Within hours of the attack, our volunteers including Inna, Dina, Karina, and some of Andriy and Oleksandr’s teams, were at the site, helping with aid distribution, delivering warm drinks to rescue workers, and providing comfort to residents of the building.

While the battle for Bahmut and Soledar keep burning and smoldering in the East of Ukraine, our teams completed another week full of important and meaningful work.

As soon as the explosions ceased, people of Kyiv redoubled their united, defiant cheers from their balconies, rejoicing and celebrating in the darkness without fear.

As we approach the end of 2022, we can’t help but reflect on the stories, photographs, phone and Zoom calls, videos, texts, and connections with volunteers in Ukraine that we here in the US have experienced.

For this holiday season, consider the vital, life-saving gift that you could offer by continuing to support UTC volunteers in their selfless work.

Today, despite the rain, again there was a big room full of people. The team distributed 120 humanitarian aid packages consisting of butter, salt, and bread. People come for food and also for words of comfort, though outside it is so loud.

As we race to help as many people as possible before the onset of winter, the world is preparing for the winter holidays.

This is the third week that we start our letter acknowledging the extreme hardship our teams endure due to the absence of electricity, heat, and water.

Even without light.

The city is cheering happily, even though for eight days we haven’t had light, water or heat, but we have ZSU (Ukrainian Armed Forces).

We take it almost for granted but 8 teams last week went on 12 dangerous missions delivering aid into the liberated territories and zones of active bombardment.

Despite these difficulties and ongoing bombings that happen almost on schedule, our volunteers continue to push aid into the areas of desperate need and teams have now shifted to various winterization tasks for fixing up roofs to providing stoves and blankets.

Last weekend it was warm in Kyiv and Dnipro, but rather than taking a stroll through the quiet street, watching the leaves change color, our teams raced against the clock, trying to deliver as much assistance as possible before the onset of winter. These efforts are made difficult by constant power outages and increasingly frequent air raid sirens. Yet in the last week alone our teams distributed aid to more than 20,000 people, many of them in the liberated territories, still in danger from Russia’s shelling. We continue to admire the unceasing creativity of their efforts and continued generosity of our community in the US and Europe. Though we continue to spend more money than comes in, we still think that it is important to deploy and evacuate as many people as possible now before the winter cold sets in. Thank you for every single donation you’ve made. Please consider switching to the monthly donation option, so that we can plan better for the five difficult months ahead of us.

The week began and ended with massive attacks that hit residential areas and civilian infrastructure in all of the cities where our volunteer teams operate. Despite being rattled by the explosions, our teams either ignored the attacks or jumped right into action with even more fervor.

Seven teams continued to push aid to the occupied territories last week. The refrain there is that people need everything. Volunteer deliveries are a key source of sustenance in those territories. Those territories have been semi destroyed and heat and electricity are not likely to be turned back on before the onset of winter. These heroic efforts became even more complicated after Russia indiscriminately bombed Ukrainian cities on Monday in the worst attack in months.

Olga’s group has provided the chance for roughly 170 students from dozens of villages to resume learning. The children started offline learning this week and, thankfully, so far there have been no air raid sirens. We hope the children can continue learning upstairs. 

People kissed the bread and cried.

Olga Chizhova who spearheaded the effort to repair schools in Chernihiv continued to distribute supplies, delivery of which was sponsored by UTC. School supplies remain a critical need in multiple parts of the country and we continue to look for partners and ways to provide help to the schoolchildren, especially in refugee families in central Ukraine.

For all of us who follow events in Ukraine, it was hard not to feel hopeful last week, not to rejoice seeing the success of the Ukrainian army, nurturing our hope for the future of Ukraine, for victory over the aggressor's armies. But despite this reassuring news, Russian rockets and shells continued to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, making Ukrainians relying on our help even more vulnerable to diseases, cold and economic instability. We continue to track the situation closely and hope that in the upcoming weeks, our teams will as usual find a way to push help to the liberated territories like they did in the Kyiv region. This however will require additional resources and as Ukraine liberates more area we continue to expect a steady increase in needs on the ground. Meanwhile alongside the drive to victory, other smaller stories continue to emerge from our conversations with our teams.

Timur’s team has braved intense fighting to make it to the villages in the "gray" zone, close to the front lines. Bezryki and Pechenigi were added to our regular distribution points in Tishki and Tsirkunovi. At both locations, 580 packages of aid were distributed, in addition to 300 other packages. Additionally, Timur’s team delivered 100 packages of aid to the children's hospital in the Kharkiv region. Timur’s team completed 10 relatively short-distance evacuations as, with the approaching cold, some residents are giving up on spending the winter at their homes after months of shelling.