In the first half of December 2024, Pierre Raiman, co-founder of the association For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours1, and Svetlana Murer, from the association Kalyna2, transported to Ukraine the proceeds of a collection from several hundred members and supporters: a vehicle to be converted into an ambulance, as well as dozens of electricity generators, EcoFlow batteries, and medical equipment. They crossed the country from Lviv to Kharkiv via Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Poltava, and Izium to make deliveries at some thirty hospitals and frontline units.
Pierre Raiman recounts the fighters, the wounded, the foreign volunteers, and the civilians who keep life going despite the bombs: fleeting but radiant encounters.
Prologue
At the end of a dead-end street in a still-sleeping Lviv, a fighter from a famous and formidable unmanned attack aviation brigade was waiting for us. Under the light of a streetlamp, we exchanged three generators and an EcoFlow—these energy machines that have become survival machines—for an autograph on a blue and yellow flag. It was a brief encounter: Ivan was heading back to a destination he couldn’t name, and we had an appointment 250 miles further east that afternoon. It was a quick transaction, punctuated by a smile and a handshake.
What struck me, what I will never forget, was the humanity intact in his face after four years of fighting—the face of a man who is perhaps an attentive father, a reliable friend, a technician, or a passionate teacher, and who had no reason to become a volunteer in this unit that held off the Russian army for 110 days in Bakhmut in the spring of 2023. Ivan was no superman—that was precisely what made him admirable.
Ukraine must be earned
But let’s go back to the beginning of our journey. After thirty hours on the road and six hours of waiting, the Polish customs officials in Medyka sent us back, saying, “Return to Poland!” on the pretext of missing forms.
The next day, with all the documents and a priority humanitarian vehicle certificate, we opted for another checkpoint 100 kilometers away. A customs officer tried to make us pay a fine, repeating “Strafe! Strafe!”3, but Svetlana, the head of our mission, didn’t blink, and he gave in. Then comes the weigh-in, and we are found to be 260 kg overweight. But this customs officer is accommodating and invites me to back up, take a running start, and drive over the scale as fast as possible, stopping before the barrier. We don’t know what the weight is, but we’ve made it through, Ukraine is 10 meters away, and we’re super excited. With a nice gesture, the last customs officer invites Svetlana to lift the barrier herself. On the other side, the Ukrainians are totally different, and a customs officer hugs Svetlana, telling her that her husband is on the front lines in Kherson.
It’s hard to express how happy we were as we drove through the night towards Lviv.
Our mission extended to Izioum, in the northeast: a string of appointments to reach around thirty recipients, units, and hospitals. This meeting in Lviv was only the first step. On the road, while I drive, Svetlana constantly plans and reorganizes appointments, meticulously keeping evidence of each delivery.
Solomon the Wise
In Margarita’s house in Zhytomyr, a man enters without ceremony. A few words in Ukrainian, then he comes up to me: “Hi! I am Solomon, it’s my call sign.”
A warrior bearing the name of the wise king. I am intrigued.
“Why Solomon,” I ask.
“Because my comrades think I’m wise.”
Wisdom. The word resonates strangely. That of the Special Operations Forces is not contemplative—it is tactical, embodied, silent. But did Solomon also carry something else: the Jewish memory of Ukraine, that of nearby Berdychiv, the town of Vasily Grossman’s mother4, exterminated in 1941? “
No, I am not from Berdychiv. I am a native of Donbas, raised speaking Russian. I had a good life down under, in Australia. But I had to come and fight.”
Russian-speaking Donbas, exile in Australia, returning to defend what Moscow claimed to be protecting in his name. Solomon reveals the lie of the Russian narrative: these Russian-speaking Ukrainians who are supposedly being ’liberated’ and who have taken up arms against their supposed saviors.
After the meal, sitting side by side, I ask him about the new Ukrainian weapons, underwater drones and long-range aerial drones. He smiles enigmatically, but cannot give any details and simply says:
”They are like modern V15, but for a just cause.”
Ukrainian ingenuity is turning the tide in the fight against totalitarianism. For Solomon, victory is also being played out in the burning Russian refineries and the sunken ghost fleet.
Then he pauses.
“You know, we can win. But our losses are heavy.”
That sentence is terrible. Just this sober observation: yes, victory is possible, but it comes at the price of blood. This lucidity is rarely heard in Europe. Solomon knows the cost of every kilometer defended and that Ukraine’s new weapons are forged in absolute urgency. And his words were a mirror held up to our inadequacy.
