“Anywhere you go in the world, people are the same:” A Delaware County humanitarian in eastern Ukraine

By Rianna Pauline Starheim

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative, in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

This straight ribbon of winter highway connecting Kharkiv and Dnipro in eastern Ukraine could easily be rural America: Route 88 between Oneonta and Binghamton in upstate New York, perhaps, or Route 55 tracing the northeastward line from Bloomington to Chicago in Illinois. Wipers steadily clear the light rain that repeatedly obscures the windshield, limiting the field of view. Trees are silhouetted against a horizon that disappears into fog in all directions. It’s the perfect day from a security perspective: weather that blurs the view from the skies, and grounds Russian drones. Weather you can hide behind.

Delaware County native Bryan Many, 37, sits shotgun in the mud-streaked SUV, writing a multimillion-dollar humanitarian aid budget on a computer open on his lap. His Ukrainian colleague, ⁠Serhii, drives and the two make easy conversation in English about the impact electric vehicles will have on America’s massive network of gas stations, plans for Christmas, and Serhii’s 11-year-old cat and two-year-old dog, who get along well. ⁠Serhii asks whether the United States will withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); he’s been reading about that in the news. Bryan says he doesn’t know. You never know. It might.

Headlights of oncoming traffic emerge like eyes from the fog: a civilian cement truck, 10-wheeler tractor trailers, coach buses, many muddy and weathered passenger cars. Occasionally, a military vehicle passes, camouflage netting blowing wildly in the wind and with a cage around its forehead to protect from drones (the drone explodes on impact with the cage, rather than directly on the vehicle skin, reducing damage). The car passes a civilian café with plywood over the windows, operational again after a Russian drone attack in late October. The military could have been conducting covert operations from the building. Or maybe—like many attacks—it was simply a civilian café.

Every 50 miles or so, the car slows and then stops at a checkpoint, where Ukrainian soldiers check ⁠Serhii’s identification on his phone. Most Ukrainians carry their national identity documents electronically through a government app called Diia. Ukrainian males over the age of 25 are eligible for a national draft that has conscripted more than a million men since the beginning of martial law in February 2022. As the war nears its fourth year and casualties mount, desertion has increased. The military uses drones to find men trying to leave the country illegally and in cities, conscription officers patrol the metro and other public places, checking documents. This summer, Bryan was taking a run in a residential neighborhood when a van cut off the road ahead of him and four soldiers jumped out of the vehicle, demanding his identification. “It wasn't that they were politely asking me to show my passport,” Bryan says. “There's still a draft.” For 25 to 60-year-old men, this type of encounter could be life changing for a Ukrainian.

The road from Kharkiv to Dnipro is quiet now, but in February and March of 2022, Ukrainian tanks rolled over this pavement and warplanes flew overhead as Russia carried out a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, occupying twenty percent of the country and dramatically escalating conflict that had been simmering since 2014, when Russia annexed the 10,000-square-mile Crimean Peninsula, still claimed by Ukraine. In 2025, this road is no longer a front line—that’s dozens of miles away—but still, forest green armored vehicles and small military encampments surrounded by sandbags are visible through the mist and the trees.

Bryan has been based in eastern Ukraine for more than a year working with Medair, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization that currently works across sectors of humanitarian response in 11 countries. The Medair offices in central Kharkiv are split across three spaces within a one-block radius, all in basements so staff can stay as safe as possible in the event of an attack and carry on with their work during air alarms. The fluorescent-lit rooms are filled with the basic physical tools from which humanitarian work is coordinated: simple desks, printers, shelves, pens and highlighters, an almost-empty container of animal crackers, detailed maps on the walls, a water kettle, microwave, and espresso machine. Muted laughter, clicking keyboards and conversations in Ukrainian and English set a quiet soundtrack. A colleague begins a video call with a wry, “We hope the electricity will allow us to have this conversation.” There is evidence of the previous lives of these spaces: an empty barista counter from when one of the offices was a coffee shop; gilded burgundy sofas and brightly painted brick walls in the office that used to be a Turkish bar. On a whiteboard in the fluorescent-lit basement where Bryan works—a former electronics repair store—someone has written in careful marker in English: May your homes be filled with love and laughter—and electricity, water, and heat. Then in Ukrainian: Stay strong, Ukraine.

