Volunteers risk their lives to provide aid to Ukrainians trapped on the frontlines

Read the Full Transcript

• Amna Nawaz:

  As the war in Ukraine has shifted east, so too have the efforts to aid millions of civilians still stuck between warring armies with nowhere to hide.

  They lack the very basics. But some of their fellow Ukrainians are risking everything to help them, homegrown heroes delivering food, formula, and sometimes a ride out of the war zone.

  Special correspondent Willem Marx and videographer Ed Kiernan traveled the fraught lifelines in Eastern Ukraine.

• Willem Marx:

  The grocery stores in Dnipro, just two hours from the front line, remain full of food.

  And Karina Bakholdina may well be their best customer. Every day, she fills carts with baby formula, diapers, and yogurt, yet not for her own family, for total strangers, on this Monday, the bill around $750, just a fraction of what this real estate developer spent in the past two months, working with other local volunteers to load up vans and cars with crucial supplies, the start of a long, difficult and complex journey.

• Karina Bakholdina, Ukraine TrustChain (through translator):

  This is done by a large number of people who got word that help is needed. This is not done by one person. This is done by a huge team.

• Willem Marx:

  Among them, Kyrylo Chemizov, a former furniture maker, driving north the next morning toward the city of Kharkiv.

• Kyrylo Chemizov, Volunteer (through translator):

  Dangerous, very, very dangerous.

• Willem Marx:

  With a brief pit stop to put on his protective equipment, a courageous courier on the road to front line fighting some 40 hours each week, today, in a city center, where many stores are shuttered or shot up, delivering a payload that earns him no pay. It is transferred once more, before coming to a stop inside this shed.

  So the products that we saw being purchased in Dnipro are now being sorted for families in a small village on the outskirts of Kharkiv called Buda, where 600 refugees are in desperate need of these supplies.

  Back in Kharkiv, a more precious cargo picked up for the journey home, including Liubov, aged 73, and 76-year-old Aksiniya. For the past month, they have been sleeping rough in a city metro station.

• Aksiniya Migunova, Kharkiv Resident (through translator):

  Our house essentially was ruined.

• Willem Marx:

  Liubov's younger son died recently revisiting his abandoned apartment. She's been told she can bury him one day after the war.

• Liubov Haponenko, Kharkiv Resident (through translator):

  They cremated him. Nobody was allowed in the cemetery because of the shelling that started everywhere. His brother left his urn in the garage.

• Willem Marx:

  As shells kept falling on the city's outskirts, a handful more hitched a ride to relative safety in Dnipro, where Karina established a refugee shelter earlier this month in just two days.

• Karina Bakholdina (through translator):

  They don't want to leave their homes. They are afraid they will not return. They fear their apartment will be looted. They are very afraid of this.

• Willem Marx:

  Toddlers, tweens, worried women calling friends and family watching news of the war.

• Karina Bakholdina (through translator):

  they only start feeling better when they have some warm food, some tea. They all are scared, and they all want to go home.

• Willem Marx:

  This converted office block now houses almost 200 hundred, Ukrainians helping Ukrainians. But there's only so much one person can do. And, burning through funds, Karina needed cash to continue. It came from Chicago and Daniil Cherkasskiy.

• Daniil Cherkasskiy, Founder, Ukraine TrustChain:

  When you meet Karina, you — I don't think you have any doubts about supporting her and seeing the work that she does so selflessly.

• Willem Marx:

  He founded a group, Ukraine TrustChain, that's deployed more than half-a-million dollars, he told us, thanks to thousands of donors.

• Daniil Cherkasskiy:

  I think people that are generous and have resources have responsibility to help Ukrainians right now.

  Governments direct help in a very specific way. And I think it's important for private citizens to use their networks to find the vacuum and the gaps where help is needed.

• Willem Marx:

  Baby Sasha seems to need no help sleeping, but his mother does feeding him. And Karina has stepped in.

• Karina Bakholdina (through translator):

  This is the most excruciating. This is the most difficult, because you talk to every person. You talk to every one of them, and each person has their own story.

• Willem Marx:

  And, Amna, Karina has told us that each one of those stories has been difficult for her to hear.

  Just yesterday, she welcomed another dozen people into her shelter, all of them no doubt with tales to tell of shattered homes and destroyed lives in the towns to the north, east and south of this city, Dnipro, currently darkened by a nighttime curfew.

  And don't forget the estimated 7.7 million more of these difficult stories currently displaced right across this country, with around five million now outside Ukraine's borders too — Amna.

• Amna Nawaz:

  That is Willem Marx reporting in Dnipro.

  Thank you, Willem.

  And the "NewsHour"'s coverage of the war in Ukraine is supported in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Improved audio player available on our mobile page