ukraine Team Milestones
Oleksandr’s Network
Maxim B delivered 5.5 tons of humanitarian aid from Kyiv to Bakhmut - currently the deadliest battlefield of the war. His two vans brought warm clothes, blankets, pet food, food kits, drinking water, medicine, flashlights, children’s gifts and 15 wood stoves. Due to continued shelling, most of Bahmut population stays in basements. Maxim identified places where people lived by the smoke of the potbelly chimneys. Maxim attempted to deliver aid to Soledar - but due to tragic battles taking place there, the army did not let Maxim through. Instead, he delivered 80 food packages to Kramatorsk to be passed to Sloviansk.
Over the past two weeks, Pavlo V’s team in Dnipro delivered 2,600 kg of food and 40 pipes for wood stoves to hotspots in Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Mykolaivka. The circumstances in these areas are difficult with frequent shelling, destruction, often a lack of water, electricity and gas. People are very grateful for the help that our volunteers bring. Every penny makes a difference in someone’s life and health. The team also distributes $1,000 of bread a month to the vulnerable displaced, disabled and homeless population in the Dnipro region for whom this bread is an essential lifeline.
The people of Bukovina prepared 1,100 gifts for children in front-line and de-occupied territories in the East, which Pavlo V’s team is now distributing.
Vladyslav K’s team delivered 24 tons of drinking water and seven tons of food to Mykolaiv and distributed 900 loaves of bread and 100 hygiene kits.
Sandra S’s kitchen in Odesa fed 1,170 people. For half the week the meals were distributed in a bomb shelter due to frequent air raids. Among those receiving meals are many mothers who have come from Kherson and Kharkiv to see their sons in the hospital.
Andriy P received 13 minibusses of humanitarian aid from BF ADRA in Romania and delivered them from Izmail to four distribution points in Mykolaiv. The 24 tons of aid included canned food and pasta, medical orthopedic beds for hospitals and mattresses. The aid will be distributed to displaced persons in Mykolaiv and to needy villages of the Kherson Region.
Viktor P made a trip from Ilnitsa to Germany to bring back 1,300 kg of new winter clothes. This aid will later be delivered to Zaporizhzhia.
Yuriy S made several trips to the Plyskiv and Dashkivtsi shelters in the Vinnytsia Region, bringing furniture and housekeeping supplies to displaced persons and people with disabilities. 80 sets of first-aid kits were also brought to Vinnytsia, on the way to the Donetsk Region.
Oksana K made a trip from Lutsk to Poland, bringing back 500 kg of food and 230 kg of other supplies. She also went to Ternopil, bringing back 600 kg of packaged cereals. In between trips, her team provided assistance to about 25 local people and families.
Oleksandr Z in Lutsk distributed 100 pairs of glasses to 77 displaced people and families. Four clay art therapy events were also held for displaced children and children from underresourced families.
Nazarii P’s team delivered nine generators to Kherson and the Kherson region, several of them to key community or public centers. They also brought 100 kg of sugar, 100 kg of rice, 100 kg of pasta, tomato paste, soup, preserves, diapers, clothes, blankets and two heaters. In all, Nazarii’s help center assisted 550 persons and families this week.
Natalia B, who is temporarily living in the Mykolaiv region, continues to collect funds and buy dairy products for disabled children in Kherson.
Dina’s Team - Vilny Lyudi - Vylna Kraina
Between January 2nd and 9th, Dina’s group distributed 918 packages of food to displaced people, as well as 250 kg of dog and cat food. The pet food was generously donated by another organization, but as usual some of your donations went to fund the logistics and transportation costs.
Serhiy continued his mission traveling to the village of Zarichne only miles away from the frontline distributing aid packages and potbelly stoves there.
Vilny Lyudi - Vylna Kraina was also able to send trench candles to the soldiers on the front lines that were made by one of the displaced people receiving aid in Dnipro. One of the destinations for the candles was Soledar. Our dedicated readers might recall a few weeks ago one of the volunteers of VL-VK, Olena, married a soldier. He is currently stationed in Soledar, currently the most violent area of this war.
