No longer ad hoc, but organized as Soul of Kharkiv, the effort Roxana Pavlenko leads has grown into a network feeding thousands across the city and beyond. It runs on routine and on calls: rapid responses to impact sites, where tea and food are handed out to those emerging from basements and rubble. In those first moments, what they provide is not only nourishment, but something that still resembles home.
A few kilometers outside the city center of Kharkiv, an inconspicuous door set into a small annex at the edge of a large parking lot opens. In the wall beside it, shrapnel scars mark the concrete – small, dark impacts, easy to miss if you don’t look closely.
More than a kitchen
Inside, the space resists clear boundaries. Kitchen equipment stands alongside stacks of food supplies: bulk packages of pasta and rice, nets of mandarins, bundles of bread and toast, jars of garlic mayonnaise, powdered broth, boxes piled on top of one another. Large industrial pots stand along the back wall, gas canisters one side. Flags and certificates hang in between, marking something that is not quite a workplace, but not something else either.
Further in, the room stretches into a long working line. Rows of foam meal trays are laid out across tables, ready to be filled. Hands move constantly – scooping, sealing, stacking. From here, food leaves in all directions: toward shelters, damaged districts, places where people are waiting.
This is where Dusha Kharkiv (Soul of Kharkiv) operates.
It is not a restaurant, not a charity in the conventional sense, and not a temporary project either. It is a working kitchen that has become part of the city’s infrastructure – a place where meals are produced, organized, and sent out across Kharkiv and beyond, wherever they are needed most.
1,440 portions before noon
Roxana emerges from the kitchen, moving quickly, already mid-task.
Measured in her movements, fully focused, she speaks while working rather than pausing for conversation. Around her, the rhythm continues uninterrupted.
Together with her business partner Maxim – a trained cook and confectioner she has worked with for years – Roxana runs this effort. What began as an improvised response in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion has since taken on a more permanent form.
“We start at six,” the 47-year-old explains, without breaking her pace. During heavy power outages, they began at 4am, working when electricity allowed. In about four hours, the team prepares roughly 1,440 portions – soups, hearty dishes, salads, baked goods. The menu shifts, the output does not.
Keeping everything moving requires tight organization. With so few people and so much ground to cover, distribution relies on a highly coordinated network.
Drivers load roll containers into cars and vans, while others pick them up for further routes. From there, meals are passed along to transit points, evacuation hubs, kindergartens and schools, including a group of around eighty children with disabilities who are fed during the week.
When the calls come in
Among the recipients are also volunteer groups, emergency responders, internally displaced people (IDP), and those who can no longer cook for themselves. Military units come here as well, taking food packages back to their positions. The system is fluid, but it holds.
Alongside the steady, routine work of preparing and sending out meals, there is another side to Roxana’s work. When there are impacts in and around Kharkiv, she and her team head out.
“They call and tell us where to go,” Roxana says, referring to emergency services and coordination centers, which can request assistance at any hour. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes early in the morning.
“We work as a quick response group,” she continues. They gather what they can and leave.
At the site of an attack, they quickly set up a makeshift supply point in the most practical sense. “Tea, coffee, sandwiches, snacks – to warm people up, to support them at least a little.”
People come out of basements, out of damaged buildings, often still disoriented. In those first moments, something immediate matters more than anything else. Only later, if the situation stretches on, they return with proper meals.
There have been times, she adds, when they fed people like this for weeks.
When they are dispatched to emergencies, it is usually the same small group: Roxana herself, her sister, her daughter, her son-in-law, and Maxim. Others are no longer sent due to the high risk and the strain it places on them, both physical and emotional.
Roxana’s path
So the work tightens around those who remain.
Back in the kitchen, the rhythm resumes without pause, but settles into an unhurried flow, with no sense of rush. Coffee is poured into paper cups and passed along, laughter rises here and there. On one of the tables, small pieces of paska – the traditional Ukrainian Easter bread, slightly sweet and soft – are cut into bite-sized portions and shared in between tasks.
Roxana’s path to this place was anything but linear.
Born in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, she came to Ukraine as a child. “We moved when I was eleven.” Her family left amid rising tensions in the Central Asian country, and since then, Kharkiv has been home, where most of her relatives now live.
Long before February 2022 carved a rupture into everyday life, Roxana was already rooted in the language of food. Cooking, organizing, feeding people – this had long been her life. She worked in the restaurant business, most notably at Big Ben Pub in Kharkiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district, where she rose from cook to sous-chef and eventually shared responsibility in the kitchen with Maxim, the same one she now runs this operation with.
At the same time, she built a small catering business of her own, a thread that continues into the present, taken up whenever possible to supplement her income and carry her, however modestly, through.
Keys, the kitchen, the decision
On the morning when the full-scale invasion began, her phone rang. The restaurant’s owners were leaving Kharkiv and asked whether Roxana and Maxim needed to be taken out as well. But they refused.
“This is Kharkiv,” Roxana says. Then she adds, with a quiet insistence: “It is love. Love for our country. It’s something that runs deep.”
The owners left them everything: the keys, the kitchen, the food, even the money in the safe. “They told us: you can use everything. Do what you want with it.” So they did.
“From the first day, we wrote on Social media that we wanted to help,” she recalls. First there was no plan beyond that. No structure, no funding, just a kitchen and the decision to stay.
