When 22-year-old Mariia Lohvynenko boarded a plane for Poland two days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, she did not believe war was about to happen.
Neither did Mariia imagine returning to Kharkiv with a minibus and enough humanitarian aid to feed 500 people and a list of Ukrainians to evacuate to Lviv and Lutsk in the west almost two weeks later.
Speaking to The Independent, Mariia said she was able to organise two evacuations with help from Facebook friends and her connections across Ukraine, and even Instagram, where she has amassed a group of willing volunteers.
It began when a Facebook friend hired a bus to evacuate people from central Ukraine, when she realised she could also do the same for Kharkiv.
Like many Ukrainians, she has turned to helping those most in need – with the vulnerable, women and children either having already fled Russian aggression or waiting to do so.
“You know, right now in Ukraine social networks are really active,” Mariia said, “as well as volunteers and volunteer organisations. So whenever I see some (social media) posts from my friends, or from my colleagues, we are all trying to help each other”.
Her plan? To hire a minibus to drive people from her home city of Kharkiv to safety in western Ukraine – a distance of about 1,000km that required multiple days of driving from Lviv to Kharkiv in the east, and rest stops via Dnipro.
“I actually contacted a lot of people. It was different connections from different parts of my life,” said Mariia from Poland, where she has now taken refuge with friends. “So I contacted a lot of people and finally, I found one CEO of a tech company in Dnipro.”
Mariia said it was “impossible” to buy a minibus in Kharkiv or her nearby home town of Kup’yans’k, where people are also in need of evacuation, because of the deteriorating situation on the ground.
Her contact in Dnipro, who she says was part of a Ukrainian volunteer organisation, had been personally evacuating people from eastsern Ukraine and was able to give Mariia details of a bus owner in Lviv, however.
“We just managed to work together, and right now we are evacuating people from Dnipro and Kharkiv to Lviv,” Mariia explained, “and also we are driving humanitarian help on the way back to Kharkiv”.
She said her plan came together thanks to Facebook and social media, with Ukrainians sharing information about minibus evacuations, aid and opportunities for those abroad. Some of her friends share updates about upcoming minibus evacuations of their own, with people asked to call ahead of time.
“Some people are giving their own cars to strangers to evacuate their families, so people are really amazing,” Mariia said. “They all understand that they’re putting themselves in a dangerous position but these drivers who are still working as cab drivers or whoever evacuates people, they’re truly amazing.”
Like the recruiter, many Ukrainians have taken the rescue mission into their own hands by organising minibuses and driving for miles – sometimes also for days – to help those stranded closer to Russia’s frontline.
Mariia said she knows one mother and a daughter who were stuck standing on a train for 24 hours waiting to leave Ukraine, and that traffic in certain areas is also making it harder for people to leave.
On Tuesday, authorities in Ukraine’s largest easternmost city said some 500 civilians had been killed by Russian attacks to date. Many others who have been forced to stay behind are meanwhile struggling to find basic supplies.
“So we are also driving with humanitarian aid through the districts of Kharkiv and this weekend we managed to deliver more than 500 people with some food,” said Mariia, who keeps in touch with her team of volunteers on Instagram.
“Because I know that it depends from district to district, but for example, my stepfather is living far away from Kharkiv’s centre, and it’s so hard to take some food there. But yeah that’s what we are doing right now”.
Her own family, who like many of the 3 million refugees who have fled Ukraine, have never been abroad before and were without passports. She was able to convince them to leave Ukraine last week despite having never been abroad before.
“I didn’t think I had this level of psychological trauma they had,” said Mariia, who had not experienced the nights of shelling and air raid sirens, but still could not sleep when the war began. “And they were so afraid to leave their home and feel even when the war started.”
Mariia said although some of those she helped evacuate had friends in Poland, many had not wanted to go beyond Lviv, or western Ukraine, and are among some 200,000 estimated people to be calling the city home, at least temporarily.
While her Polish friends have provided Mariia and her family with a place to stay, she said she wanted to create resources for Ukrainians now stranded in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere and is working to create a website with information on work opportunities for Ukrainian refugees.
“As far as I know there are a lot of opportunities for Ukrainians,” said Mariia. “For example in Poland, in Austria, in Germany, and in many many countries, but they are all divided into different websites and when you’ve just come from the war and you’re so shocked, believe me I saw what huge trauma people had, and they are not able to just Google search information.”
She says she also used a Google Doc to collect information from her Facebook friends across Europe about opportunities for Ukrainians, and also to reach those in need of evacuations.
While she works on creating the website and an app, further evacuations are planned and Mariia – like many others in Ukraine – say they will continue trying to help in any way they can.
“Because before that, it was like, the most safest opportunity to go away from Kharkiv was to take a train. But trains right now are super overcrowded”.
The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered. To find out more about our Refugees Welcome campaign, click here. To sign the petition click here. If you would like to donate then please click here for our GoFundMe page.
