It’s a sunny June day in Kherson, a city on the frontline of the war in Ukraine, and a strong breeze blows through the streets – a small relief for the passersby making their way out in the open to get groceries. The Russian bomber drones terrorising the city are a constant threat in the background of such errands. Igor sits at a café table, coffee in hand. A nearby concrete bunker, marked with a stencil of an escaping man, blocks the wind.
“We picked up a dead body in the red zone yesterday,” he says. “He had been taking care of his paralysed brother, who we then had to rescue… but there’s no space in Kherson for the brother. Temporarily, we’ll put him in the hospital, but it’s already overflowing.”
Igor, 36, runs the local volunteer organisation, or Strong Because Free, which primarily works to evacuate civilians from the ‘red zone’ of high risk in the villages around Kherson – where Russian drone operators go on daily ‘human safaris’ targeting ambulances, firefighters, civilians and aid workers, then posting videos of the attacks to an audience on Telegram. “We’re expecting another hit here,” Igor says, waving at the building next to him, which has already withstood two rocket attacks. “There’s a kindergarten. And the Russians marked it because there are volunteers here.”
In 2022, Russian troops surged through this area of Ukraine. After a brief period of occupation marked by civilian torture and mass rape, the Ukrainians retook the region and were able to hold off Russian advances – until recently. “In the last few days, many volunteers have been killed. The guys who do the evacuations, they’re target number one,” Igor says.
Since the beginning of the year, humanitarian aid to Ukraine has dropped significantly. In 2024, Ukraine received roughly €88.7 billion in general aid. But since January 2025, the US has halted new spending, dropping from €35 billion in financial, military and humanitarian support in 2022 to almost nothing this year. To date, the US has only allocated €3.4 billion in humanitarian aid out of nearly €115 billion since the full-scale invasion began. While Europe increased its share, overall aid has declined – and what’s more, public attention on the conflict has faded to the background. This shortfall of both is weakening Ukraine’s ability to evacuate civilians as Russia’s attacks intensify, putting pressure on grassroots aid organisations. Volunteers on the ground say they can only bring people part of the way to safety, often leaving them stranded in areas under fire. “We don’t evacuate people anymore,” Igor says grimly. “We evacuate bodies.”
We don’t evacuate people anymore. We evacuate bodies
Sitting next to Igor is Andreas Tölke, who runs the Berlin-based humanitarian aid organisation Be An Angel. Tölke is something of a war zone networker, identifying the needs of small, local NGOs and attempting to cut through the massive bureaucratic hurdles standing in the way of international assistance. Tölke is in Kherson to coordinate directly with Igor on what support they need the most, as what little aid does arrive isn’t always effective. “We had high heels once. I think it was 3,000 high heels, as a donation – really, not kidding,” Tölke tells me. “It was announced as ‘shoes in different sizes’. We said, ‘Yeah, great. Send them over.’ And then we opened up, it was all silver and red high heels.” He smiles at Igor. “You want some? Which size?”
Aid doesn’t always line up with reality on the ground in Ukraine, with bureaucracy and miscommunication leaving gaps, Tölke says. “It’s important to understand the needs of the front-line aid workers, to hear directly what would make a difference for them. Ukrainians might receive an aid project they don’t need, like another food programme.”
Instead of shoes, people might need windows, doors, pipes – or in this case, an armoured vehicle. Be An Angel recently sourced a bulletproof Subaru sedan for Igor, to make his civilian evacuations from the villages around Kherson safer. The car, originally designed for Italian diplomats, survived a drone strike, but then broke down. “We can’t afford the repairs,” Igor says. “And there is only one good mechanic here; the other mechanics take advantage and charge extra.” Minutes later, a colleague arrives at the café and shares some news in Ukrainian. Igor translates: “Okay… the mechanic just got bombed.”
The business of hope
Andreas Tölke never set out to run an NGO. For years he was a lifestyle journalist, writing for titles like Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle. He interviewed Sarah Jessica Parker and Frank Gehry. But in 2015, when more than a thousand Syrian refugees were arriving in Berlin every day and the German state was overwhelmed, he began opening his apartment to families who had nowhere else to go – hosting as many as 16 people at a time. Eventually, around 400 displaced people passed through his home, and what began as an act of hospitality quickly grew into a formal system of support.
