How Safe Is It to Volunteer in Ukraine?

When some close friends learned that I was going to volunteer in Ukraine have asked if I have a death wish. I don’t. So I thought I would try to explain my thinking because I believe the odds are in my favor, though when you generally think about going to a country at war, it doesn’t appear that way on the surface.

We were heading to Dnipro to drop off a cute dog named Amy and as we entered the Donetsk region, the military checkpoints got more frequent and stringent. After searching our van and answering their questions, they took photos of us, our passports and the van’s registration. Before waving us on, the soldier commented, we will provide these photos to your consulates if anything happens to you. Reassuring. Our passenger from The Netherlands said, “Well, I’ll rot in a Russian prison.” The Ukrainian said, “If I get captured, they’ll kill me and then eat me.” And, I sat there quietly wishing I had Internet to send Joe Biden a message telling him I thought he was doing a great job.

I’m not a military strategist, so it’s hard for me to figure out what the Russians are doing. I stayed at a woman’s home in Izyum which was occupied by Russians for six months. She lived in her basement with her neighbor. She put rugs up on her windows to black them out. On her gate, she wrote the word “humans” with the hope the Russian soldiers wouldn’t loot her home while she was there. She said an 80-year-old lady down the street was raped. Many of them committed suicide because the constant bombing drove them over the edge. They had no heat, electricity, or water. In her bathroom, she had filled her tub of water and had buckets lining the walls. The town, which once had 45,000 citizens, like the size of Edmonds, Washington, now only had 15,000. The majority of the town’s buildings and homes are rubble from the missiles and the bullets. Why they would want to take a poor village and reduce it to less than nothing is bewildering.

Now there are lots of Ukrainian military patrolling the town. It’s quiet, but you still have to watch out for landmines and only walk on the street or paths. Also, you hear air raid sirens quite frequently, even in the smaller villages. One of volunteers that experienced the missile attacks in Kharkiv told me that usually you hear the missile first and then the air raid sirens sound. Now, I believe the Russian soldiers are actually selling information to the Ukrainians, so they know where and when the missile attacks are coming.

To go into an active battle zone, you need military permission. So, it’s not easy to wander into active fighting. One mistake, which I’ve made a couple of times is to follow Google Maps. For example, Kristina and I were coming back from dog catching and she was busy reloading her darts. I punched in Kharkiv into my phone and it gave me the quickest route back. We were more than halfway into our journey when I looked over and saw Kristina playing with my phone. She was zooming in and zooming out and was deeply concentrating. Then she gave me the bad news. We were heading right to the Russian front and my have to try and cross their checkpoints. She wasn’t happy about this and said it’s a common error that foreign volunteers do and usually doesn’t have a good outcome. We stopped to discuss whether we should backtrack or not. It was already late at night and we had been working for over twelve hours. We decided to push forward and felt relieved when we finally came to a Ukrainian military checkpoint. He confirmed we were pretty lucky and we made it on to Kharkiv.

We also had the fortune of having a connection into Ukraine’s intelligence. After finishing one clinic, the next day we were supposed to move on to Kupyansk. However our contact told us that Russia was going to invade it, so our incredible partner, White Angel worked some magic and found us another village, a place to set up the clinic and assembled volunteers there.

So, if you stay out of active military areas, walk on the street or paths, you are actually pretty safe. Well, there are just the hazards of Ukraine. Driving is hazardous because the street lights are out, military vehicles are driving with their lights off, and the anti-tank barriers are everywhere and not well marked, so in the dark, it would be easy to hit them head on. There is shrapnel in a lot of places that will puncture your tires, and no AAA to come fix your flat. Curfew is in effect, so you have to make sure you plan ahead and even with the best planning, things go sideways. Most restaurants, if they are open at all, close at 7pm and grocery stores at 9pm.

So, if you calculate the number of civilian deaths outside the Russian battle zones and you compare that to deaths due to guns in the USA (not including suicide), it’s only about two-and-a-half times as dangerous to be a volunteer.

And it looks like Russia is running out of missiles which is why they have teamed up with the Iranians for drones. Russia is in possession of approximately 1,500 'high precision' missiles capable of deep penetration attacks on strategic targets like critical infrastructure, compared to 3,200 at the beginning of the war. However, many of the missiles commonly cited as high-precision cruise missiles are designed to fulfil a different role or are difficult to deploy in large quantities.

Of the 1,500, an estimated 790 were designed as SACMs; the remainder are anti-ship missiles (ASM) that have either been deployed against land targets in small numbers or not at all. According to one open source, deploying these ASMs in the surface attack role is more a reflection of diminished SACM supplies than a true multi-purpose capability.

Though these ASMs are considered high precision, they are acknowledged to have considerable deficiencies against land targets. Their ability to routinely strike small but key components of critical infrastructure, such as energy transformer stations, is far from certain. Thus, ASMs have a greater potential for collateral damage due to this inaccuracy and, counterintuitively, harbour the potential to cause a high degree of damage in civilian areas. Their likelihood of striking an existential blow on the energy grid is much less evident.

The Russians like to deploy missile strikes at night because they want to create terror and sleep deprivation. They also use a “double-tap.” They will hit with the first missile and then wait for Ukrainian medics and fire crew to arrive and then send in the second missile. At night, you will hear the air raid sirens, but Ukraine has gotten very good at air defense. They will shoot out the majority of the missiles only letting a few hit. The chances of those missiles hitting you are very low.

In summary, I felt safe most of the time I’ve gone to Ukraine. You can’t let down your guard and you need to be prepared. Things change every day and sometimes every hour. But the reward of helping certainly compensates for any discomfort you feel.