Before dawn breaks on an icy post-Christmas morning, a convoy of seven ambulances, several large trucks, five fire engines, and a dump truck lumber out of the Blau Gelbes Kreuz (BGK) warehouse compound in Cologne, western Germany. Driving the vehicles—castoffs all of them, donations from across the state of North Rhine-Westphalia—are a quirky hodgepodge of volunteers: a retired civil servant, several Ukrainian refugees, a German police officer, and a handful of Ukrainian Germans. Blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fly from the chassis. The drivers know the drill—and one another, judging by the rapport—having made the two-day trip to the Polish-Ukraine border many times since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“With a convoy of this size it’s never smooth,” says Linda Mai, BGK’s director and co-founder, who has organized hundreds of such caravans over the past decade. Sure enough, two of the second-hand vehicles break down near Dresden, halting the convoy for hours. By the time the fleet reaches its layover destination in Poland, it is 2 a.m. No matter, the show is on the road again the next morning at 7 a.m., en route to the Ukrainian border where drivers from six cities pick up the vehicles, have them inspected and serviced, and then deliver them.
BGK was founded in 2014 by Mai, a professional pharmacist and native of western Ukraine, and her German husband, a medical doctor, in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia’s first invasion. In 2022, BGK exploded in size and scope as sympathizers rushed to Ukraine’s cause while over a million Ukrainian refugees joined the already existing Ukrainian community in Germany. It is one of many thousands of diaspora-driven initiatives across Europe—the most numerous are in Germany and Poland where the new diasporas (about one million respectively) are largest—that have brought concerned citizens, businesses, schools, and towns together to raise money and funnel a myriad of humanitarian aid to war-torn Ukraine.
Non-military Aid
Much of the cargo—medical supplies, baby-care products, mini-generators, school supplies, motor vehicles, and more—is equipment for towns, schools, and hospitals, some of which could be used by units at the front, too. BGK, with six branch offices across the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, distinguishes itself as one of Germany’s most prodigious: Since 2022 it has delivered €30 million worth of goods, over half of which is medicine, paramedic kits, ambulances, and hospital equipment. And the aid deliveries are only part of the local, behind-the-front support that BGK and the other European diaspora organizations carry out on behalf of besieged Ukraine.
This engagement from across Europe is essential for Ukraine’s survival and defense, and particularly so for its medical sector and frontline emergency medical services. At the June 2024 Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin 120 diaspora organizations came together with international organizations to facilitate the country’s rebuilding—evidence that this diaspora envisions itself as an integral part of postwar Ukraine.
Diaspora groups like the Centre for War Crimes Documentation in Poland document alleged war crimes. In Berlin, the NGO Vitsche counters Russian disinformation narratives while others, such as the CineMova Ukrainian Empowerment Network shows newcomers to Berlin how to establish Ukrainian associations, cafes and restaurants, cinemas, Christmas markets, radio stations, and more—all of which illustrate that Ukrainians in their new homes are not just on the receiving end but engaging productively in their new locations, too.
Local Diplomacy and Multipliers
All of the diaspora exiles explain Ukraine’s plight to their host countries and make the case to bolster Ukraine’s defense, conceivably one reason for Germans’ continued high level of support for arming Ukraine. These projects in exile liaise with civil society counterparts in Ukraine, just as select European cities do with their partner cities in Ukraine: engagement that has reinforced decentralized governance and civic democracy in Ukraine, in stark contrast to authoritarian Russia where since 2022 autocracy has grown deeper and more firmly embedded.
In total, there are about seven million war refugees and tens of millions of longer-standing diaspora Ukrainians scattered across the globe, including large communities in North America. While only a fraction of these populations constitutes mobilized activists (6 percent according to one study), this core is an organized, highly motivated, many-sided asset for the homeland.
Since the full-scale invasion, the diaspora contingents have waged a powerful and relentless solidarity campaign that reflects Ukraine’s domestic civic resistance. These exile contingents—young, largely female, decentralized, tech-savvy, polyglot, and mostly volunteer-run—are an integral part of the new Ukraine outside of Ukraine that has manifested itself since the Russian invasions and contributes emphatically not only to the homeland but to a Europe linked through ordinary human beings and localities.
Moreover, in addition to increasing resilience on the battlefield, the contribution of supplies to hospitals, paramedic services, and frontline emergency medical units has enabled Ukraine to distinguish itself from Russia in yet another way. “The Russians, like the Soviet army in the past, don’t do much emergency medicine. They do meat assaults,” explains Fedir Serdiuk, co-founder of PULSE, an Odesa-based tactical medicine training program for Ukraine’s defense units. “Meat assaults” are the waves of Russian soldiers sent into battle to die—with little respect for their lives.
