It would seem that, during war, the flight of a new military drone to inspect the border is nothing out of the ordinary. But not this one. Last week, the first people’s drone, an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft crowd-funded by Ukrainians and assembled by volunteer information technology specialists, went on a mission in Donetsk Oblast.
David Arakhamia, head of an IT company in Kyiv, said the drone cost $35,000, and the money was donated to a bank account advertised on the website www.narodniy.org.ua.
“We wanted to buy a ready-made drone, but in Israel it costs $165,000 and in the U.S. $120,000,” Arakhamia said. To save money, a group of activists found someone to make a frame and then ordered the Zhytomyr Military Institute to fill it up with all the necessary equipment.
“We acquired such a cheap drone because people who were constructing it did their work for free as volunteers,” Arakhamia explains.
The Ukrainian army has shrunk by 10 times — to only 90,000 servicemen — since 1991, when the country gained its independence. The fighting force that remained was in poor shape and poorly equipped, which has become painfully visible during Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent Kremlin support for the separatist war in Ukraine’s troubled east.
The problem pushed thousands of Ukrainians to kick-start hundreds of groups and initiatives to collect money, buy and deliver ammunition, cash and food for the army. People have trained themselves to select the best protective helmets and bullet-proof vests and adopted military units to supply them with night vision devices. Accounts of this type of volunteer activities have become common in social networks.
Hryhory Perepelytsia, a military expert and professor of Taras Shevchenko University, said that Ukraine had inherited massive military stockpiles from the Soviet Union. “The reserves were enough to supply an army of 5 million people. But for the last 20 years, they all have been sold out or simply stolen,” he said.
For years Ukrainians did not realize how dire the state of the army was – until they started to see their army in action. Arakhamia said he created his group of volunteers after traveling to Chonhar, a village on the border between the Crimean peninsula and Kherson Oblast, to visit paratroopers from his home city of Mykolayiv.
Instead of commando-style militants he expected to see, there were men in torn bullet-proof vests and shabby camouflage uniforms. Hence, he decided to buy new outfits for them. He and other volunteers managed to collect more than Hr 1 million in less than a month to equip 287 paratroopers, calling this project the First People’s Battalion.
Arakhamia’s group now includes nine people. “One of our guys is a former paratrooper, so he knows military equipment well. He negotiates with dealers, chooses outfits. Other volunteers maintain the website (and) promote (it in) social networks. I haven’t actually seen four other people working with us,” Arakhamia said.
The group has also collected equipment for a dozen snipers as part of the project called the First People’s Sniper and also for another group of paratroopers, The Second People’s Battalion.
Arakhamia is responsible for updating the figures for money donated and spent in the group’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Donations vary from Hr 20 to Hr 50,000. “During two months of work, we have already collected Hr 2.5 million,” Arakhamia says.
But the most important part of their activity for this group is finding money to build new drones, which are efficient for patrolling the border and spying on separatists. The group plans to construct 20 drones in cooperation with the Kyiv Polytechnic University after they collect enough money.
Ukrainians donated Hr 134 million to the accounts of the Defense Ministry for support of the army by July 1, according to the ministry’s data. Of them, Hr 32 million came through sms messages, also a public initiative project. More than Hr 2 million was donated from Ukrainians abroad in hard currency.
Military expert Perepelytsia believes that it is primarily thanks to people’s help that the soldiers are still able to perform their duties in the east.
Former journalist Diana Makarova spoke with the Kyiv Post on the day after volunteers of her group called Diana Makarova’s Foundation sent two carloads of supplies to Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Sloviansk, one of the hottest zones. They donated everything “from pants to night vision devices,” she said.
Her group started their activity during the EuroMaidan Revolution that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych. They sewed bulletproof vests for protesters, for which they were called the “Sewing Hundred.” The vests were hard to find or too expensive, so the women bought the necessary material and designed them.
“We made about 1,500 bullet proof vests then,” Makarova said. “But they provided only second-level protection, OK for Maidan but not (strong) enough for the ongoing military campaign on the east,” Makarova said.
So for the moment Makarova’s team is searching for tougher steel to produce the vests of higher, fourth-level protection. “One of our bulletproof vests costs some Hr 500-700. These vests are not as expensive as many believe. Many people just sell them for a large profit now regardless of war,” she said.
This week, Oxana Chorna, a researcher from Kyiv, is going to drive hundreds of kilometers to Donbas in her car, loaded with medication, uniforms, tents and food. It will be her third trip to the army unit, where her friend, who abandoned his business to become a volunteer, serves. The first time she bought everything out of her pocket; now she has raised Hr 6,000 via Facebook.
Despite the danger, Chorna travels to Donbas not only to bring goods but also to provide soldiers with moral support: “I came, so they see people they need to protect, people who care about them and for whom they will fight.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