Bryan is the project manager for Medair’s shelter program in Ukraine, managing a portfolio of more than $5 million for emergency and recovery shelter programs across three project teams of more than a dozen people, based in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Sumy. A typical day might include discussions with the team to stay current on evolving needs and resource allocation, United Nations-coordinated cluster meetings with other organizations to align work, hours of writing budgets, video calls with colleagues in other cities, tracking progress to make sure project timelines are met, and site visits to buildings where Medair has replaced windows damaged by explosions or given funds to help displaced Ukrainians cover security deposits and rent. Medair strives to aid civilians most impacted by the conflict, with its shelter program helping repair war-related damages and winterize buildings, often near current front lines and in territory previously occupied by Russia. “It’s strange, because obviously you don’t want to encourage people to stay in a dangerous place,” Bryan says. “But at the same time, if people are going to stay regardless, then it’s important that they are warm.”

Ukraine is Bryan’s first war, but by the time he arrived in Kharkiv in November of last year, he had extensive experience with travel and work in high-risk areas. As an accident-prone, dirt bike-loving boy growing up on a veal farm in Township, Bryan’s childhood was a sequence of low and medium-grade emergency medical responses, to the resigned chagrin of his former-nurse mom. Watching the destruction of the 2010 Haiti earthquake unfold on a television, Bryan saw a commercial asking viewers to text a number to donate. “It struck me how convenient it was that you could help from your couch,” he says. “I found it both brilliant and depressing.” Instead, he was motivated to leave the United States for the first time, joining the international humanitarian response at 21 years old to help disassemble damaged and unsafe buildings left behind from the earthquake.

Since then, his work and travels have taken him across roughly three years each of humanitarian response in Guatemala, Colombia, and the Bahamas, with shorter stints interspersed elsewhere: distributing non-food items in a refugee camp in Greece, building an award-winning pavilion out of more than 7,000 used car tires in China, navigating flood response on a shoestring budget in Honduras, a wilderness Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) course, travels in Nicaragua, years understanding and learning to manage long-term effects of Lyme Disease, a wildlife firefighting stint one summer—the list goes on. In each place, he says, it’s “waking up every morning and then trying to figure out how to maximize the day. You try to learn as much as you can about so many different topics. The reason you’re there is to assess what has happened and to do something about it.” The experiences, he says, have “opened my eyes to so many things that all help shape my perspective. I find myself in places that are full of interesting stories.”

“People ask me all the time, what do you notice about Ukraine?” Bryan says. “It’s always the insignificant things. When I arrived in Kharkiv and saw that people were still putting their trash out for somebody to come around and pick it up, I thought, Wow, I don’t have a good understanding of what war looks like.” Ukrainian gardens are impressively bountiful in the summer—“I think that’s still from the Soviet era, where food production was something to consider,” he says. When it snows in Kharkiv, an elaborate system of machinery takes to the streets, heavily staffed by a corps of workers shoveling snow onto machines resembling hay elevators, which lift the snow into dump trucks. Before arriving in Ukraine, “I figured all resources would have to go to the war. That was the first really strange thing, realizing that life on the surface is normal in many ways. There’s better garbage service than they have in Stamford.”

***

The conflict in Ukraine combines conventional weapons of war—rockets, artillery, tanks, machine guns, mines—with a wide array of dangerous new drone technology and advanced (and expensive) missiles. Hundreds of shahed-type suicide drones swarm the skies over Ukraine every night, and surveillance and first-person view (FPV) drones are used as infantry on the front lines. Russian munitions have led to a complicated air defense. The war has become a financial calculation, with both sides weighing whether it costs more to make a weapon or shoot it down. Several Ukrainian cities are guarded by Patriot air defense systems, but interceptor missiles cost millions of dollars each, making them an unviable defense against cheaply-made Russian drones. As a result, air defense sometimes takes the low-tech form of soldiers in pickup trucks driving around and shooting down drones.