While Maxim spent the first days organizing the evacuation of his wife and small child, Roxana stayed behind, cooking. “Three hundred portions a day,” she says. “That’s how it started.” In the beginning, most of the meals went to soldiers. There was no functioning logistics network yet, no clear overview of who needed help, she explains.
From twenty-six to eight
But word began to spread. Within weeks, the effort had grown into a team of twenty-six, all volunteers, unpaid, driven by little more than urgency and conviction. Requests soon multiplied, and before long they were noticed by World Central Kitchen (WCK), an international humanitarian organization, which began supporting their work, initially through Roxana herself. “Thanks to them, we made ten thousand portions daily,” Roxana notes. For a time, the WCK’s commitment even made it possible to pay salaries.
Inevitably, the circle widened, reaching metro stations, shelters, nearby towns, and districts under heavy shelling. People who had no electricity, no way to cook, and simply no other option but to rely on it. In Northern Saltivka, where many people were living in basements, the volume of meals they sent out was among the highest. “Up to seven thousand,” she underscores.
As World Central Kitchen gradually withdrew toward the end of 2022, with Ukrainian forces pushing Russian troops further out of the Kharkiv region, the support fell away bit by bit. Roxana and Maxim carried on with what remained, including the funds still on her personal account, but it became increasingly difficult to operate without a formal structure. So in March 2023, they officially registered Dusha Kharkiv as a volunteer organization and food pantry.
Around that time, new help arrived, almost by chance. Three Ukrainian women living abroad discovered their work on TikTok. A call followed, questions about how the kitchen functioned, what was needed. For the past three years, they have supported the project regularly, sending around 5,000 euros a month – enough to cover rent, utilities, and keep the kitchen running. Since then, the team has settled at a core of eight.
Taste of home
And so, the work has not stopped. Its meaning has only become clearer. Food, in this place, is not only about survival. It is a matter of dignity.
Roxana returns to this idea often, though she never speaks about it in abstract terms. During the war, she says, she has come to value Ukrainian cuisine more deeply. Not refined food, not something elaborate, but something familiar.
“When we make varenyky (Ukrainian dumplings), or other Ukrainian dishes, those at the front are very happy,” she emphasizes. “They love the food they grew up with.”
She insists on maintaining a certain standard. Ingredients like pasta or rice are chosen carefully, the quality never allowed to slip. “We don’t want to lower this level.” Here, food is more than sustenance. For Roxana, there is no doubt. “Thanks to our support, people can hold on like this.”
“Women allow Kharkiv to endure”
In 2022, Kharkiv came together in a way she has not seen elsewhere. Those who stood firm then, she suggests, are still here now. And among them, women in particular. “Lots of women became volunteers,” she points out. Not as a side remark, but as a central observation she has made.
They cook, organize, deliver, coordinate, carrying out work that rarely draws attention, yet keeps everything moving. “Women like them allow Kharkiv to endure,” she adds. “Sixty percent of what is done for victory is done by women, in my view,” she remarks with a faint smile, glancing around.
What this endurance takes becomes visible in what they encounter. “There are moments you cannot forget,” Roxana says. She describes scenes that are difficult to look at, that stay with you. A man carried out with a head injury, still holding a bag in his hand, as if trying to save something. A mother crying over the body of her child, asking for help when it is already too late.
“We have probably become used to it,” she says. “Like zombies.” The word comes almost casually. “These moments stay in the head forever.”
The body reacts differently. She is more irritable now, she says, more easily pushed to the edge. “Sometimes I cannot stop. I want to cry, to scream.” It is something she sees in others too.
Not killed by the war, but in its shadow
The past years have demanded everything of her.
Roxana’s father died in 2022, after a long illness. A year later, her husband followed. Not through the war directly, she notes, but in its shadow. She has lost friends too, among them two women who had also been volunteering.
Something flickers across her face. “And it is hard.” You can sense her pulling herself together, her focus almost automatically shifting elsewhere.
“The war took a lot,” she reflects, “but it also brought good, close people into our lives.” Relationships rearranged, priorities sharpened. “It try to put everything in its place.”
But the toll has not been only mental. Her body, too, has gone through its own battles.
Roxana had already been fighting long before the war reached her. For six years, she lived with uterine cancer, until in 2023 she was told she was in remission. But the relief did not last. Not long after, she nearly died.
“My daughter brought me to the hospital in time,” she recalls. What followed was another diagnosis: colon cancer, malignant. There was surgery, then chemotherapy, what she refers to, almost in passing, as “a lot of things.”
With the support of family, friends, and fellow volunteers, she entered remission again. For her, the reason is clear. “I believe that thanks to these good deeds, I overcame cancer twice.”
Another call, another place, another meal
She does not dwell on herself for long. It does not seem to sit comfortably with her, being at the center like this. Her focus shifts.
“It is not as hard for us here as it is for those sitting in the trenches. They live through hell every day.”
Because of them, she makes clear, life here can still, at times, resemble something close to normal.
“They cannot endure without help,” she emphasizes.
Then she turns back to the kitchen, where the next meals are already underway.
The large pots are filled again. New rows of trays are lined up. Portions are measured out, sealed, stacked.
There is no fixed end to the day. At any moment, the phone can ring again. And when it does, they will go. Another place, another group of people, another moment where something has broken.
And again, they will bring something that still holds. Food.