Since February 2022, thousands of volunteers have been assisting both Ukrainian civilians and soldiers. Among them are those who embarked on this journey at the very start of the fighting. Such is the case of Andrzej Swierkosz, whom we met in Kramatorsk in April — his course illustrating the ups and downs experienced by these backstage hands of war.
When he finally decided to leave the car repair shop where he worked on the outskirts of Lyon, Andrzej, a Polish national, 37 at the time, had one plan in mind: to renovate a beautiful blue German-made van he had recently purchased and which was at his parents’ home near Katowice in Poland.
“When we had our Friday night beer [at the workshop], this is what it was like,” Andrzej recalls, tightening his neck and lowering his gaze. In other words: a gloomy atmosphere — not to mention the exhausting working conditions. In that garage, in addition to being a mechanic, Andrzej worked as a roadside assistance technician on the highway, which meant being on call one week per month. “Being on call,” he says, “meant a week from Thursday to Thursday. From Thursday at 5 pm to the following Thursday at 5 pm, you were constantly on the phone. As soon as they called you, you had thirty minutes to get there. Day or night. Weekends included. It was just impossible.”
On top of that, there was the never-ending stream of strange characters he had to assist as part of the job: one woman had no insurance policy and refused to pay, another demanded to be taken for free to his wedding in the South of France, a man had a phobia of bridges, yet another, after arguing with a prostitute, managed to wedge his car into a drainage pipe under the highway. “Well, you see [in the end], it just becomes a pain in the ass,” concludes our interviewee, with square shoulders and hands, visibly annoyed all over again as he recounts these bizarre episodes.
A Historic Resignation
So, one morning at six o’clock, once his resignation letter was proofread by his sister, Andrzej visited his boss and quit, brushing aside pretenses and any thought of unemployment benefits. He had made up his mind: once the van was refurbished, he would fulfill his dream — set out on a road trip across Ukraine and Russia, and drive “practically to the end of the Earth.” No plan, no itinerary, Andrzej explains — he’s “never traveled with preparation.”
But he did not know that, even before he said goodbye to his employer, his beautiful plan was already dead on arrival. Because that day was February 24, 2022, and the invasion of Ukraine had begun just hours earlier. “I didn’t have a clue. I got home at noon, turned on the TV, and there it was: ‘full-scale invasion.’ That was a problem, because I’d planned to go through Ukraine,” Andrzej recalls, animated by the strangeness of the memory.
A few days went by. Then a television report made him think. On the screen, civilians were crossing a river on foot, balancing on planks laid across the wreckage of a bridge. A white van, overturned and half-submerged, lay there after falling when the bridge had collapsed.
The Irpin bridge, destroyed by the Ukrainian army to slow the advance of Russian troops heading rapidly toward Kyiv, the city’s residents fleeing under a gray sky: the images were seen around the world. “Damn, that overturned van — it really stuck with me. I don’t know why; and then seeing the people trying to cross,” Andrzej recalls with a quivering voice. At that point, he adds, “I started to tell myself I wouldn’t be going anywhere.” But Andrzej, who has a calm temperament and is a fan of American rock and science fiction, is not easily discouraged.
From Road Trip to Humanitarian Deliveries
At 18, with a vocational diploma in construction and a professional baccalaureate in structural work under his belt, he left Poland, then in the grip of a major economic crisis, to look for work abroad. A backpack and £200 made up the bulk of his belongings and capital. He spent two years sorting tomatoes in a factory on the outskirts of London and transporting fabric and clothing between the UK and France.
In the Paris region, where Andrzej spent about ten years, he worked in construction and demolition. He even took part in pulling bodies from the debris and clearing the rubble of the building in Saint-Denis where some of the terrorists who bloodied Paris in 2015 had holed up. “That was quite an experience,” he says. Eventually, with rent prices rising and wages falling, Andrzej applied for a job at that much-maligned car repair shop in the Lyon region. In short, he’s a man who knows how to adapt.
And so, the solution to the hurdle that was the war in Ukraine quickly took shape. “I thought to myself: ‘the van’ — it was already in pretty good nick at the time. I thought, ‘Why not do humanitarian aid?’” A group of laughing teenagers interrupts him. We’re sitting right in the middle of Peace Square, in Kramatorsk. The sun is warm, the sky is blue, and in the distance the front line rumbles now and then.