“Our losses are heavy.” The sentence kept coming back, containing what the West refuses to hear: that victory requires a sacrifice that we have never had to make since 1945. That every day we withhold our aid is paid for in Ukrainian lives. Solomon was talking about the arithmetic of war, and in that arithmetic, a debt was mounting. They fight, we debate. They lose men, we waste time.
At one point, he pauses. He, the Russian speaker from Donbas, asks me a question that seems to puzzle him just as much: “
How do you explain the silence of Russians? Fear of the FSB cannot be the only answer.”
The silence of the Russians. Not that of the propagandists—that of the others, those who are not participating in the war, who do not openly support Putin, but who do not take the risk of opposing him. A heavy, bloody silence.
How can we not think of the silence of the Germans under the Third Reich? Karl Jaspers emphasized that all citizens of a state are accountable for the regime they have tolerated, and bear a moral responsibility that each individual must face up to6.
Silence falls once more. Millions of silent Russians are financing with their taxes the missiles that will kill tomorrow. I don’t mention Jaspers to Solomon. But by asking this question, he is already engaged in this reflection.
Kyiv, a capital at war
On the surface, Kyiv seems to be bustling like any other capital city. But appearances can be deceiving. Electricity is only available for two three-hour periods per day. Bombings are frequent: the day before we arrived, there were five alerts and a residential building was hit.
We are staying with Valera and his wife Svetlana, high up in a tower block. Svetlana makes amazing little orthopedic cushions for the wounded, embroidered so that each one is unique. We will distribute them at the hospital in Poltava. Valera, a bank executive, becomes our driver in Kyiv, a huge city the size of Greater Paris, and takes us to Oleksiy, who welcomes us into his office-workshop.
There, with four other geeky-looking guys, he invents new drones and, above all, an amazing long-range detector that locates and classifies enemy drones. The army has already placed an order for them. We tell ourselves, our eyes shining, that we need a thousand of them as soon as possible, ten thousand quickly. In the meantime, our EcoFlows are welcome, and Oleksiy offers us two jars of honey from his father, a beekeeper in Soumy. Oleksiy embodies the inventive and generous Ukraine that is saving the country through ingenuity as much as through weapons.
At the Nova Pochta depot—along with the railways, it is another institution that keeps the country connected during wartime. As soon as Svetlana announces our shipments for the front, everything speeds up: counter, trolley, pallets. The generators will leave within the hour. The next day, Kherson sends back a photo of a soldier beaming in front of his “gift.” So in the capital, too often described as disconnected from the front, many people also live for the army.
At the end of the afternoon, six hundred meters away, a vehicle explodes. One dead, one wounded. Two Ukrainians bribed by Moscow are believed to be behind it. Ukrainians also strike in Moscow, but not like this: their targets are legitimate—generals, torturers. That is the difference between terrorism and resistance.
Light, love, and solidarity
Svetlana and I were talking outside Viktoria’s little house when a cheerful voice cried out, “Ah, what a rare pleasure to hear French spoken here!”
There she is. Tatou Ania, already a legend, accompanied by two Ukrainian companions, lights up the evening in Poltava. Blonde and beaming, she arrives after hours of driving to pick up two EcoFlows.
“I’m the only Belgian woman with one leg on the entire front,” she says with a self-deprecating humor that disarms any misplaced pity. She left Belgium, joined the 37th Brigade and, despite her disability, now flies drones.
She signs our flag with a motto: “Light, love and solidarity.” Are these words naive in a war of such brutality? No, because Tatou Ania proves that you can fight without losing your humanity.
The light, I think to myself, is the one she carries everywhere with her, refusing to let war extinguish what makes life worth living. Her love is not facile sentimentality—it is a deep attachment to a country that is not her own, to its men and women, whom she defends at the risk of her own life. The solidarity she invokes should be the motto of all those who understand that this war concerns us all, that the freedom of Europe is being defended here.
In Vika’s house, Tatou Ania radiates as we hold the autographed flag together. The debt I mentioned has another side to it: the foreign nationals who have chosen Ukraine remind us that there are causes worth sacrificing one’s comfort, safety, and sometimes one’s life for. That Europe is being built here—where a one-legged Belgian woman comes to get batteries to destroy Russian drones—as much as it is at summits in Brussels.
