A protective gear shortage has forced Ukrainian volunteers near Kyiv to share a bulletproof vest to deliver vital aid to injured civilians

• Anna Fedchenko, who volunteers with an NGO stationed outside Kyiv, told Insider the group is out of medical supplies and needs bulletproof vests.
• As a result of the lack of supplies, some of the volunteers have been sharing a single bulletproof vest.
• When volunteers walk around the city without a bulletproof vest, they risk getting shot by Russian forces, she said.

Anna Fedchenko is desperate. 

Fedchenko joined Let’s Do It, Ukraine — an NGO stationed just outside Kyiv — on the first day of the invasion of Ukraine to provide vital lifelines to civilians who are under steady bombardment from Russian forces. 

“I attended a three-hour course on how to provide the first aid,” Fedchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist, told Insider in a Zoom interview through a translator. “And I had some knowledge on this, and I wanted to be somehow useful for the country. That is why I joined this territorial defense group.” 

Since then, Fedchenko and four other volunteers have been delivering critical aid to injured civilians, as well as food and other basic necessities. But now, the group itself is in need of help. 

Fedchenko and her group of volunteers have not only run out of medical supplies — there are no bandages or first-aid kits, she said — but also gear vital for moving through a perilous battlefield, particularly bulletproof vests. 

Without them, they risk death as they walk through the city unarmed and unprotected, Fedchenko said. Russian soldiers at the beginning of the invasion fired at one volunteer, Fedchenko recalled, but he survived — likely because he had a bulletproof vest on. 

“They’re not professional military people,” Fedchenko said. “And most of the supplies which we receive as help from other countries, like helmets and vests, they go directly to the military, which [is] based mostly in the hotspots like Kyiv or the Eastern part of Ukraine,” leaving volunteers vulnerable to danger.

The volunteers “would like to help our local people, our people who we live with,” Fedchenko told Insider. “To protect them somehow.”

‘We don’t have enough strength’

As Russian soldiers attempt to clear a path into the capital, neighboring cities like Bila Tserkva, about 50 miles south of Kyiv, have become sites of attack. Ukrainian military officials have declared that Bila Tserkva is under curfew, Fedchenko said. 

 The war between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers has led to the collapse of some buildings in Bila Tserkva, Fedchenko said, killing some residents and injuring others. But without medical supplies, the volunteers can’t help injured people.

“We are trying to find all those supplies which are needed, starting from food, medicine,” Fedchenko said. 

When Russian soldiers last month bombed a military station that housed medicine, Fedchenko said it further complicated their efforts.

“All the medicine was destroyed,” she said.

Since then, she and other Let’s Do It, Ukraine volunteers have been trying to locate painkillers and other medicines for Bila Tserkva residents.

Meanwhile, Fedchenko and other volunteers working with Let’s Do It, Ukraine are still trying to provide relief for city residents, despite numerous reports of Russian forces targeting volunteers trying to help Ukrainian civilians.

The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, for example, said earlier this month that at least four volunteers were killed by Russian soldiers while tending to injured civilians or animals. Oleksandr Feldman, a member of Ukraine’s parliament and a social activist, made similar claims, as did the Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian news outlet. Insider is unable to independently verify such claims. 

Some Let’s Do It, Ukraine volunteers have worked out a system in which they share a single vest, according to Fedchenko. While outside tending to civilians, they wear the vest in shifts, she said. Medics who need to treat injuries from bombings by Russian forces “stay without the vest,” she said.

 “Young people go and risk their lives just to help others,” she added.

The volunteers found suppliers of bulletproof vests who are selling them for around $440 apiece, she said, a price that’s “impossible to cover for us as volunteers.” At the same time, they’re already spending money on gas for their vans to transport materials and supplies from the border to various towns and regions, she said. 

Because of how difficult it’s been to source supplies, Fedchenko has started to reach out to her friends overseas, she said, asking them to buy what they need and then mail it over.

Sometimes “it’s faster to get all these supplies through these local volunteers who can personally buy through their network of volunteers,” Fedchenko said.

But there are still hiccups with that strategy.  

She said, for example, a friend in San Diego malied three bulletproof vests, but believes the package got lost in the mail. 

One of her friends based in New York, who identified himself as Vamsee and declined to give his last name, told Insider he’s been fervently trying to ship over bulletproof vests to Ukraine to help Fedchenko and the other volunteers. He’s been calling up suppliers of bulletproof vests in Texas and New Jersey, as well as in other countries like Denmark and the Netherlands. But all of them told him they’d be unable to ship an order into Ukraine, he said. 

“I don’t need to do this alone. I don’t want to be Rambo,” he said. “At one point I thought about buying 10 and getting on a plane and going to the border and giving it to them. But there’s just got to be a better way.”

Fedchenko, in a plea for help, asked that Americans send over medical supplies and bulletproof vests to Ukraine. 

But at the very least, she said, the US should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine to deter Russian forces from firing missiles through the sky. However, President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have resisted calls, including from  Zelenskyy to implement the no-fly zone. 

“It’s [an] unfair war where Russia can strike us with the missiles and we don’t have enough strength to protect from the strikes above us,” she said.