Losing one’s home is the loss of a third skin, a trauma
To carry the work further, Tölke and his colleagues created Be an Angel. Since 2015, it’s grown into an international charity providing crisis relief around the world. Tölke has helped support refugees in Germany, Serbia and Greece; provided evacuation in the Middle East; facilitated medical exchange programmes in the US; and opened the migrant-staffed Berlin restaurant Kreuzberger Himmel. To date, Be an Angel has helped more than 23,000 Ukrainians get to safety and delivered almost 5,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid to the country.
Unlike slow-moving institutions, Tölke believes his relatively small group can react immediately and bridge the gaps where governments and large agencies can’t. “The local NGOs, they’re all completely overwhelmed with the administration and bureaucracy,” Tölke says. “I would really like to drive their projects. If we install a system of matchmaking, we can find organisations who want to support Ukrainian NGOs from the EU… like Tinder for NGOs.”
Tölke is already implementing this style of connection with several localised partner NGOs in different cities around Ukraine. As a facilitator, he aims to deliver support that bigger institutions like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) might not be equipped to offer. This two-month trip is all about gathering information on what he can do from Berlin to help.
Among the initiatives linked to his network is
, or Hope Home. Hope Home is on a mission to help people rebuild, attempting to show the feasibility of traditional building materials like straw, mushrooms and hemp – offering a faster, more ecologically-friendly construction process that residents can implement themselves, without waiting on international funds tied up in red tape. Their pilot project is underway in Pervomais’ke, a village surrounded by wide fields of golden wheat – fields now dotted with landmines. After Russian forces retreated from Kyiv, many villages in the region suffered heavy artillery and missile strikes. Where once 9,000 people lived, now there are only 2,500.
The youth don’t have anything to do here, they’re just riding their scooters around all day.
“Losing one’s home is the loss of a third skin, a trauma,” says psychologist and former Berlin senator Adrienne Goehler, who runs Hope Home along with the architect Sophie Halat and Norbert Höpfer, a mineralogist from Brandenburg. On the June trip, Goehler oversees a group of young men extracting hemp bricks from a clay cast. “Being able to build with local materials has the impact of making one’s self independent,” she says.
Pervomais’ke has no cultural centre and no local government office, but what it does have is a lot of teenagers with nowhere to go – which is why Hope Home is building a youth centre. Of the remaining residents, 300 are adolescents without jobs, school or the ability to travel. Local resident Marina welcomes the youth centre. “The youth don’t have anything to do here, they’re just riding their scooters around all day,” she says while caring for an overweight dachshund – one of dozens of dogs whose owners fled without them after the occupation.
A major problem plaguing the rebuilding effort in areas like this is asbestos. Up to 70% of buildings in Ukraine contain the harmful mineral fibres; a ban was only enacted in 2022. Rubble from destroyed buildings has been widely reported as being used repave roads, with little to no concern for the asbestos inhaled by the workers in the process. Goehler and Höpfer believe that education on building techniques common in preindustrial times can reduce dependence on concrete for places like Pervomais’ke. “The thing I want to tell you about hemp,” says Höpfer (for the umpteenth time that day), “is fire resistance. Fire resistance works great on this material. If you plaster it, it’s not really burning.” Höpfer is a renewable building materials nerd, having worked on similar efforts in Rwanda and Syria.
Tölke’s role with Hope Home is more of his administrative matchmaking. They’ve had trouble communicating with the local Ukrainian community, who look at the project sceptically. “To them, it’s just foreigners doing a weird thing,” Tölke explains. After visiting the project in Pervomais’ke, Tölke has travelled to Mykolaiv, a city a few hours from Pervomais’ke, to pitch the project to Vicki, a Ukrainian colleague who has successfully led several similar initiatives. He sits in a cafe in Mykoliav, a reggae version of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ blaring through the speakers at 10am. “This project needs someone who’s really driving it, someone who says, ‘This is what we do, this is the purpose, this is the idea behind it.’ So the local community will go ‘Oh, wow, I’m proud of it. Great.’” Vicki promises to get in touch with Goehler and see what she can do to help.