Tatou Ania leaves again in the night. Light, love, and solidarity—the keys to victory.
The Poltava Hospital
We deliver 40 packages of equipment and several generators to the military hospital in Poltava. Svetlana insists that I should join her when she visits the wounded. “Don’t leave this reality out of the picture,” she urges me. This is where those who have passed through the stabilization points arrive7, those who have survived.
The rooms are large and clean, with four or five beds per room. The wounded come from all the battles of the year: Pokrovsk, Kupiansk, other places whose names mean nothing to Europeans but which are nevertheless hellish. Their injuries are severe: open legs, stomach wounds, amputated arms. Most of them choose from Svetlana’s small cushions from Kyiv, feeling them at length—as if this simple gesture gave them back a little control over a world that had slipped away from them.
A young blond man named Artem, with a sad look in his eyes, confides: taken prisoner at the beginning of the war, he was released in 2024 and returned to the front. He was wounded in Kupiansk and had his forearm amputated. I say nothing. Saying ‘thank you’ would be derisory and ‘take heart’ patronizing. Svetlana speaks for both of us.
In another room, two wounded soldiers are in remission. The third, Bohdan, seems to be in much worse shape. He doesn’t want to talk and is curled up in a ball. That’s when Svetlana does something I will never forget: she approaches him, takes him in her arms, and speaks to him softly. Little by little, Bohdan’s features relax. Now he is the one holding Svetlana’s arm. He asks her to read his service record: 2022, 2023, 2024, up to Pokrovsk 2025. Years etched into his torn body.
I didn’t know what to say to the wounded as Svetlana introduced me as “a historian with a PhD from France.” I beg to differ.
“You know, Svetlana, a historian with a PhD, it doesn’t matter.”
She disagrees. “It does matter to them.”
Why? So that tomorrow, Ukrainian historians will record their names, their wounds, their sacrifices. Tomorrow. So that we don’t forget the wounded of Ukraine, so that Russia pays for their rehabilitation.
We have to leave too quickly, but these faces will stay with me: Artem and his missing forearm. Bohdan in Svetlana’s arms.
Yuri and the names
The colossus of the detachment Odin, the Norse god of war and wisdom, wears his two wounds like others wear medals they never show. Broad-shouldered, with a short salt-and-pepper beard, he commands respect. His voice is deep and raspy; Yuri smokes a lot. One of his wounds, sustained in Bakhmut, nearly killed him—a bullet near his heart. After receiving treatment, he returned to the front. The second, to his hip, forces him to walk with a crutch. Since then, he has been in charge of logistics and of keeping alive the memory of his separate detachment, Odin, a group of volunteers that was formed to defend Poltava and oppose the Russian breakthrough in 2022, of which only a few survivors remain today.
In another life, Yuri could have been an actor. But history decided otherwise. “Look,” he says, pointing to the new plaque. “Odin Assault Detachment Street,” where once there was a Russian name. Like all streets with Russian names, this one has been renamed. But Yuri insisted that the new name should not be impersonal, but dedicated to his comrades.
This is an essential act: Russian negationism begins here, in this desire to erase language, places, and memories. Renaming is not an act of revenge—it is ontological resistance. It is saying: we are. We name our world.
In a simple gesture, Yuri rips the insignia off his uniform and hands it to me. The round, black patch with Odin’s winged helmet. This badge must be earned—through fire, through Bakhmut, through Lyman, through Avdiivka. Moved, I accept it with humility.
Our truck broke down as we were leaving Poltava for Kharkiv, where we were to hand it over to Andriy, a doctor with the 9th Brigade, to be converted into an ambulance. It will be repaired overnight by the unbeatable Ukrainian mechanics. But Andriy came specially from Kharkiv to drive us without delay.
When he got out of the car, Yuri and he stopped, recognized each other, and embraced. They fought in the same unit in 2022 and had not seen each other since. It was an emotional moment as Yuri, leaning on his crutch, and Andriy, the doctor, exchanged a few words. I understand what is happening: the brotherhood of those who stood together and did not know if they would ever see each other again.
A broken-down vehicle and French volunteers: that’s what it took. A coincidence? But what is a coincidence, really? Pure chance, or the way war weaves bonds that can never be broken?
