35bread, cookies, and cofee in the back
of the shop. Kurkin scarfed down cold
meatballs from a can.
Before long the trucks were fully
loaded, about a dozen in all, and we set
of in a line behind Tyra’s car. He had
given Kurkin and me an ambulance to
drive, an old Belgian model that had
been purchased and donated by vol-
unteers in the Netherlands. They had
stufed the vehicle so full of medical
supplies that we had trouble squeezing
our backpacks inside.
The border with Ukraine was less
than 15 miles away, but it took us
seven hours to reach it. Coming out
of Ukraine into Poland, the crossing
was backed up with refugees, a vast
column of women and children pull-
ing roller suitcases and carrying pets
under their arms. That was expected:
more than a million of them had al-
ready led the ighting. What surprised
me was the traic going in, a leet of
cars pushing into a war zone.Many of them were aid convoys.
Others carried Ukrainians who had
been abroad when the invasion started
and were rushing to ind their fami-
lies. At one point, a line of more than
a dozen identical green trucks eased
around the traic on their way intoUkraine. One of Tyra’s convoy runners
saw me staring at the vehicles, which
had no identifying markers. “Zbroi,” he
said in Ukrainian. Weapons.IT WAS WELL past midnight when we
reached the border crossing, a system
of tents and cordons where refugees
were waiting in the cold to get inside. At
the customs booth, a Ukrainian oicial
looked at my U.S. passport and asked in
a tired voice, “Foreign ighter?”
By the time we got across, the
nightly curfew was in efect, prohibit-
ing the convoy from carrying on until
morning. But a group of Ukrainian spe-
cial forces troops had come to the bor-
der to receive the aid, and they ofered
to drive me the rest of the way to Lviv
that night. They were all in their 20s,
dressed in camoulage, and had been
making runs back and forth to the bor-
der since the invasion started. “It’s
keeping us alive,” said a 27-year-old
named Viktor as we cruised through‘How can anyone
just carry on as
normal when this
is happening?’
—Gennady Kurkin,
DOUG MILLS—THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX; ANASTASIA TAYLOR-LIND FOR TI a volunteer from Berlin
ME
△
A former U.S. Army medic,
David Plaster, trains civilians at a
school gym in Lviv