Andrzej picks up the thread. Methodically, once the idea had formed, he began gathering information on Facebook. “You know, when I thought about quitting my job, I still had a month and a half of work left. There was the notice period […] and damn. That month and a half was the longest of my life,” he says with a laugh, with no regrets about his decision — which, in any case, came as no surprise to his relatives. “They know full well that I’m a little nuts,” Andrzej adds with a touch of irony.
“And you know,” he goes on, “I’ve always liked apocalyptic stories and all that” — a fascination that led to his first trip to Ukraine in 2019, during which he visited the area around Chernobyl, an experience he remembers fondly.
First Missions in Ukraine
After unsuccessfully offering his services as a driver to a group of volunteers — making his van available — Andrzej was eventually contacted by Sylvia, a resident of Lublin, Poland. Sylvia and her friend Martha, who owns a home cleaning business, were organizing food deliveries to Ukraine after having hosted women and children refugees in their homes for several months.
“Sylvia,” says Andrzej with a hint of sarcasm, “she breeds Cane Corso dogs. You know, Cane Corso — the kind of mutt that’s real small. So yeah, she had friends all over Europe […]. Then she started posting that she was doing humanitarian aid for animals too. And you see, people gave way more money if you wrote in the post [that your aid was also for animals].”
And so, from May 2022 and for nearly six months, the trio made round trips to Ukraine every two weeks to deliver goods donated by the Red Cross — “entire pallets” — as well as private donations. Their work focused in particular on areas recently liberated by the Ukrainian army during its counteroffensive in the fall of 2022. “It was always at least 3,000 kilometers […] every weekend. Because we left on Fridays — we were driving basically non-stop — to [be back] Sunday night or Monday morning in Poland,” recalls the former car mechanic.
Eventually, tensions within the team put an end to this exhausting operation. The trio split up — but for Andrzej, the adventure was only just beginning. Sylvia gave him the contact details of Claudia and Pavlo, a Ukrainian volunteer couple from Irpin who were working in Izium (in Kharkiv Oblast). The city had only recently been liberated. The two were looking for an additional driver. Polish and Ukrainian are closely related languages, and Andrzej speaks Russian. They’d manage.
Drawn into the World of Volunteers
By December 2022, Andrzej had moved in with Claudia and Pavlo in a house on the outskirts of Izium, near the M03 — the road to Donbas. Upon arriving in Izium, Claudia had first focused on finding a warehouse to store supplies for civilians and soldiers. It was also there that the former psychologist settled in with her partner. “They stayed, I think, two nights there,” says Andrzej. Two days later, a woman they had delivered supplies to understood their situation: “Next to my house, there’s an empty house — the owners left for Russia, you can go stay there,” she told them offhandedly.
He lived in Izium from December 2022 to January 2023. Andrzej remembers a nearly deserted town, littered with burned-out tank carcasses, where only “a few stores were open” and “there was a burning smell.” Near the volunteers’ house, he says, “there were big warehouses” that the Russians had used during their occupation of the town. “You’d go in there and there were missiles like this, piled up,” he adds, raising his hand above his head.
Missiles left behind in the chaos of retreat — and anti-personnel mines, everywhere: along the roads and in gardens. To this day, the outskirts of the town and the M03 remain infested. The skull-and-crossbones warning signs and strips of hazard tape installed by Ukrainians have, in some places, faded with time. Time passes but the mines remain.
Supplying Bakhmut, Evacuating Residents
After a few weeks, the trio realized that international NGOs were now able to supply Izium adequately. Their attention therefore shifted to Bakhmut, in Donetsk Oblast. At that time, the city was still under Ukrainian control. Many civilians still lived there, and since the security protocols of major NGOs generally prohibited them from operating near the front lines, volunteers played a crucial role in providing humanitarian aid.
During that period, Andrzej recalls, his team met a man called Serhiy, originally from Odesa.
“He was a welder, says Andrzej. He had connections with people in Japan. They gave him money so he could build burzhuykas [cast-iron wood-burning stoves – Editor’s note]. He built quite a few, and then asked us to help deliver them.”
Missions to Bakhmut began without delay, facilitated by the self-organization of the local residents. “There was a chat group, a [messaging] group for people who still lived in Bakhmut. They would post questions, requests for burzhuykas, food, evacuation,” explains Andrzej.
“In the morning, we brought everything people had asked for, and in the evening, when we left, we took out […] those who had requested evacuation.”