Later, we walk down Poltava’s Alley of Heroes. Hundreds of faces look down on us—soldiers who have fallen since February 2022, and in some cases since 2014. The alley has transformed what was once a simple promenade. Now, portraits line the walkway at eye level. The rows stretch far, far too far.
It is the exact mirror image of the renamed street. There, erasing the names of the occupiers. Here, engraving the names of those who fell. Two sides of the same fight for memory against the great Russian silence and its totalitarian uniformity.
Yuri and Andriy walk, search, and quickly find their friends frozen in their uniforms. Yuri stops in front of several graves, whispering their first names.
In front of one of the portraits, he pauses for longer. Then he lights a cigarette, takes a drag or two, and stubs it out on the small grille.
He tells Svetlana: ”We always shared our cigarettes. So he’s still enjoying them.”
What might seem theatrical is not. The bond between the living and the dead that makes up a nation will remain deep in Ukraine for a long time to come—carried by memory and the earth where they rest. Among the portraits, I notice two women. One in civilian clothes and bright red lipstick smiles at us. She too fought. She too fell.
When we leave Yuri, we hug him and invite him to France after victory.
On the road, Svetlana often says to me: “Look to the right, at the soldier’s gait—under his uniform, he has a prosthesis, and so does the one on the left.” I can’t.
“But Svetlana, I’m driving.” She is unfazed.
“Well then, davaï8, follow the truck in front,” she continues in her mix of languages.
Following Tanchik
Twenty minutes earlier, Tanchik, a seasoned fighter from the 3rd Assault Brigade, asked me, “Do you want to come with me?” He had arrived at the wheel of his pickup truck, which was equipped with drone jammers. He lives up to his name, Little Tank: stocky and bearded, he exudes a quiet strength. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Izium, a martyred city southeast of Kharkiv. We were moved as we reached the outskirts of the city, liberated in September 2022 after five months of occupation. The Russian rout revealed a mass grave containing hundreds of bodies: soldiers, civilians, and children, some of whom had been tortured and castrated.
We set off on a road protected by anti-drone nets, then Tanchik left it for an unlit road. With his rifle next to the steering wheel, he warned: “Keep one hand on the door handle. If I shout ‘Go’, get out and run.”
We drove through a completely destroyed village. ”Only two old women live here.” Then he gets out. “Now we’ll walk.”
He runs through the night. The torch on his rifle points toward the ground, lighting his way. We struggle to follow him through the tall grass, somewhere “15km to zero.” Running behind him, I understand how much the resistance depends on men like Tanchik, whom we follow because they inspire such confidence.
We arrive in front of a deserted housing estate, bombed in 2022. Then, further on, a gutted church, riddled with bullets.
“Here we fought for six weeks to retake the church.”
Inside, there is a certain solemnity despite the devastation. A few small paintings on the walls, some intact, others in pieces. And then, larger, a reproduction of Abraham’s Hospitality—a prefiguration of the Trinity in the Orthodox tradition—which, sadly torn apart, bore the marks of the cultural war: what Moscow cannot appropriate, it destroys.
In the night on the front line, only a few 20 mm caliber shots against a Shahed break the silence. We have to leave. Svetlana takes down the surviving small paintings to evacuate them. It is not a naive gesture, just the obvious fact that even here, 15 km from the front line, culture must not be abandoned.
On the way back, Tanchik blurts out:
“When I joined the army in 2014, there were thirteen of us. Today, there are only two of us left.”
The sentence goes down like a stone. Eleven companions gone. The debt grows even deeper.
In the speeding pickup truck, I feel physically that this war will be won or lost by men like him—tenacious, sober, carrying their dead like a burden they never lay down.
Kharkiv in the dark
Of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, I saw only the night and a long series of air raid alerts.
Andriy drives us to our last meeting with Paul Israël, a young French national who founded the Dignitas association in Kharkiv, which runs mobile care stations for wounded children and practices hippotherapy.
Our meeting is at a gas station that is still lit. The young Frenchman arrived in 2022. “My Catholic faith made me take action.” Before that, he was writing a PhD thesis in Strasbourg on religion and totalitarianism. I am intrigued by his choice of topic. I ask him if he has finished it. “
No, it’s on hold. Perhaps you know my supervisor, Gérard Bensussan.” I exclaim, “I do. He’s one of the founders of our association!”
A second coincidence? Or rather, the continuity between thought and action that connects us all. We parted ways after sending a selfie to Gérard Bensussan.