Among some challenges of the last couple of weeks that Dina has been facing is the issue of accounting. There are so many volunteer organizations that have sprung up in Ukraine in the last 10 months that new laws have been created to ensure they can be taxed appropriately, but not enough accountants to keep up with the demands. Dina is trying to figure out the correct way to receive and transfer money. These problems are complicated further by the constant power and Internet outages. She is signing contracts with distributors and adjusting the way they source aid in Poltava, Kanev, Kremenchuk, Krasnokutsk, and Dnipro. Additionally, Dina has re-opened the form that people trapped in remote rural areas can use to request a package of food and hygiene products by mail. She plans to mail out 400 such packages this month.
Inna’s Team - Krok z Nadiyeyu
Last week Inna’s group delivered 25 tons of aid. 7,730 people received food and hygienic products packages and 6,000 received bread. In particular 1.1 tons were delivered to 40 families in the Bahmut region. There were additional deliveries to Nikopol (800 kg of food plus 50 children gifts), Kherson (1.5 tons for 120 people) and the Kharkiv region for 2500 people.
In the meantime, Oleksandr Davydiuk, Inna Kampen, and Ukraine TrustChain continue to coordinate a number of larger projects. One of them is manufacturing and distributing bread in the regions where there are potential food security issues for low-income families. Two bakeries have partnered with Inna Kampen and are producing 10,000 loaves of bread weekly. The bakeries volunteer their labor, while UTC covers the cost of ingredients.
Kseniia - Livyj Bereh
This week Liviy Bereh reported taking on a larger project covering the roof of a large apartment building. In Kyiv the region, the group continued to build a house for a large family in the Sloboda Kucharska village, Kyiv region.
The Kherson volunteer team we support through Kseniia distributed children’s gifts and aid packages in the Kherson region, in Kherson itself, and to the nearby Muzykivka village.
Natasha - Vysnia Volunteer Center
Last week we learned about another trip that Natalia’s organization Vyshnia Volunteer Center put together right before the New Year. The Krivyi Rih team led by Andriy and Tetiana Pasenko brought a large truck of aid into the village of Velyka Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region that had been under the Russian occupation for several months. In addition to food packages and gifts for the children, this delivery brought in large quantities of vegetables (cabbage, potatoes), which were essential for the New Year holiday meal prep.
Trips to the Kherson region are particularly emotional for our teams as this area historically has had a very distinct and strong Ukrainian identity. People in the villages around Kherson have a distinct pronunciation they use to thank volunteers and express joy at being liberated and reunited with Ukraine.
Karina’s Team - We Save Dnipro
117 people continue to live in Karina’s shelter. This holiday week they were visited by Natalya Mogilevskaya, a popular Ukrainian singer, who performed to lift their spirits.
Evacuations were not possible this week as the situation in Bakhmut and Soledar is dire. There are still civilians left in the cities, but the cities are nearly completely destroyed and people are hiding underground.
Timur’s Team - Timur and Team
As the temperatures continue to drop, оver 900 packages, blankets and flashlights, along with some holiday gifts for the children, have been delivered to the villages around Kharkiv. Towards the end of the week the teamed traveled to the liberated areas around the Izyum area and distributed over a thousand bags of aid there.
Tetiana’s Team - Dopomoha Poruch
We ran into an issue with bank transfers to Tetiana last week which delayed aid distribution. The issue has since been resolved, but this situation underscores how reliant our teams are on your donations and the magnitude of the direct impact your donations make on the ground in Ukraine.
As unfortunate as this hiccup with the bank transfer was, it made it easier for Tetiana to travel to Dnipro to spend a little bit of time with her father who was recovering from his injuries at the front there. She became sick during this trip, and a few days of slowing down sped her recovery.
