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In a small town in eastern Ukraine, elderly culture workers assume prominent roles in the daily work of raising funds for the front. The success of these otherwise invisible older women can be traced to pre-war conditions of their work.
Every weekend, a few hours before sunrise, a group of military support activists, or “volunteers” as they are called here, meet at the Museum of Local Lore in N., a small town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. They load a car with aid packages gathered over the course of the week before departing for the frontline some 180 miles away. The buckets of dried food, drones, wet wipes, laptops, home-cooked meat pies, power banks, blood-stopping tourniquets, masking nets and medicines that they squeeze into the trunk come from various sources. Soldiers’ wives and partners send personal items; volunteers dispatch crowdsourced protective equipment, 3D-printed shell casings and drone parts; church choirs or municipal workers prepare dried goods and food parcels; kids make masking nets in local culture houses. Once packed, the volunteers hit the road, negotiating military checkpoints as they make their way through a list of Ukrainian army units dispersed along the slowly moving frontline in the neighbouring Donetsk region.
The town of N. is located on “the road to war,” a major highway busy with heavy military vehicles vans and SUVs taking soldiers and volunteers home or to the frontline. For the activists from N., these weekly trips are not without risks and surprises. Pre-planned sites of aid handover, usually a mere 10-30 km from forward lines, can get shelled or spied out by Russian drones. Soldiers might fail to turn up, unable to leave their positions. Previously safe locations can become inaccessible due to fighting in a matter of days or weeks.
“Look how beautiful they are. Seeing uniforms, for me, is celebratory.” Valentyna Mykhailivna, the informal head of the town’s activists, a stern woman in her sixties, hands me her phone, instructing me to play a video in a WhatsApp chat. It is late August 2024; she has just returned from another aid delivery trip. We sit at the Museum of Local Lore, which she has directed for decades. The short video shows a soldier who holds a Mavic drone, and thanks a certain Petro Melnyk for it. The gratitude speech feels scripted: the soldier introduces himself, says which unit he is from, names the gift he is holding, the donor, the volunteers who brought it, and closes with “Glory to Ukraine.” “Glory to the heroes!” respond in unison invisible others beyond the frame, among them Valentyna, who is filming the scene.
The WhatsApp chat, she explains, is her exchange with the donor, Petro Melnyk, whom she sent the video as proof of soldiers’ receipt of the drone. Over the course of the ten days I spent accompanying Valentyna and her fellow volunteers on my two visits to N., such videos often came up in conversations. As we drove on bumpy roads to pick up masking nets or 3D-printed casings for drone munitions, I watched dozens of them, revealing aid chains linking frontline troops to the people whom we were visiting. We listened to audio messages from soldiers requesting medicine or thermal imagers. When we learnt about the death of one of her long-term contacts, a young sniper, she opened her phone again, scrolling through these messages, visibly shaken. Messages like these are tokens of proximity and personal ties to the army, but they are also tools of accountability in the delicate web of relationships that link servicemen, volunteers, and donors.
Building on networks and know-how from the Maidan Revolution of 2013-4 and the subsequent war in Donbas, Ukrainian civilians mobilised en masse to support the war effort when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Online crowdfunding campaigns run by civilian volunteers and, increasingly, military units themselves, have been key to mobilising billions of dollars of aid from supporters all over the world. Such fundraisers rely on social media platforms, which attract public attention and donations through performative visibility. Activists and charities declare their funding goals, post their bank statements, scan purchase receipts, and document the final delivery of goods. This transparency, and the crowd-sourced accountability that it affords, are key for successful operation in the online marketplace often celebrated as the cornerstone of civic mobilisation in Ukraine.
Yet, if you were to search for Petro Melnyk online, you would likely miss the extent of his involvement in supporting the war effort. And despite their weekly trips and often-mentioned respect among locals and soldiers, tracking down the volunteers from N. in the digital realm otherwise full of crowdfunding activists competing for donors’ attention, could prove equally difficult.
As I accompanied Valentyna gathering the week’s supplies, I met volunteers in a local agrarian college who informally used the college premises to store aid and make dried food supplies for the front; a farmer who 3D-printed munition casings in his stables; elderly women selling meat pies for donations. These and other people I met insisted on operating under the radar, without registering as a charity. They took donations informally, either in kind or in cash, and they used soldiers’ accounts rather than their own. They relied on word of mouth, rather than digital presence, to maintain their regard among the local publics to whom they felt accountable.