Serdiuk and two colleagues founded PULSE in 2022 to enhance Ukraine’s own battlefield medical capabilities. As a result of PULSE’s activities and other such NGOs across the non-occupied part of the country, Ukraine’s defenders have a mortality rate significantly lower than that of Russian forces. They couldn’t do it, Serdiuk says, without the steady flow of non-state donations from abroad.
Enhancing the War Effort
Most of the vehicles in BGK’s Christmas convoy will enhance the war effort, either on the frontline or in cities fending off the attacks of Russian drones and missiles. In its warehouse, BGK displays one of the ambulances that it had sent to the front city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine in 2023. It returned totaled: a towed wreck sprayed with bullet holes, its windshields smashed, and black holes where its headlights once shined. “You see the red cross on it,” says Mai, “for the Russians that’s a target. We can’t send enough [ambulances] because they don’t last long.”
Mai and BGK’s CEO Julia Chenusha, the latter a native of Nova Kakhovka, are representative of the figures one finds behind so many of the civil society projects in Ukraine and abroad. In the sprawling warehouse, their thin voices are diminished amidst the voluminous, packed cardboards boxes, hospital beds, and wheelchairs that are stacked to the ceiling. The donated and purchased wares are meticulously organized and documented before transfer.
It works like this: Via its website, BGK receives requests from Ukrainian organizations and localities, which it tries to meet itself—or, if it can’t, sends on to networked counterparts. “We’re demand oriented and there’s no middleman,” says Chenusha. Before Ukrainian LKWs pick up the goods in Cologne, every item is entered into a digital accounting system that enables BKG to track its shipment, arrival, and final destination. “Donors must have full confidence that their money is being spent as we say it is,” says Chenusha. “If that trust didn’t exist, we’d be worthless.”
One of BGK’s products is a self-designed rescue backpack: bulky blue rucksacks filled with medical supplies, including tourniquets, chest patches, bandages, emergency resuscitation kits, and other equipment, as well as 200 types of medication. One of these packs, BGK claims, can save five lives. While European NGOs cannot send any weaponry, the backpacks are the kind of kit that frontline Ukrainian medics use. BGK designed and refined the rescue backpack in consultation with battlefield professionals: just one example of the hand-in-glove communication between diaspora and homeland that accounts for its high efficacy.
Horizontal Diplomacy of Sister Cities
Most of the vehicles in the Christmas convoy weren’t from BGK’s own supply but rather donations from the German cities that have sister cities in Ukraine. Aachen, a city at the German-Belgian and German-Dutch border, sent three ambulances and two fire trucks, via BGK, to Lviv in western-most Ukraine. Bonn had three fire engines for its sister city, Kherson. The state of North-Rhine Westphalia sent a fire engine to its partner, the eastern city of Dnipro. And Bochum donated the convoy’s lone dump truck to besieged Zaporizhzhia. BGK took over all of the logistics, including the mountain of red tape that transports entail.
Sister cities—also referred to as twin towns or partnerships—link and network localities across the European Union and beyond, and have since the postwar years when the first (West) German sister cities were established with US and British cities, and then with French municipalities, in what one scholar called “one of the greatest peace projects of the twentieth century.” And their thickly woven, grassroots networks have proven crucial to the efforts of diverse sympathizers in Europe to leverage aid to Ukraine, not least because they entail partially- funded structures that activists plug into. Furthermore, because they include participants from both countries—with granular knowledge of their homelands—highly effective cooperation is facilitated in a way that top-down state aid often fails to do.
As of late 2023, Ukraine boasted around 356 municipalities with over 1,500 partnerships, many with Polish cities and municipalities, but also German, Hungarian, and Romanian, among many others. The western Ukrainian city of Lviv has 24 partners and most of them are new since 2022. Over 200 German and 500 Polish cities boast partnerships with Ukraine, most of which profit from full-time staff in city halls and limited but important official funding. The organization Cities4Cities, funded by Sweden, helps link Ukraine’s currently unpartnered towns with potential partner cities abroad; but it admits that interest in new partnerships has decreased since the 2022 boom. There are 1,000 Ukrainian towns and villages that want partners and can’t find them, it says.
The difference between a sleepy partnership and a dynamic one is usually a handful of people: in Germany it tends to be a Ukrainian national like Daryna Illienko, native of Sumy oblast, who runs the partnership with the town of Riwne in the offices of the Berlin municipality of Pankow. Illienko arrived in Stuttgart 13 years ago to complete a doctorate in political science at Augsburg University and became involved in Ukraine support during the 2014 Maidan uprising. Since 2023, she has been coordinating the Pankow partnership as a full-time employee, though without a budget.