With drones flying on both sides of trenches, the war in Ukraine does not so much have a front line as a large expanse of front region, more than 12 miles of “grey zone” that can easily be reached with FPV drones from either side. As a humanitarian organization, Medair doesn’t participate or take sides in any war—but they do need to understand the contexts they work within to be able to safely navigate their work. In June, “We were working in Stets'kivka where we thought we were reasonably safe, maybe 30 kilometers from the front line,” Bryan says. “Then all of a sudden we were fourteen [kilometers away]. That was the biggest shift I’ve seen in such a short amount of time.” Medair carefully monitors the evolving conflict, working closely with starostas—the rough equivalent of a local mayor—who often join them on field visits to serve as a local guide in rural farming communities where strong relationships hold a lot of weight. In the Medair offices, staff frequently reference the maps on office walls, which designate territory with unexploded ordnance, chart front lines and Russian-controlled areas at various points in time, and denote the infrastructure that has been targeted by Russian attacks, such as railroads and power plants.

When the Ukrainian government tracks the launch of Russian drones, incoming missiles, or the takeoff of aircraft that can launch missiles or drop bombs, air alarms sound across the city and a national Air Alert phone app advises individuals to shelter. In mid-December, this happened multiple times a day in Kharkiv, at least once a day in Dnipro, and several times a week in Kyiv. Each time there’s an air alert, Medair evaluates to decide whether staff should shelter, based on the level of risk. But walking the streets, there’s little response among Ukrainians: mothers continue to push baby carriages down the sidewalk, children laugh on playgrounds in parks, families continue visiting the lion, giraffe, leopard, and many meerkats of the Kharkiv Zoo. “It's terrible that bombs being dropped can be normalized,” Bryan says. “Everyone is carrying multiple traumas that go unnoticed because it is so commonplace.”

Immediately after an air alert, local channels on the Telegram messaging app fill with messages about drone movements and particularly high-risk neighborhoods—as well as hedgehog emojis and memes of hedgehogs running to and from cover. Jamming systems cause some drones navigating by GPS to lose orientation and air defenses shoot down many of the threats, although falling debris from the interception can also be a danger. As the trajectory of each attack unfolds, the Telegram channels track movements with impressive detail. “The whole thing is online,” Bryan says. “If you want to watch this war unfold in real time, you can.”

The war impacts life, but Ukrainians find ways to carry on, life persisting with a kind of meticulous pride. “I admire how there is every reason not to do something, but people decide to find a way to do it anyway,” Bryan says. The Kharkiv ballet, which Bryan and colleagues sometimes attend on weekends, holds performances on a makeshift stage in the basement of the Kharkiv Opera building, a looming Soviet postmodernist concrete structure nicknamed “The Aircraft Carrier” and completed in 1991, the same year Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In Kharkiv’s Freedom Square, Ukrainians have fashioned a Game of Thrones-style “Iron Throne” where passersby can sit and take pictures, made of real rockets and mortars that were fired from Russia into Ukraine. Russian attacks on energy and other critical infrastructure have left most of Ukraine with frequent power cuts that in some cities last 16 hours a day. Still, generators hum on the sidewalks and Christmas carols play in English across restaurants and coffee shops, where there is inevitably a place to neatly hang winter coats.

More than a year into life in Ukraine—and 15 years into his humanitarian career—Bryan has become accustomed to adjusting as he travels between places that can feel like different worlds. “Sometimes it goes better than others,” he says, “I can find it hard to relate to people at home.” When he visits home, “I’ve been working abroad” leads to inevitable follow-up questions. “When you tell people that you’re in Ukraine, they have an image of what that means to them,” Bryan says. “Mostly people don’t know what to ask, which is fair enough. There aren’t too many opportunities to say what Ukraine is actually like.”

