Ukrainian volunteers, with a Philly connection, help rebuild without waiting for the war to end

Just before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Kseniia Kalmus was swamped with orders at her flower shop in Kyiv, as business continued to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic.

After the first day of bombing, she went to donate blood. By the third day, she was raising money on the internet to feed older Ukrainians who were unable to leave their homes, and working with friends to deliver meals. By mid-March she had opened a volunteer center in her flower shop, raising money on Facebook and Instagram, and working with several restaurants to deliver 4,000 meals a day to Kyiv citizens sheltering in the subway from the bombing.

Soon, through her personal networking, she made contact with Ukraine TrustChain, a fund-raising network begun by Ukrainian American volunteers (with a Philadelphia connection). It is now funding a dozen teams across the country, including Kalmus’, which is helping rebuild schools destroyed by the Russians.

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Welcome to Ukraine, the networking nation. Informal groups of civilian volunteers like Kalmus’ — real estate agents, priests, students, IT workers, and carpenters — emerged across the country at the beginning of the war to rescue, feed, and shelter tens of thousands of terrorized citizens. Some even worked to raise funds for body armor and drones for the volunteer military units joined by friends and relatives.

Now they are helping, at a local level, to start rebuilding their devastated country. They deserve our admiration and our help.

I traveled with Kalmus and two colleagues for a day as she checked on efforts to rebuild traditional tin roofs for old wooden homes in the village of Kukhari and a school rebuilding project in the town of Olyzarivka, both in the Kyiv region.

“I wanted to stay here and work with my friends and help people,” she recalled, referring to the initial days of the war, when Kyiv and its surroundings were under heavy shelling and many locals were fleeing abroad. With a master’s degree in business administration and experience running a business, Kalmus figured “a manager in this or that is the same process.”

So, by April and May, once the Russians retreated, her network of new and old contacts was delivering aid to villages all the way to the Belarus border about 60 miles away. “We had friends who would tell us, ‘The next village is without food,’” Kalmus recalled.

She recalled a food convoy they had organized of 12 buses, which had to drive through a mined forest because a bridge was out, and “our guys going out front of the bus looking for mines.” One of the volunteers, a psychotherapist, saw “a huge wire, but it turned out to be an internet cable.” These volunteers, many of them professionals, were no more familiar with the rigors of war than their counterparts in Philadelphia. But they adapted fast.

Through mutual friends, Kalmus came into contact with Daniil Cherkasskiy, a Ukrainian American real estate executive from Chicago who left Ukraine in 1999 after high school. Shortly after the war began, Cherkasskiy heard from a close friend who had engaged a surrogate mother in Kyiv; the mother had just given birth to premature twins but could not access special baby formula for preemies because of the shelling.

Cherkasskiy posted on Facebook and soon found a volunteer — a real estate agent — who risked her life to find an open pharmacy that had this formula. “I started talking to her and sent $1,000 and soon she had a network of 70 people looking for elderly people stuck at home or people in bomb shelters,” Cherkasskiy told me by phone.

Subsequently, he made contact with Kalmus and other self-starters. “There is a new sector of Ukrainian society in the last 10 years that is self-organized,” he said. “I never realized how many really selfless great people I would meet through this. They had no reason [to volunteer] and everything was stacked against them.” Yet they stepped up.

Soon, Ukraine TrustChain built up a web presence (ukrainetrustchain.org) and began funding several teams working in different regions. Each set their agenda according to the needs in their particular locale and reached out to bring people they trusted, with needed skills, onto the team.

“If the government does it it would be much higher cost and not the same urgency,” Cherkasskiy told me. “We focus on fund-raising,” added Ukrainian American Ilya Knizhnik, who is on the board of Ukraine TrustChain. He was a childhood classmate of Cherkasskiy’s at a Jewish elementary school in Kyiv and is now a tech manager at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.

Knizhnik explained the benefits of networking. “One thing that makes the Ukrainian army effective is that its teams operate independently [unlike the top-down Russian style of operations]. Our teams operate independently, too.”

Team leaders like Kalmus scout for places that can benefit from moderate amounts of funding and vet new projects. They are now feeding tens of thousands of displaced persons or villagers under shelling, evacuating the desperate from war zones, delivering medical supplies to hospitals, and running shelters. “You call friends, they call their friends. People begin building links,” Knizhnik said.

In Olyzarivka, I saw the results. The local elementary school had been occupied for 34 days, in February and March, while 68 people hid in the basement — until the Russians left the school and a Russian plane dropped four bombs in the school courtyard.

» READ MORE: Six months after Putin's war started, West still won't give Ukraine the weapons to win.

The school suffered substantial damage, but fortunately the women and children in the basement weren’t injured. “When we asked the Russian soldiers why they did it,” teacher Ludmyla Mystrenko told me, “they said it was a Ukrainian jet. We saw the red stars on it.”

Now with funds from Ukraine TrustChain, along with local town sponsors — and local workers — carpenters are pounding away inside the school to rebuild interior walls and ceilings and a new roof. The teachers hope the school will be repaired in time for fall classes.

Ultimately, Ukraine will need a Western Marshall Plan or Russian compensation (perhaps taken from Russian Central Bank assets frozen in the West?) to rebuild the staggering amount of civilian infrastructure that Moscow has deliberately destroyed all across the country, including schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, heating systems, airports, and housing. Estimates of the cost of damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure range from $114 billion to several times that.

But Ukraine’s skill at networking and grassroots volunteering illustrates how this country could rebound — if the West gives it the right weapons to push back the Russians, and stays the course until they have done so. And if ordinary Americans and Europeans help Ukrainians help themselves.