Through shelling and captivity: how Ukrainians evacuate war victims

To take people out of the occupied territories, to rescue volunteers who got into Russian prisons and to search for kidnapped Ukrainian children - all this is done by members of the Ukrainian public organization Help People. At the end of August, its founder Alexei Voronin, during his visit to the United States, met with the Ukrainian diaspora of San Francisco and shared his experience.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

From business to charity

Until 2016, Alexey worked in IT, and then he founded his own automotive business. An experienced yachtsman, he lived quite an ordinary life - until the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine. After February 2022, Alexey, like many other entrepreneurs, reoriented the main forces of his business to help those affected by the war. The guys began to evacuate from Kyiv, Kharkov and other regions, including from Mariupol, which was under constant shelling. Volunteers delivered humanitarian aid, helped in finding funds for the restoration of destroyed buildings, and so on.

Now, in addition to evacuation, members of the public organization are engaged in the return of abducted Ukrainian children and assistance to people affected by the flood as a result of the explosion of the Kakhovka dam.

«It happens that we are approached by mothers whose child is in the occupied territory, and his father is in the army. It is not uncommon for Russians to take their children to summer camps in Crimea, and parents lose contact with them.", - says Alexey.

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According to the head of the organization, more than 30 people were evacuated during its existence. Drivers, without exaggeration, risk their lives taking people out of the occupied territories. At the same time, the danger is created not only by constant shelling, but also by occupation patrols. Ten drivers ended up in Russian prisons in the first months of the war.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Captivity in Yelenovka

«We carefully prepared our first mission to Mariupol. Our drivers had to overcome many checkpoints where they were checked by the DPR military or Chechen battalions. Arrests of volunteers at that time were a mass phenomenon, and at some point we lost contact with our guys. We were lucky that one of the drivers was local. He presented the Russian military with a passport with a Mariupol residence permit, documents for a car, showed a detailed knowledge of the city's districts and thus was able to convince them that he had just come privately for his family”, - he recalls.

Believing the driver, the militants let him go, and he found a way to contact the Help People team and tell them about what had happened. As it turned out, the invaders sent the rest of the volunteers to the colony in Yelenovka, and some of them spent almost 100 days there. Prisoners were periodically transferred from one prison to another. According to Aleksey, their organization tried to give them food and money, but no transfers reached their recipients. Eventually Help People was able to buy out their volunteers. One of them, Bogdan, is still working in the team as a driver.

«The guys told very difficult facts about the content in captivity. As a rule, it was a tiny cell for four people. As a result, they were unable to sleep and could only stand. One or two pieces of bread were given out for the day along with a bottle of water - the same one in which urine had to be collected. If the guards were Chechens, they forced the prisoners to shout “Akhmat is power!”. Bogdan, for example, lost all his teeth in captivity”, – reports the testimonies of the prisoners Aleksey.

Children and old people

The organization miraculously managed to save its volunteers before a terrible fire broke out in Yelenovka, which claimed the lives of many prisoners. The situation with the abducted children was even more difficult.

«The hardest thing is to know the name of the child. Now both the Ukrainian and Russian sides are extremely reluctant to share the data of children. When the names are known, the whereabouts of the children are already easier to trace through open sources, although in this case they are often transported. For example, from Rostov-on-Don to the Crimea, and then beyond the Urals. When the location of the child is determined, preparation of legal documents is required, and it is even better to organize a special car with numbers from the EU, not Ukraine", - he shares the intricacies of the case.

According to him, the preparation of the return of one child to the territory of Ukraine takes from two weeks to a month. For the most part, Russians are afraid of publicity and, when all the documents have already been prepared, they give up their children quite willingly, pretending that nothing happened.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Work with elderly people in the front-line territories is also progressing rather uneasy. Aleksey Voronin recalls the difficulty with which the volunteers managed to persuade the old people to leave Bakhmut even before the city was completely destroyed by the occupying forces.

«It happened that our drivers talked to the old people, and in response they offered to treat them to soup. Then we saw that the elderly women stirred only water in the pan, and could no longer distinguish it from the soup. This says a lot about the psychological state of people living in such conditions. Fortunately, many of our drivers were psychologists or doctors, so they knew how to communicate with such people.", - emphasizes Alex.

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Volunteers note that now at least 163 buildings in Ukraine are completely destroyed and cannot be restored. Unfortunately, their number is constantly growing. Volunteers are trying to help with the search for funds to restore destroyed houses and kindergartens. In the city of Dnipro, the organization’s employees have created a hub for drivers, where cars are repaired, which are then used to evacuate people and deliver humanitarian aid. In such hubs, drivers can relax and receive the necessary medical care. At the same time, Ukrainians complain that now there is a catastrophic lack of mobile hospitals and medicines.

I must say that during the meeting of representatives of this public organization with the residents of San Francisco, they received reports of the shelling of their native Kyiv. But, in spite of everything, the Help People team is sure: in any conditions, saving every human life is priceless.

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