The sister-city offices, such as Illienko’s, function as beacons for a vast array of smaller solidarity projects and interested local clubs, including the likes of soccer teams and hunting clubs that might raise a few thousand euros for a project and throw in a dozen soccer balls. The partnership association Berlin Pankow-Riwne is volunteer-run and conducts its own activities, though usually in consultation with Illienko’s office. For example, it is fundraising to send 50 second-hand hospital beds and other medical technology donated by the Caritas clinic St. Marien in Brandenburg to a Riwne hospital as well as the Luhansk medical university, which had fled the now-occupied eastern city of Luhansk in 2014. The breadth of these networks is uncanny: the Caritas clinic donation was facilitated through another local association, namely Ukraine-Hilfe Lobetal, a tiny NGO that was launched in 2022 in a town north of Berlin. Illienko’s office is contributing to the transportation costs with funds raised through social media and grants.
Illienko and the five other Berlin districts with Ukrainian partners, as well as the city of Berlin itself with Kyiv, work in close contact with volunteer-run NGOs, like Ukraine Hilfe Berlin which is orchestrated by Tetyana Sell. Since Sell arrived in Berlin in 2022, Ukraine Hilfe Berlin has collected and dispersed humanitarian aid in excess of €7 million; over half of that sum in 2022 alone and funneled a large share of it to hospitals and clinics. The ingenuity at work is remarkable: Ukraine Hilfe Berlin has raised one million euros through the sale of Ukrainian children’s art works. A German volunteer crisscrosses Ukraine in a van to collect art projects and bring them back to Berlin where they are put on tour and sold, the revenue going to injured Ukrainian children in the homeland.
Rear Support in Poland
Poland’s Ukrainian diaspora looks and functions differently to Germany’s. It’s spearheaded by a long-standing Ukrainian ethnic minority of about 1.5 million that has been represented in the Union of Ukrainians in Poland since the 1990s and was boosted by over one million Ukrainians who arrived between 2020 and 2022 and then another million refugees who arrived during the full-scale invasion and remained in Poland. Its Warsaw central office and 10 regional branches, as well as about 80 smaller local groups, are organized horizontally and work in cooperation with local authorities. The Union only has five paid staffers—everyone else is a volunteer.
Many of the untold number of aid deliveries, the medical supplies, and thousands of vehicles resemble those sent from Germany. But they are financed by Ukrainian businesses, says Natalia Panchenko, who founded the Warsaw-based Stand with Ukraine Foundation in 2022. They are companies that now operate in Poland or conduct business in Ukraine and Poland, sometimes even with offices in both countries.
Poland’s diaspora is close to Ukraine in more ways than geographic proximity. Rather than acting as multipliers, as their cousins in Germany do, they are the homeland’s rear guard: namely a logics hub that supplies the frontlines with whatever they can’t get in Ukraine. In contrast to the German groups, the Ukrainians in Poland make plain that they are supporting Ukraine’s defensive forces. All of the Union’s €20 million in collected donations went to the military, says Mirosław Skórka, president of the Union of Ukrainians in Poland. “It was the only way to reach our brothers on the front directly,” Skórka explains. “Their lives were more important to us than adhering to the letter of administrative procedures.” The Union sent drones, bulletproof vests, night-vision devices, telescopic sights, and specialized communications equipment.
“We receive very precise requests,” Skórka explains, from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, National Guard of Ukraine, military intelligence, and special operations forces. Poland’s Ukrainians outfitted the 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade for the duration of the two years that it defended the city of Avdiivka in the Donetsk Oblast until it finally fell in February 2024.
“It’s Never Enough”
As impressive as the international Ukrainian diaspora’s self-styled operations may be, they must also be put into perspective. The quantity of the financial and material donations pale in comparison to state aid, which is measured in billions not millions. Moreover, of the NGOs interviewed in this research, all save BGK, admitted that fundraising has become increasingly more difficult. “People give once or for one ambulance and then they think that’s it. But the war consumes everything,” says Sell. “There’s never enough.”
In the media, other conflicts, like that in Gaza, crowd out the familiar reports from Ukraine: more drones, more destruction, more misery. The activists say that they too experience burnout; after three years of war their energies have depleted since 2022. Whenever the war does finally end, the diaspora leaders know that the next campaign will be: aiding in recovery and reconstruction, a task that will cost hundreds of billions more. At the third annual Café Kyiv festival in Berlin on March 11, 2025, the many events looking toward recovery underscored that it is at the forefront of Ukrainians’ minds—and that they’re already on it.
An extremely sensitive topic, of course, is the prospect of return: Eventually Ukraine will need its diaspora millions to come back and participate in the country’s postwar recovery and rebuilding. Surveys show that about half plan to return. Even the most committed activists are unsure what they’ll do. This is why Ukraine’s Ministry of National Unity is setting up “unity hubs” abroad that will act as points of contact for Ukrainian refugees and will assist with finding jobs in Ukraine and Germany, as well as provide advice on returning to Ukraine voluntarily and helping to rebuild the country.
The first such hub’s location: Berlin.
Paul Hockenos is freelance journalist and author based in Berlin.