In Ukraine and everywhere he’s traveled, “It always goes back to the people I work with,” Bryan says. “Anywhere you go in the world, people are the same.” The Medair offices in Ukraine are swarming with stories—a multilingual weightlifter on the logistics team who is working toward his PhD; father of a young dancer who performs internationally; pediatrician who teaches at a local medical university on the side; colleague who makes and sells jewelry on Etsy and sat at home with a beer one night early in the war, watching orange rockets streak the sky. Many of Bryan’s colleagues were displaced from Crimea or the Donbas region, now occupied by Russia, with lives that have been many times interrupted by war. Although parts of life in a war zone have become normalized—frequent air alert sirens and power cuts, communal living and sleeping in a basement alongside other international colleagues, sipping ginger tea at a nice restaurant as drones fly in other districts of the city—Bryan continues to be amazed by the commitment of his Ukrainian colleagues to their work and their ability to carry on. “People will have spent the night in the basement or just in the bathroom because there’s been explosions all night and they are apologetic if they show up to work ten minutes late,” he says. “And you’re like, wait a second. It’s ok.”

The evening of December 12, with two minutes to spare before departure, Bryan catches a westbound sleeper train in Dnipro. He’s leaving on a trip out of the country, which Medair mandates non-Ukrainian staff take every two months to prevent burnout. The airspace over Ukraine has been closed for civilian use since 2022, so Bryan will take a 19-hour train journey to Poland, another hour and a half train to an airport, then fly to Egypt via a 12-hour layover in Istanbul. The sun will lap him several times before he reaches the Sinai Peninsula in northeastern Egypt, where he will complete a scuba diving course and take in some sun before returning to winter weather in Ukraine, just in time for Christmas.

Rianna Pauline Starheim has no institutional relationship with Medair and the perspectives expressed in this article do not represent, reflect, or bind Medair in any manner.

Bryan Many works on a humanitarian shelter budget on his laptop as his Ukrainian colleague, ⁠Serhii, drives the highway from Kharkiv to Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. Due to jamming to interfere with drones, the GPS shows the car near Lima, Peru.

The Diia app, which Ukrainians use to store their national identification cards. In the section of the app that’s shown, users can view military job vacancies and apply to join the military. Some of the jobs shown on this screen include Master Explosive Technician for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Aircraft Maintenance Technician, Warehouse Clerk, and the highly coveted position of UAV Pilot.

Photos

Some of the generators that Ukrainians use to keep the lights on. Power generation facilities have been one of the primary targets of Russian attacks during the war, stressing the electrical infrastructure of the country. Blackouts are common, sometimes lasting up to 16 hours a day.

Two of Bryan’s colleagues pick assignments for the staff Christmas gift exchange in Kharkiv. One colleague is assigned to purchase a half-liter of gin, an organizer for electronic chargers, and a flashlight.

Bryan at the MEDAIR office in Kharkiv. The Ukrainian flag behind him symbolizes a field of sunflowers under a bright blue sky. Ukraine is the second-largest producer of sunflower oil and seeds in the world, after Russia. On a clear day in the summer, sunflower fields in rural areas of eastern Ukraine stretch as far as the eye can see and beyond.

Bryan in a central Kharkiv metro stop, decorated for Christmas. Metro stations in Kharkiv and Kyiv were built deep into the ground during the Cold War to double as shelters in case of American nuclear attack or other bombing. Six metro stations currently also serve as schools for Kharkiv's children. Most Ukrainian schools moved online in 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic, then children continued to study from home due to the war.

Day and nighttime views of a city government building on Freedom Square in central Kharkiv. The building was hit with two cruise missiles on March 1, 2022 and then two ballistic missiles later in the year. It is now the site of a memorial and a billboard that translates to “Dad, I am drawing the sky and you protect it for us.

One of Bryan’s colleagues communicates some of her thoughts about the war through Google Translate.