Berlin – On Tuesday evening, Ilona Abrosimova drives across Berlin in a large white van. Her brother is behind the wheel, she always has her cell phone in view. From this phone she started a fundraiser for Ukraine, her home country, on Monday, just over 24 hours ago. Now the boxes are piling up in the back of the van, more than 1,700 euros have already come into her account, some from people she doesn’t even know, and Ilona Abrosimova is thinking about terms like “green corridor”. Aid organizations, she has heard, should be able to travel relatively easily from Poland or Romania to the Ukraine and leave the country again after a delivery.
But it is not an aid organization, so far. She is 26 years old, came to Berlin seven years ago to study law here, she works in a law firm on Potsdamer Platz. There she sat on Monday, unable to concentrate on work, after the weekend demos, after nights when she didn’t sleep and days when she only cried. Her parents live in Kamianets-Podilskyj, in western Ukraine, as do her grandparents. They want to stay there, also because the grandparents are too old to join the refugee train across the borders, she says. She shows a video: In a basement, people are clearing away the rubble, and a bunk is set up on the edge with blankets lying on it. The bunker in her parents’ house is that.
Are donations in kind or money better?
Kamianets-Podilskyj is already full of refugees, her parents and friends tell her. People have to be taken care of. It’s pretty cold at night. At the same time, the citizens of the city want to prepare for emergencies and organize their self-defence. She gets a lot of messages from home, says Ilona Abrosimova, telling what’s missing locally and what’s needed. And she gets a lot of messages from friends in Berlin, from other countries, from colleagues who want to know how they can help, what they can do for Ukraine.
She’s not the only one trying to connect both sides in a private fundraiser. Small clubs, day-care centers and scientists started appeals, loaded vans and drove off on their own. Does that really make sense? Or shouldn’t one leave the helping to large organizations and rather give money than winter jackets from one’s own closet? This discussion has flared up on social media. Large organizations can procure relief supplies in a targeted manner, ideally in neighboring countries where the economy is supported. But on the other hand, these organizations do not reach every place. And can everything that is needed now really be bought in Romania or Poland?
There is humanitarian aid for Kyiv and Kharkiv, fortunately, says Ilona Abrosimova. She has many friends who live in the two heavily attacked cities. A childhood friend now works in a Kiev hospital. “But you also have to think of the small towns.” She made a list of the things that are needed there: sleeping bags, backpacks, thermal underwear, flashlights, power banks, medicines such as ibuprofen or paracetamol, bandages. She sent this list to the office and posted it on her Instagram account. She improvised collection points halfway across the city, at friends’ houses, her brother, who has also lived in Berlin for five years and works for a construction company, organized a storage room in Ahrensfelde, and she doesn’t know exactly who.
Protective equipment for a checkpoint
“We already have a lot of sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and warm clothes for children,” she says on Tuesday evening. She tells of monetary donations, an acquaintance from India, whom she met at a festival in the USA, transferred something to her, and a Ukrainian friend who lives in Norway collected it there. She says that her Russian friends in Berlin also support her with donations at the demos, “and they tell their parents in Russia not to watch the news on state television.”
Ilona Abrosimova wants to use the money to buy what hardly any Berliner should have at home: military protective clothing, protective vests, helmets and, if at all possible, a thermal imaging camera. There is a checkpoint in their area where 15 men and two women are preparing to defend their homeland. She’s determined to outfit these “17 heroes,” as she calls them.
On Friday they want to go with three vans to a border crossing between Romania and Ukraine, where they will hand over the things to Ukrainian helpers. If all goes well, they want to do the tour again next week, she says.