A month went by. Then, starting in January 2023, for the sake of efficiency (it took an hour and a half to get from Izium to Bakhmut), the team relocated to Chasiv Yar, about twenty minutes away by car. Pavlo, a former soldier who had fought in the region during the first war in Donbas, used his connections; a friend agreed to lend them his apartment.
Dangerous Missions
From this heroic period, Andrzej brought back truly apocalyptic images: deserted streets no longer maintained, cluttered with leaves and dirt; anti-tank barriers in the city center; Ukrainian armored vehicles encountered at random street corners; selfies in helmet and bulletproof vest; and, in the background of his videos, the sound of shelling.
He also retains the memory of an atmosphere that is difficult to describe, where absurdity — and at times comedy — is tinged with the shadow of death. One day in January 2023, a resident still living in the city, whose apartment was located 700 meters from Russian positions, finally decided to request evacuation — for himself… and for his horse. The detail might raise eyebrows. For volunteers at that time, it was nothing unusual.
Stunned by such a request, Claudia asked her teammate how he planned to evacuate a horse, in a war zone, with a van. Every problem has its solution: “Well, we’ll push it and it’ll get into the van,” replied our friend, recounting their conversation in the most natural tone. They set off. Things quickly became complicated: they couldn’t find the address.
The two volunteers got lost, eventually found the street, turned into it — and then “right in front of us: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!” recalls Andrzej, mimicking a series of explosions with his hand. “The van doors flew open — there were so many shockwaves… the back doors just popped open. Me [miming a driver slamming on the brakes], brakes, reverse gear. And goodbye!”
Supplying Civilians… At All Costs?
Another time, also in Bakhmut, an elderly woman approached the volunteers to ask whether she could get a wood stove. Agreed, they said, but she hesitated when Serhiy, the welder, offered to deliver the heavy appliance to her apartment. In the building where she lived, she said, the elevator had been out of service for six months due to the power outage. Suspicious, the team insisted — and eventually discovered an apartment “crammed full” of humanitarian aid parcels. “She was hoarding everything,” Andrzej explains.
Such stories illustrate what he sees as one of the issues with providing humanitarian aid in front-line areas. Some civilians do not grasp the mortal danger they are in — or the risk they impose on volunteers when they request last-minute evacuations. When the situation becomes too dangerous, Andrzej says, volunteers should not be supplying aid to residents but focusing solely on evacuation. “If you’ve got no food […] no water, then what do you do?” he asks rhetorically, clearly frustrated by this kind of behavior — which eventually convinced him to shift his efforts to supporting the military, like many seasoned volunteers.
Following the deaths of several aid workers, including American medic Pete Reed — killed by an anti-tank missile on February 2, 2023 — the Ukrainian army decided to ban access to Bakhmut for non-resident civilians. Andrzej and his team were left at a standstill. Claudia and Pavlo chose to return to Irpin. Andrzej and his then-partner Kristina, also a volunteer, decided to spend a few months in Poland. A break was needed, and the van required repairs. Since the start of my interview with Andrzej, the air raid alarm has already gone off twice. Unfazed, two young women take turns posing for pictures in the last rays of sunlight — engrossed in their impromptu photo session.
In the Shadow of a Church
During that stay in Poland, Kristina, then 31 and originally from Kyiv, heard about Road to Relief, a humanitarian organization based in Sloviansk that was looking for new volunteers to support its development. Despite his growing doubts about the relevance of supplying civilians — which was precisely Road to Relief’s raison d’etre — Andrzej agreed to give it a try. At that time, the front line had stabilized and evacuations had become rare. The organization, which was still growing at the time, was struggling to find goods to deliver and had not yet fully structured itself. For Andrzej, the experience proved disappointing.
So, after two months on site and a romantic breakup, he decided to return to life as an independent volunteer. Together with two young Ukrainian women he had met at Road to Relief, Yulia and Maria, he moved into the rectory of Sloviansk, then unoccupied and made available to the new team by the Bishop of Kharkiv. The place had been uninhabited for years and was rustic, lacking many basic amenities, but Andrzej, good with his hands, also had a sharp memory.
During a previous humanitarian delivery, he recalls, he had visited a village in the region where a destroyed house had caught his attention. Why? Because he had noticed “a washing machine and a water heater still hanging on the wall […]”. So, when the time came to move into the rectory, he says, “I went back to that house […] to take down the water heater — and it worked”; “marauder (‘plundering’)” he adds with a smile, using the French word now adopted into Ukrainian slang. Then, he goes on, “I fixed up the bathroom a bit, because the frost had broken a lot of stuff. And […] the three of us started living there.”
