Crowdfunding a war against autocracy

Jonathan MS Pearce reporting from Ukraine.

The four-wheel drive bounces around the potholes in the road on a dark Ukrainian night. With the last checkpoint of the evening behind us, documents again stored away, we are following the truck ahead as it weaves and wends its way around the road damage. This road has been given the attention of Grad rockets and artillery shells, battered early in the war as Russian columns streamed over the border to embark on their three-day "special military operation."

Two years later, with the "SMO" becoming a war, there are no Russians to be seen here. Well, that's not strictly true. Local Ukrainian brigades are reporting an uptick in DRGs—deep reconnaissance groups—penetrating the dark forests, crossing over the border to keep the Ukrainian defenders on their toes. Suddenly, the thick lines of midnight trees become all the more menacing.

There are no rear lights on the truck in front of us, nor on the NGO vehicle we are traveling in. A single brake light winks as the vehicle negotiates the tricky road. It's not just the ravages of war, but the effects of winter ice and patches of snow that we are dealing with. The lights inside the trucks are kept to a minimum, with only fog lights being used to sight the drivers.

Risks are managed carefully here.

These trucks, whether Nissan Navarros, Mitsubishi L200s, or any other similar pickups, are the military blood cells that course around the veins of the Ukrainian frontlines. The Navarro of the NGO I'm traveling with has so far racked up over 400,000 kilometers on its loops around the Ukrainian warzone. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

That phrase has more purchase than you might realize.

Imagine back in your home country—in the US or perhaps the UK—that your serving soldiers had to fundraise or rely on donations for their main form of transport.

Welcome to Ukraine.

"Often ninety to a hundred percent of vehicles in a unit come from donations," Zhenya tells me. The Ukrainian who runs the NGO with his American charity partner, Greg, can see I am skeptical. "Seriously, you will find out if you ask the men tomorrow."

The beautiful morning sky, clear and cold, silent and still, belies a constant menace. The conditions are perfect for drones, and drones are the currency of war these days. They loiter, they spot, they drop explosives, they commit suicide and murder at the same time.

We huddle in the kitchen of a house that has been taken on by this unit. Operational security prohibits too much detail being expressed here as to what they do and where. A young sergeant with a great grasp of English enlightens Pierre and me as we listen intently to what they do, how they do it, what their hopes and fears are, and what they need.

And they constantly have needs.

Pierre, a British volunteer who usually works in another area of the Ukrainian frontline, is accompanying me for these ten days. We are privileged to have been given this access by the NGO and the troops themselves. Together, we meet the commander of the unit.

Sergei (not his real name), a thick-set, dark-bearded man who looks too young to be in the position he holds, hails from Bakhmut, a city now reduced to rubble. After all, that's what Russian "liberation" looks like. Greg fills us in on the man's back story.

Sergei's brother had moved to Russia before the 2014 annexation. The events of 2014, where Putin's illegal forces, or "little green men"—soldiers who had removed their insignias—marched into parts of Ukraine and announced ownership of large swathes of land, had split the commander's family. As has been experienced and recounted often since the large-scale invasion in 2022, Russian relatives of Ukrainians back in the Russian Federation have routinely refused to believe their Ukrainian family members concerning what the Russian army has been doing. They would prefer to believe Russian state media over their own family members who have lived experiences of being bombed and shelled by Russian forces. Unfortunately, Sergei's brother is one of these relatives.

This is national identity-level cognitive dissonance and brainwashing all at once.

A year ago, Sergei's parents had to be moved out of Bakhmut in the middle of the town being heavily bombarded. Being disabled, the parents needed care and assistance of family and so, serving in the army, Sergei had no choice but to send his parents to Russia to live with his brother. He hoped that the brother would be enlightened. But the brother was in "hook, line, and sinker" as Greg tells me.

Luckily for the commander, his parents are able to see through the state television disinformation—to a degree. But to Sergei's utter dismay, his brother, as a Ukrainian, is so far down the Kremlin disinformation rabbit hole that the first-hand experiences of his parents and of Sereie are not enough to convince him.

For some people, there is just no hope of a reconciliation with reality.

The procurement reality

Sergei welcomes Greg and Zhenya. The pair's NGO, supported by fundraising from my own YouTube channel and two others, have raised $200,000 since December 25th. That's a lot of money in just over a month that will buy equipment directly for units like Sergei's.

A thin Sargent, one of the drone operators in the unit, kitted in snow-camouflaged uniform, confirms Zhenya's earlier claims about procurement. How many vehicles of their unit are donated from fundraising? "One hundred percent," he answers me. "Every single vehicle is donated."

A few days later, we pass a unit on a main unit, a convoy of a dozen or so vehicles. Not one of them turns out to be a military vehicle—a Humvee or Kamaz truck. They are all pickups, SUVs, and cars. This only confirms our experiences with Sergei's unit.

It's not just vehicles, it's all sorts of equipment.