Aid to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and residents of the anti-terrorist operation zone

From the very beginning of the war in the East of Ukraine, the Kyiv automotoclub has constantly been helping our Armed Forces and children living in the anti-terrorist operation zone. Collectively and individually, we participate in various volunteer activities: we collect and hand the necessary things to the soldiers, from socks to technical equipment, we help orphan boarding schools and orphanages in liberated cities or towns close to the battle line. Our Club members are constantly on duty and aiding wounded soldiers in Kyiv hospitals.

We have close and very good friendly relations with Slovyansk orphan boarding school №41, Svyatohorsk center Smaragdove Mistechko (The Emerald Town), Kramatorsk infant orphanage Antoshka and Mariupol orphan boarding school №2. They have fantastic management teams that take every kid personally and try hard to provide children with everything they need even in such challenging times.

We want to express special gratitude to all our friends and philanthropists who donate money, goods and food. We thank every kid who sent us letters and drawings for the soldiers – there, under the shelling, in the trenches, they warm and inspire to fight the aggressor.

Aid to soldiers and children does not stop. We will publish about the current needs of the Armed Forces and volunteer battalions, children in each institution and hospitals.

You can join our humanitarian mission and donate to:

All details and current needs by phone +380 50 311-35-34

Serhii Malyk, a tall and slim man in his 50. He is a man and a record, a living legend of Ukrainian sports. Here are just a few facts from his solid list of achievements. 2004: Summiting the Ai-Petri Mountain on Formula 3 – the highest altitude reached by the Formula race car (1221 meters). 2006: The Formula race car outraced the L-29 jet plane at a 1200 m distance. 2008: He brought to the Dakar 2008 the first national race team on the national race truck KrAZ. 2011: He set the first Ukrainian record for the range of an air balloon flight (170 km). And in May 2013, Serhii performed perhaps the most impressive feat of his sporting career: in 13 days he travelled all over Ukraine on a mountain motorcycle along its perimeter, along the border. Then no one would have thought that in less than a year, there would be events that would make it impossible to repeat this challenge.

Now Serhii, having virtually left professional sports, spends almost all his time helping the army and civilians in the combat zone. He hauled about 30 tons of humanitarian aid and military equipment to Donbas on his van. After returning from the next round, Serhii told Cultprostir that he finds the most horrible, strange and encouraging in the events in the east of Ukraine:

Volunteering is like metastases, only good ones, that pass through the whole country. I visited the entire front line. And there are many people like me – lone ants, it’s huge traffic. They haul useful things there; in the reverse direction – cargo 200 and 300, volunteers have established cooperation with hospitals. Of course, I do not collect packages by myself, many people help me – with goods, money and fuel, including my friends from the automotoclub. Our ladies-motorcyclists are volunteers in the hospitals. One of them spent all her money raised to buy an apartment to help the soldiers. People give everything and do not regret it. That’s really valuable.

Everything that I bring to the anti-terrorist operation zone, I hand personally to my recipients, without any intermediaries. Usually, I deliver to soldiers goods that they can carry and that are necessary in the trenches, from food to panties/socks and other small things. And children in orphan boarding schools need almost everything – LDPR members once “squeezed” from orphanages everything they could, from cars to computers and machines from classes. Now the children in the liberated areas are not hungry, they have meat, cereals and potatoes, but there will not be too many delights – cookies, chocolate – no matter how much they are lucky to have it. Clothes, pencils and everything for drawing, notebooks – it’s all the same as going to dry land.

This war, like any other, is driven by passionaries. They are the best people – those who bought clothes and boots, equipped themselves, and volunteered at their own expense. Mostly, they die. There are plenty of them among my acquaintances from motorsports – those who “quenched” their passion for extreme sports in peacetime. I met many such kinds of people “there”, including in hospitals.

I know people who gave bribes to military commissars to be drafted into the army and go to the front. Not to hide, but to be called, despite the substantial medical contraindications! Here, by the way, is the question: should every man be a warrior and defend the homeland? On conscience – yes, but life shows that not everyone is given it. So this is an individual, intimate question. The only thing I can’t understand is when career officers are hiding from the war. Those who went to serve for wages and rations, and here’s a war! And now their mothers are going to rallies so that their sons are not sent to the front. Shame.

During the years of independence, our security forces have softened and become ‘obese’. Most security officers have turned into businessmen. But Ukraine will pull itself out of this quagmire and become an efficient and ‘sharp-tongued’ state, I’m sure. Another question is how long it will take and how many more people will die. We are opposed to a state with simply more money to wage this war than we have. But we are more motivated. You can fight for your land with a hammer or a stick and win, but the question arises about the price of such a victory. The trouble is that our state and military machine is ‘warming up’ too slowly. We have been at war for almost a year, a 500-kilometre hole in the border, and there are many motivated people – what are we waiting for? It is high time to make a decision: either we are really fighting for the integrity of the country, or we are wimping out and not faking out.

It seems wild that war is not something in the past, and it can happen in our lives. And this is not surprising because people do not change, only tools change. In our territories, wars have been going on constantly, with an interval of, say, 50 years. In fact, we just don’t remember who we are. The Cossacks were once the best army in Europe. Ukrainians formed the core of the Navy of tsarist Russia. We took the brunt of both World War I and World War II. We do not have to invent the glorious national idea – we just have to bend down and take it. It is at our feet, in our land and in our history.

This is the vilest and most terrible war. With a whole tangle of mutual insults – because fratricidal. Not the open war we are used to reading and watching movies about – there is, in fact, no front line here; it can “fly in” and kill anywhere.

Military science has come a long way, and we have stayed. See how the United States, Britain, and Israel are at war. Those ideas about the war, the strategy and tactics that I was taught as a career officer in the Soviet army, can be thrown away. Everything has changed: technology, our psychology, the means of manipulating the mass consciousness. A small but super-professional unit can solve very serious problems and cause mayhem in a big city. A modern fighter is a high-tech machine. And we have to sculpt an army of unarmed guys who saw only 40 days of training.

There should be no mercy for the enemy. We chew snot all year round. If it’s a war, it’s a war, and the tougher it is, the fewer people will die. I met motivated people from ‘that’ side. I respect them; they are warriors, and they know exactly what they want. But in their picture of the world, there is no place for Ukraine and us, and therefore they are enemies.

The strangest thing in this war is that after returning to Kyiv, people here, a few hundred kilometres from the tanks, the Grads and the Tornadoes, live as if nothing is happening. But gradually, this realization comes: acquaintances die or get wounds, and the wallet is empty. There is a “diffusion” of war into a peaceful life.

The worst thing I saw there were homeless children. Those who escaped from orphanages and those who lost their parents and home. In hunger, cold, under fire, they went completely wild; they are real Mowgli. You must see how they react to the sounds of gunshots, how they look at food, how they grab it and try to escape. And what is horrible is that thousands and thousands of people are going through the crucible of a terrible war right now. By and large, we do not have an institute of social rehabilitation. I know many guys whose head is on the verge of failure. They have to live with all this shit all their lives. Driven into the shelters of the psyche, it will ‘catch up’ later. That material, moral and psychological destructions that have already taken place are not just for a long time, but for a very long time.

I do not recommend those who want to go there for thrills. Tours to the anti-terrorist operation zone are already organized and for lots of money. That’s what idiots do for idiots, I think. This is a very dangerous and unpredictable area; the front is blurred, saboteurs are roaming, and ‘stupid’ shells are flying. I came under artillery fire, and my car was slapped from the ‘green’ – so I at least understand why I risk.