During that period, the trio mainly supplied aid to the military. Andrzej continued receiving support from Sylvia, Maria raised funds through social media, and a Ukrainian association based in Kramatorsk — Vsi Poroutch (‘All Together’) — asked the three to help sort and deliver medicine, food, water, and other essentials to various units.
The rectory had a large vegetable garden, and from time to time, their friends and family sent food parcels — or the team would return from family visits loaded with preserves, wine, or poultry from the family farm. This was invaluable psychological support. Summer passed, and Andrzej was informed that a priest would be coming to move in by September. Maria left to work in the UK. Andrzej and Yulia officially joined Vsi Poroutch. The director of the organization found them an apartment in Sloviansk — its owners, who had fled to western Ukraine, offered it for use.
A Year of Gloom
For Andrzej, what followed was a year marked by monotony. His experience with Vsi Poroutch, he notes, “was kind of a waste of time,” because by then, both abroad and in Ukraine, public interest in the war was waning. Donations were becoming scarce, and the days — spent in the association’s dimly lit and barely heated premises — were long. Meanwhile, the news from the front was not good. The Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2023 had bogged down; then, artillery shells began to run out, along with diesel fuel — some of which, they discovered, had been diluted with water. Andrzej’s van fell victim to this.
One evening in February 2024, a group of soldiers came by to stock up on food. With faces drawn from sleepless nights and the stress of brutal winter combat, these men — with their hardened hands and beards but no mustaches — looked like ghosts. One of the association’s volunteers had just received care packages prepared by Kharkiv schoolchildren for the soldiers. She rushed to hand them out. Laconic and grim-faced, the soldiers opened the packages with their pocketknives, taking care not to damage the children’s drawings. On one of the parcels, a small, clumsy hand had written a phone number. The soldier smiled and shared the news with his comrades, who laughed nervously before deciding to dial the number. A young boy’s voice answered. The soldier exchanged a few words with his young benefactor, thanked him, and hung up. Silence. No one met the gaze of others. Soldiers and volunteers, lost in thought, had tears in their eyes.
“Those guys,” Andrzej says, “pretty much all of them are dead now.” On the wall of the room where this took place are black-and-white photos of soldiers and volunteers killed in action. Among them, since November 2024, is the photo of Kristina. Having become a military medic, she was killed in a Russian bombing raid during one of her missions.
Love, Drones, and Resourcefulness
During that long year, Andrzej did not feel very useful and was living off his own savings. So in September 2024, when he was offered a paid position with the organization Frontline Medics, which specializes in medical assistance in war zones, he seized the opportunity without hesitation. He became the driver of a mobile clinic operating in Kharkiv Oblast and was also tasked with maintaining the organization’s vehicles. Despite the American volunteers’ unfortunate habit of damaging manual transmissions, unfamiliar to them, and the pay interruptions caused by Frontline Medics’ unstable funding, this is still the job he holds today.
When asked about his plans, Andrzej smiles: “Honestly, I’m not thinking about that at all. I don’t project myself: here’s a drone, [and] there’s a drone [that crashed],” he says, pointing to two buildings about 200 meters from the bench where he’s sitting. In such conditions, how can anyone plan anything? “But for sure, I’m going to stay in the war zone. Because [if] I go live in Kyiv, I’ll shoot myself in the head,” he adds, half-joking.
In any case, for Andrzej, now in a relationship with a woman called Natacha, a strong-willed florist who spends her free time weaving camouflage nets, there is no going back to his old life. “In France,” he explains, “I was commuting, working and sleeping. You start at 9 am and finish at 5 pm. But that work didn’t mean anything to me.” In Ukraine, on the other hand, “we manage to get by with nothing.” Ukrainians, he adds, “aren’t the kind of people who throw a fit over bullshit. That was actually my biggest problem in France. People who couldn’t make up their minds about the smallest things.” On the shelves in Andrzej’s living room, thank-you letters from military units and communities he has helped are neatly arranged next to empty machine gun casings and 155 mm artillery shells.
Antoine Laurent is a freelance journalist. A contributor to the Swiss bimonthly Echo Magazine, the Italian media Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa, and other publications on a more ad hoc basis (Le Courrier de Genève, Linkiesta, etc.).