34 TIME April 11/April 18, 2022
WORLD
twice about threatening these supply
lines. “You are sitting at the forward
edge of freedom,” General Mark Mil-
ley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staf, told the troops during a stop in
eastern Poland in early March.
It was one of many visits that Kvien
and her team have helped to manage
from their new base in Rzeszow. Con-
gressional delegations have cycled
through town. Republican Mike Pence,
the former Vice President, paid a visit
to see the U.S. support for Ukraine in
action. “We haven’t taken a day of
in about a month,” Kvien told me at
the hotel restaurant. “The days have
started to run together.”
THE HUMANITARIAN AID convoy
began to gather the next morning in a
small Polish town near the border with
Ukraine. Its organizer was Yuri Tyra, a
longtime adviser to President Zelen-
sky. The two have been friends since
Zelensky’s early days as a comedian
and actor. Beginning in 2014, when
Russia launched its annexation of the
Crimean peninsula, they have made a
tradition of visiting soldiers on New
Year’s Eve, delivering treats and gear
to raise morale.
The start of the broader war in late
February caught Tyra in his bathing
suit, relaxing with his family in Brazil.
He had been so sure that the buildup
of Russian troops at the border was a
bluf that he had decided to go on va-
cation. When Tyra heard the news,
he sent a text message to Zelensky:
“Coming to help.”
With that began a mad dash to
gather supplies from all over Eu-
rope. A network of friends helped
Tyra drum up support from commu-
nity groups, churches, schools, andcharity organizations. Truckloads of
supplies soon began arriving at an-
other friend’s mechanic shop in a Pol-
ish village near the border. By the
time Tyra got there on March 6—his
wife, their daughter, and a suitcase
full of their holiday clothes in tow—
the shop was piled high with boxes.
FROM FINLAND, FOR UKRAINE, read
one of them. Another label, written in
German, ofered a meticulous list of
the contents: 48 juice boxes, 10 bags
of muesli, 40 pairs of socks.
More than a dozen volunteers had
driven for days to bring it all to the bor-
der. One of them, Gennady Kurkin,
was about to begin producing his play
at a theater in New York City when the
invasion started. When I asked about
his motives for coming all the way from
his home in Berlin, he countered with
a question of his own: “How can any-
one just carry on as normal when this
is happening?” A few of the convoy
runners had laid out a lunch of pickles,△
President Biden with members
of the 82nd Airborne Division
in Poland on March 25