A middle-aged woman in a colorful dress with an elegant hairdo approaches with a warm smile. She introduces herself as a journalist, a member of a choir and lecturer in Christian universities.
But Olena Mokrenchuk skips the bravest thing she does at the moment: navigating hundreds of kilometers of war zone to take supplies to soldiers at the front lines.
As a coordinator of Maidan Press Center and volunteer of charity organization called Soldier’s Post, Morkenchuk has not had a single day off in the past six months. One of her first war volunteering experiences was in Crimea, when the first military base in Feodosiya was captured.
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
“Our job was to buy sleeping mats and food because our army had nothing, and also they needed psychological support,” she recalls. “It was then when we first saw that it was an invasion, not separatism.”
This first encounter took place in the end of February, before the March 16 illegal referendum, followed by annexation of Crimea by Russia.
Then the war zone moved over to the east of the country as the government’s Anti-Terrorist Operation kicked off in April. Volunteers like Mokrenchuk realized that the soldiers were sent under fire with no equipment and lacking even the most basic everyday things like socks. They started fundraising and buying sleeping bags, tents, helmets and the like, realizing that combat will keep on for a long time.
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
At the beginning, Mokrenchuk and her team of volunteers provided aid to soldiers in cities like Mariupol and Volnovakha, but eventually they started venturing out to distant border points like Izvaryne in Luhansk Oblast.
By now, her volunteers took patronage over 20 different units in the east of Ukraine, including a check point just two kilometers away from Russia, and some of the requests volunteers get from the tough commanders of units and battalions are quite amazing.
“Once some commandos asked me for 20 liters of milk, another time I had to buy sweets or tranquilizers. We don’t ask them questions why, we just buy it if soldiers need it,” she says. There is no greed on the frotnlines, she says. Everyone shares around what they’ve got. If volunteers bring extra pairs of binoculars, for example, soldiers share them with other units nearby.
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
“It’s unbelievable how people can unite and become one family in such severe circumstances. If someone cries or is hit with hysteria, the others try to calm him down,” Mokrenchuk says. Sometimes it saves them lives. “When the 24th brigade was trying to break out of the encirclement (Donetsk Oblast, in early Aug.), 23 people had to escape in a single APC, thrice the standard. But they managed to come out alive because of coordinated action.”
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
She has dozens of stories to tell. Once she had to deliver binoculars to Izvaryne check points, deep into the territory controlled by terrorists. “I could make it to Sverdlovsk by public transport, but I still had to walk trough occupied lands to the Ukrainian checkpoints. (I carried) a bullet-vest, two night lamps, one set of binoculars and a photo camera in my beach bag. One family asked me to take a parcel. I didn’t expect the bags to be so heavy… And realized I got into trouble,” she recalls.
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
Eventually, Mokrenchuk was abel to take a taxi, but the driver turned out of be a separatist sympathizer, and he refused to go all the way, leaving her in the middle of a field, next to a coal mine at night more than 10 kilometers away. As soon as she was out of the car, 15 armed militants arrived, pointing their automatic rifles at her for the next 40 minutes.
Fortunately, they stayed at some distance and she called the soldiers and stayed connected. For some reason, they allowed her to pass. “The main thing I was thinking at that moment was all the equipment for my soldiers. I couldn’t allow the enemy to take the outfit Ukrainian defenders were waiting for,” she says.
Facebook/Елена Мокренчук
Sidebar:
Soldiers’ Post accepts donations through its Privatbank account: 5584 2422 1104 3220 (optional – 6762 4667 2575).
Transfers accepted from all payment systems from abroad and from Ukraine to ELENA MOKRENCHUK, KIEV. Contacts: +380506206397, +380970416460.
Kyiv Post staff writer Iryna Matviyishyn can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @Matviishyn.