Pavel’s Team - Dotyk Serdtsia (Touch of Heart) and Svitanok Mriy (Dawn of Hope)
We had a chance to connect more deeply with Pavel and Olena this week after a two-week period of illness for them. Pavel improved and then was able to travel, while Olena continued to recover. They shared updates on their weekly work and larger-scale projects supporting Ukrainians.
Last week Pavel and Olena's team fed 6,022 people. Throughout the week, the team processed more than 22 tons of aid, including 900 baby food packages and 1.5 tons of hygienic products. In particular, the team focused on the village of Zasillia, which was devastated by the battles for Kherson. A 5,000-person village had only 17 families remaining at the time of deoccupation. Currently, 400 people have returned to the village which suffers utter destruction. Pavel's team delivered 3 tons of food and 16 potbelly stoves there. They are also now working with that village to supply it on a continuous basis with drinking water and firewood. In addition to the Burzhuiki they delivered to the village, there is also a need for raskladushki and accumulator-powered flashlight (they have no sources of batteries). The team is also planning to set up a heating center there with two generators.
As we write this report, the team is bringing in a truck of firewood for heating this along with drinking water and warm clothes. The team has also installed 21 smaller 2kwt generators for families with foster children. Before the war Pavel and Olena were working with Ukrainian orphanages and foster family system. Currently they use their knowledge to support families providing foster care.
Pavel has his car fleet and warehouse in Vinnitsa and plans to continue having his drivers deliver humanitarian aid. They are delivering 10 generators to Bashtanka. Separately, they will outfit the piece of land purchased by their friends in Karpaty to launch a refugee center.
Andriy’s Team - BF Pomahaem
113 people continue to live in Andriy’s shelters. In the first two weeks of the year, Andriy’s organization is taking time off to let the team rest and recharge. In the meantime, UTC has provided funding for large scale purchases that will support a series of aid deliveries in the coming weeks.
Alena’s Team - Virgo Volunteer Center
Last week Alena could not stay back to celebrate the holidays with her family and traveled to Novogradovka in the Odesa region distributing 50 aid packages to large families with kids, internally displaced people and disabled.
In the meantime, Alena is meticulously preparing to establish additional heating centers or invincibility points in the deoccupied Kherson region. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this work is vetting the locations where Alena is planning to install the generators. Generators are needed in villages that have sustained significant damage during the occupation and where many residents, including representatives of municipal government, have left. Generators, being a valuable asset, need to be left with a person who can guarantee their safety, who is connected to the local community, and who would be willing to provide unhindered access to the space where the generator is installed. Finding such people is only possible through an in-person and Alena’s trips into the regions in December provided the needed intelligence to find 5 optimal points where she is planning to install generators in the coming weeks.
Marina’s Team - Give Good Ukraine
Some time ago the Ukraine TrustChain team was contacted by Marina, leader of volunteer organization "Give Good Ukraine." After helping Marina with one project, our team in the US became so impressed with her kindness and the effectiveness of her work that we decided to support her further. Her organization currently helps over 5,000 people in four settlements and provides assistance to 800 families. Last week, along with feeding and supplying basic necessities to displaced people, they passed a large medical shipment to the maternity hospital in Zhovti Vody and gynecology department in Piatykhatky in Dnipro region.
Aid Requests
One of the families we were able to help is Alyona's. This family, like many others, suffered greatly from war. While her husband and brother were fighting in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Russian shelling destroyed their house. Alyona, her small children, and elderly parents fled to the area of Bila Tserkva, where they settled in a crumbling guest house without hot water; thankfully, the house had a wood stove. In the summer, Ukraine TrustChain helped fix up this house.
Then, the family received news of the death of her mother’s brother (Alyona's uncle) in battle. From sorrow, Alyona's mother was hospitalized with a heart attack. During a recent shelling, glass and doors in their house were knocked out by an explosive wave. Alyona's eldest son was injured by glass fragments. UTC was able to help Alyona's family repair the damage to their home, buy firewood, and procure medicine for her mother. We will continue to support Alyona’s family.
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