Many said that lying low helped them avoid suspicions about profiteering. They mistrusted the (central) state and disliked the loud, performative visibility so prominent in online fundraising. Figures of corrupt elites, self-serving politicians and fraudulent volunteers often featured in their accounts, but seldom with names or concrete stories. In a broadly populist sentiment, they saw the war as a people’s war rather than a state’s war, where the state, rather than a chief redistributor and a provider of basic services, is imagined through metaphors of organised elite accumulation. Valentyna herself emphasised she used soldiers’ bank accounts rather than her own for fundraisers: “This is not about us; we only help make things happen.” In her vision, activists should become visible only at the beginning and end of an aid chain; otherwise, the less visible they are, the better. The reputation they cultivate should be upheld by donors and recipients, a highly specific public that is markedly different from generic online publics typically invoked by accounts of crowdfunding in Ukraine.
Valentyna’s phone rang hourly throughout the week. Soldiers called with requests; wives and partners got in touch to negotiate logistics. The mayor of N. sought her out to discuss a new commemorative space in the city. People dropped by every day, leaving items in the museum’s premises. A municipal worker came to plan a charity concert—and to hand over a small drone. A widow came to discuss donating personal items of her deceased husband to the museum’s collection. Valentyna’s status as a prominent culture worker in this provincial town was crucial for her capacity to raise donations; and vice versa.
Visitors mentioned just how long they had known Valentyna for, praised her stamina and trustworthiness, and stressed how little would have been achieved without her selfless help. When we visited Petro Melnyk, the drone donor in the video message, he was keen to stress the trust he placed in Valentyna. Walking around the headquarters of his estate, he showed us around a machine repair space where, with Valentyna’s mediation, soldiers would have their cars fixed for free, and civilian vehicles would be upgraded to fit military purposes. “I have known Valentina for decades,” Petro told me when we were about to depart. “Culture is important for me, so I have always done what I could.”
Before the war, Valentyna used to seek out business owners like Petro to solicit help with the expenses for running her precariously funded state museum. Their support helped her turn the museum into a vibrant local cultural hub despite meagre official budgets.
“I ask when I know I will not be refused,” Valentyna told me on several occasions, elaborating that asking with restraint, grace, and respecting the other’s right to refuse, she was always sure she could return the next time. She followed a tacit playbook of favours and requests. To cultivate these relationships, she explained, she had to credibly convey a lack of ulterior motives and follow the donors’ preferences in terms of publicity and accountability. Over the years, these patronage ties consolidated into trust-based, mutually beneficial alliances between her and local elites. Donors cultivated the image of caring, socially responsible patrons for whom “culture”—and not just personal enrichment—was important, while Valentyna could demonstrate her competence as a museum director, building up a robust cultural program of public and educational events, extending the circle of museum visitors, and building respect in the community.
The rhetoric of unconditional trust, reliance on long-term association, and friendship is in contrast with the effort people like Valentyna invest in accountability and transparency toward donors. Trust is fragile. “Some people are just crazy,” she says when I ask her how she manages to record each transaction given the dangerous conditions under which aid is delivered near the frontline. “Last time a woman had given a bucket of plov [a central Asian rice dish] and a shelling began as we got there [to the troops]. We had to leave fast. The woman accused us of eating all her food ourselves!”
Even after years of cooperation, donors might turn on volunteers if they suspect misconduct. Online fundraisers operating through dispersed networks seek to avoid this by remaining visible to the gaze of generic others. In contrast, Valentyna relies on being seen as a competent participant of long-cultivated relations with patrons: a specific, localised public. In maintaining these ties, concealment is as important as revelation.
In Ukraine’s war-time public sphere, middle-aged or elderly women in low-paid public sector jobs like museums and cultural houses are hardly ever visible. They are unlikely candidates for high-profile military volunteering that often gets the spotlight of Ukrainian and global media. Yet, war-time volunteers like Valentyna and her social circles are found across Ukraine’s provinces. Their activism and professional work connect distinct social strata in these settlements, forging ties and sometimes even solidarity. I have seen culture workers is small towns across the country assume similar roles in a context where communities scramble to mobilise resources, cater for the displaced, support loved ones in the army, and provide spaces for grief and commemoration.
There is an ambivalence in their position that might account for this. Financially precarious, they are also held in high public esteem. Skilled in navigating their communities from the church choir to local landowners, women who are not scrutinised if they are not on the front, female culture workers can open doors most cannot without coming under suspicion for seeking personal gains. Locally visible yet always on the margins in the broader Ukrainian society, they are safe to trust.
Valentyna’s father had been a forced labourer in Germany during WWII, and a while ago the family received compensation from the German state. She used it to buy a two-bedroom apartment in N., which she promptly gave rent-free to a family displaced from the Donbas. She hosts her daughter and granddaughter, displaced from Kharkiv, in her own tiny apartment. When I ask why she chose not to move into the new flat, she said after the war she might. Until then, she cannot afford the suspicions that she might have gained from the war, or else she would lose her donors’ trust.
Taras Fedirko and Whitney Russell are section contributing editors for the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
This work is supported by ERC grant (MEMPOP, 101076092) funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.