Crowd Funders Of The Ukrainian War

Volunteers and nonprofits have been the backbone of Ukraine’s fight against Russia. What happens when ordinary citizens conduct a war?

- David Gauvey Herbert

Yuri Deychakiwsky thinks he was home in North Potomac, Md., when he saw the video. He can’t recall exactly. After writing so many checks to support the war effort overseas, even watching bombs rain down on strangers doesn’t quite register in his memory.

Born in Cleveland to Ukrainian immigrants, Deychakiwsky is a 61-year-old cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians in Bethesda. Around Christmastime in 2017, he wired $3,000 to a Ukrainian émigré in Syracuse, N.Y., for what his contact cryptically code named “our grasshopper”—a drone whose specs Deychakiwsky declines to share—which was to be used by the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, a battalion fighting Russian-backed separatists.

And now there it was on Deychakiwsky’s smartphone screen, dropping explosives on trenches in eastern Ukraine as enemy militants scrambled for cover. In one clip, a bomb detonated near a separatist. The man stood stunned for a moment, then sprinted for cover before falling down and crawling on his belly, possibly suffering from a leg wound. “It gives me an uneasy feeling as a physician and a Christian that I’m participating in this,” Deychakiwsky says. “I try not to step on ants. I don’t hunt. I couldn’t shoot Bambi. But of course I eat hamburgers, too.”