A hospital on the brink
Across the country in the coastal city of Odesa, Tölke visits another one of Be An Angel’s local partners working at the civic level. One often-overlooked aspect of war zone administration is that most resources are directed towards the areas of most visible destruction. But in a country filled with internal refugees, what happens to those who were already in need? Hospitals, care homes and animal shelters in places like Odesa are facing the same funding shortfalls and hardships as the regions directly on the frontline, but without the attention. What aid remains tends to flow where the crisis is the loudest, for reasons not difficult to understand, which ends up leaving out many of those who are most vulnerable. Among them are the residents of Odesa’s psychiatric hospital.
The Odesa Regional Medical Centre of Mental Health serves as a long-term in-patient facility for individuals with varying levels of mental and physical needs. Some have been there for decades, others just a few weeks. A number of patients are veterans, suffering from trauma brought on by the war. The hospital is government funded, but suffers from such severe budget constraints that residents are left living in inhumane conditions.
A walk through the geriatric women’s ward with Tölke reveals the depth of the budget cuts. Small rooms built for two are crammed with six beds. Some walls have collapsed entirely, leaving mouldy gaps that open into closets – where more patients sleep, beds wedged tightly together. In one common room, six women sit around a table, murmuring and chanting phrases only they can understand. A nurse walks in and snaps at them to be quiet. She doesn’t seem to notice, or care, about the sharp smell of urine in the air – one woman has clearly soiled herself, a dark puddle drying slowly beneath her chair.
“It’s not supposed to be six beds. I would love it to be two beds. Or even one. That would be great,” says Oleksandra Pavlenko as she carries crates of freshly baked sweets into the hospital. Pavlenko runs Include, a local volunteer organisation that hopes to completely renovate the facility and improve the patients’ overall quality of life. With enough donations to refurbish two rooms already, she hopes to soon renovate an entire ward.
“A big goal of ours is staff training and salaries,” explains Abe Collier from Dignity International, who works alongside Pavlenko. “It’s super crucial that these folks get paid at least triple what they’re being paid now. It’s like $200 a month for the staff, they can’t live off that.”
On their biweekly visits, Pavlenko and Collier make their way through the hospital’s corridors with crates of sweets and baby food for the patients without teeth. The patients light up at the sight of them, flocking to Pavlenko to thank her. “If they didn’t do this, no one would,” says Tölke, who helps secure donations and funding for Include. “Someone like Oleksandra is moving the world. She makes these people feel seen where no one else will – but it’s more than that. It’s taking pride in your community and standing for Ukraine. Human attention is incredibly valuable in situations like this.”
When the next drone comes
Back in Kherson, the most important stop on the trip, Igor shows Tölke the bunker he and his team of volunteers have converted into a school. Walking down the building’s stairs with a drone-detecting device in hand, he leads us past playrooms, a gym and bunk beds – all built in the last year. But why create new spaces for children in a high-risk war zone? “Many parents are afraid to leave because they don’t know if they’ll get money, if they will be able to pay rent [elsewhere],” explains Igor. “Children can say, ‘Please take me, I don’t want to die, take me out of Kherson.’ But the parents don’t understand.”
For Igor and the others, leaving is not an option. “We will stay as long as Kherson stands,” he says: a reminder that where there is danger, there are also people willing to protect their community. “We don’t know where the next shelling will happen, when the next drone comes. We just need money – we need to find space in other cities for old people, people who can’t move, children. Evacuating them and having them safe… we need help for that.” Igor appeals directly to the German capital. “I want people in Berlin to know the situation here is really terrible. People die every die.”
In Kherson – like in Odesa and Pervomais’ke – the work of people like Igor, Pavlenko and Tölke can only go so far. The residents need a constant influx of resources and attention to match the steady destruction coming from Russia and bring people to safety. But as the headlines fade and donor fatigue deepens, the gap between what is needed and what arrives grows wider. “It’s a chemical reaction to crisis,” explains Tölke. “Crisis is pain, and the body and mind get used to pain. It’s happening to Ukrainians and Europeans: everyone’s system is getting used to it… and that’s dangerous.”
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