Useful in Ukraine

KYIV — In June 2023, just a few days after Brent DePape first arrived in Kyiv, a massive missile barrage struck the city.

By then, the retired federal government economist had been in Ukraine for a few weeks, and had heard air defence at work. But that was the first time he’d felt one of the blasts, an unsettling shockwave rippled through the air, the buildings, his body.

“That was an eye-opener,” he says. “It’s interesting, because especially in Kyiv or Lviv, you can kind of… ‘forget’ is maybe not the right word, but you can certainly not think about the realities of things until something like that happens.”

He pauses, sips a coffee and furrows his brow.

“It is amazing how you can sort of put it out of your mind, actually.”

That experience did not deter the Winnipegger from coming back to Ukraine, ready to help wherever he was needed.

If anything, it strengthened his resolve to return, where he would soon become more enmeshed in the colourful — and sometimes chaotic — world of civilian war volunteers.

The first time DePape and I met was a few days before that major attack in summer 2023. We’d connected on a group text chat for prospective volunteers; I’d perked up to see an area code from home. He also brought me a care package of Kraft Dinner and all-dressed chips, which was quite appreciated.

When we met again at a Kyiv coffee shop earlier this summer, DePape was on his third trip to Ukraine in less than year.

Each visit had been a little longer than the last, and taken him a little closer to the battered front line; and in that time, he’d done a bit of everything a volunteer can do in Ukraine.

He’d peeled vegetables at a Lviv kitchen that makes fresh meals for front-line soldiers; woven camouflage nets to drape over military vehicles; and packed first-aid kits with tourniquets and bandages.

He’d cleared rubble from ruined homes, assembled 3D printers to manufacture drones and sorted boxes upon boxes of humanitarian aid.

In Slovyansk, just a few dozen kilometres from the front, he’d built kennels for a dog shelter and delivered water to the last lingering residents of a suffering front-line city.

Once, he even served as Santa Claus at a children’s hospital in Kyiv, which isn’t the kind of gig he’d envisioned.

“I never would’ve guessed that I’d be walking around in a Santa suit,” he says, laughing. But hey, both he and the kids had fun.

In this way, DePape’s trajectory is fairly typical of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have made their way to Ukraine, over the 2 1/2 years since the Russian invasion.

Some come just once, stay a few weeks in the relatively safer cities of the west and leave.

But others keep following the need, and find themselves doing work they’d never imagined.

“It’s this ‘someone knows someone who knows someone’ sort of thing that people always get into,” DePape says. “Once you get a toehold socially, opportunities kind of surface.”

For every volunteer, the journey begins with a simple intention. DePape made his decision not long after the full-scale invasion.

He was outraged by Russian aggression, and frustrated with what he sees as a global political climate too riven by populist fractures to unify and act; for a brief time he even thought about signing up to fight, until he accepted he was “not in the best age bracket,” the 66-year-old says with a chuckle.

Still, he wanted to find a way to help Ukraine and its defence directly.

“I just felt like I had to do something,” he says. “I’m retired. I’m sitting around amusing myself otherwise, right? Or by that time, I was spending five or six hours reading about (the war).

“I’d get up with my morning cup of coffee, and before I knew it, it’s three in the afternoon and I’m still sitting in my house reading about it. So I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go.’”

The next step was figuring out what he could do.

DePape is not a military veteran or a medic; he didn’t have skills specific to fighting a war. But he was fit, and knew how to use tools, and — perhaps most important — was willing to put his hands to use doing anything Ukrainians and their allies needed him to do.

On that first trip, for instance, when he signed up with debris-clearing groups Brave to Rebuild and Dobrobat, “I was hauling bricks, which didn’t necessarily disappoint me,” he says.

“Bricks need to be hauled. When I was in Lviv, I was fixing toilets, because toilets need to be fixed.”

His journeys back and forth haven’t always been easy. The language barrier can be a problem, especially outside the big cities; he’s learned how to get by with Google Translate.

There were also the regular snafus of air travel — one trip back to Winnipeg took him more than 88 hours due to delayed and cancelled flights — and a few bouts of illness.

There is also the challenge of learning to navigate what he judiciously refers to as the “social complexity” of the foreign volunteer community, which is rife with strong personalities and a wide range of skills and motivations.

In Ukraine, that community can be a source of staunch support; it is also sometimes fractious, and dotted with characters who have murky backgrounds and abrasive ways of getting a job done.

“There are all kinds of people doing things that make a difference to people’s lives.”

But at the end of the day, DePape says, learning to work in that world has been rewarding.

“There are all kinds of people doing things that make a difference to people’s lives,” he says.

“Certainly when you talk to the units on the front line, for example, or in the small communities who are reliant on someone coming in from somewhere to provide something that they need. There’s something magical about that.”

He is fascinated, too, by thinking about what draws so many people like him to help out in Ukraine. He points back to how he grew up, in the Vietnam War era, where it seemed the horrors of the world were always far away, and it was unclear what one could do to address injustice, other than protest or write letters to elected representatives.

The world seems smaller now. It’s easier to connect. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the first major state-to-state war of the social-media age, and that shapes how we perceive it in many ways.

One of the effects, perhaps, is that it’s easier to feel part of something from the other side of the world — and then, from there, to simply close the physical distance.

“It is very participatory, and there’s something very democratic about it,” he says. “It’s, ‘I may not be happy with the degree of engagement of my government or even my neighbours, but I am at liberty to do something on top of that if I want to.’

“It’s the idea that we will win this war, not our government, and people have the freedom to participate in the manner and degree to which they want to. And that to me is very interesting.”

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large (currently on leave)

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.

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