It was late in the evening. We had to get to the station for the 11:50 p.m. train. But the alerts continued and the city was completely dark. The streets are empty and the GPS is turned off so that Russian drones cannot use it. We have no idea which direction to go.
A car passes by, a rare occurrence. Andriy stops it with the authority of his uniform. The driver, Angelika, offers to show us around Kharkiv. And so begins, in the night, the most original of tours.
A recent chemistry graduate, she takes us to her faculty building, which has been targeted and completely destroyed. Then to the Kharkiv Opera House. “It’s closed, impossible to secure. But there’s a room in the basement where performances continue.” Finally, the monument to the children of Kharkiv who were killed, where hundreds of small teddy bears have been left. “In memory of these little angels who will never grow up,” says Svetlana.
We talk in the darkness. After thanking her, I return the compliment: we are the ones thanking Ukraine for defending Europe. Angelika corrects me:
“More than Europe—democratic civilization.”
Angelika has given us a glimpse of HER city, three places in the night that say it all: destruction, resistance, and memory. She embodies the attachment I have felt growing since the beginning of the trip. Not an abstract feeling of solidarity for “Ukraine” but something more intimate.
The station seems empty. Will the train run? Yes. We are the last passengers on the 11:50 p.m. train, which soon leaves Kharkiv.
Return to Kyiv
Ukrainian trains are beautiful, clean, and comfortable, but I didn’t sleep. My head was filled with all the meetings of the last few days and the need for us in France to do more to help these men and women. The terrible bombing of Odesa9 the previous day, the total blackout—unbearable. Worse still, the lack of a French response to the request for protection of Ukrainian airspace. Hadn’t Macron said a year earlier: “In the coming year, I’m going to have to send guys to Odesa10”? I am at a loss for words.
We arrive in Kyiv, beautiful and white under the snow. In the two days that remain, despite my desire not to be a tourist, there is no question of refusing the visit offered to me by Valera and Svetlana. Snow-covered Hagia Sophia and Maidan: two magical and meaningful moments.
Hagia Sophia was built when Moscow did not yet exist. Anne of Kyiv prayed there. Now Russia claims to call her “Anne of Russia”—yet another Orwellian lie that denies Kyiv’s Ukrainian identity and retroactively projects the modern Russian state onto a past in which it did not exist in order to legitimize its territorial claims.
The day before, Jews celebrating Hanukkah were slaughtered in an antisemitic terror attack on Bondi Beach in Australia. But on Maidan Square, this place of history and freedom a few miles from the bloody ravines of Babi Yar, stood a huge Menorah. “The tallest in Europe,” Valera proudly told me. On the Menorah is written: “A little light dispels much darkness.” A phrase that applies to Putin’s lies.
I left the next day, happy that the mission had been accomplished, but also sad. I return a changed man. This trip has not altered my convictions, but it has embodied them. To Svetlana, with her sunny disposition and unyielding determination: friendship, affection, and admiration.
As the train approached the border under the setting sun, I realized how much Ukraine had touched me. For a long time to come.
Nota bene: To continue providing hospitals and frontline units with humanitarian supplies, you can make a donation (tax deductible).
The author has a PhD in History. He specializes in totalitarianism and is a co-founder of French association Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre ! (For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!)
Footnotes
- The association Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre (For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours), set up in 2022, is one of the main organizations supporting Ukraine in France. Read the interview with Galia Ackerman and the founders of the association.
- The association Kalyna, set up in 2014, regularly sends out charity parcels and equipment to frontline units.
- From the German “Geldstrafe”: fine, penalty.
- Vassili Grossman, Life and Fate, Editions L’Âge d’Homme, Paris, 1980
- The German V1 Vergeltungswaffe (“weapons of vengeance”) was the first cruise missile in the history of aeronautics. It was used by Nazi Germany against the United Kingdom, then Belgium from June 1944 to March 1945.
- Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (“German Guilt”), Lambert Schneider, 1946.
- Temporary facilities where emergency care is provided to Ukrainian soldiers wounded on the front line a few kilometers away.
- “Go!” in Russian
- “Odesa endures 5-day blackout after Russian strikes.” Valeriia Samsonova, The Kyiv Independent, 12/17/2025
- “War in Ukraine: the metamorphosis of Emmanuel Macron.” Le Monde, 03/14/2024