Amid war, Ukraine’s millennials feel special responsibility for nation

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Oles Yakymchuk was in Ohio, studying for a master’s degree in fine arts. He did not have to come back to his homeland. The war was an ocean away.

But Mr. Yakymchuk, who’s spent the last four months raising money and delivering first-aid supplies, couldn’t tolerate the distance. “I didn’t know how I could live a normal life in the U.S. during all this crazy stuff happening here,” he says. “I would have to come back.”

So he did – in part to support his family, in part because he couldn’t ignore his feelings for his country. Mr. Yakymchuk is 29, almost the same age as modern Ukraine, which was founded in August 1991. He and the country have grown up together, through independence, economic depression, democratic revolution, and now war. Those events have both profoundly influenced his life and made him want to influence the life of his country.

In Ukraine, Mr. Yakymchuk’s generation is known for its activism, its European ideals, and its patriotism. Young people protested for democracy during the 2013-14 Maidan revolution and the Orange Revolution 10 years before it.

Now, young people are among the most involved in Ukraine’s war effort – gathering aid or fighting on the front lines.

Their work shows a powerful sense of agency. When faced with threats to their country, Ukraine’s post-independence generation often feels like it can, and must, do something. It’s a foil to the political pessimism elsewhere, particularly in the United States, where young people often feel the least enabled to act.

During wartime, though, there’s a cost to being a generation that tries. Last month in Kyiv, hundreds of people attended the funeral of Roman Ratushny, a young activist who had volunteered to fight on the first day of the war. Elsewhere in the country, many have begun to worry that this generation will also face some of the war’s worst consequences.

“This war is our war, and this is our responsibility,” says Mr. Yakymchuk.

“They’re the bravest”

Mr. Yakymchuk has been an activist before, including during the Maidan revolution. So when he returned to Kyiv this March, he reconnected with several friends with a similar background. They wanted to do something to help the war effort, and decided to collect first-aid supplies. Within a few weeks, Mr. Yakymchuk had opened a bank account and posted a donation page online. Within a month, while walking to get coffee one morning, he checked the account. He had a $30,000 balance.

He and his friends have bought and delivered, sometimes near actual fighting, thousands of first-aid kits and tourniquets. In the process, Mr. Yakymchuk’s number was passed on the front lines from person to person, who would then call and request equipment. Eventually his group registered as an official nongovernmental organization, UA First Aid, but only after months of work without weekends and relying on savings to pay rent and other essentials.

“My way of fighting stress is to act,” says Mr. Yakymchuk, speaking to the Monitor at a Kyiv pizza joint.

Still, it sometimes nags him that he didn’t enlist. It’s been difficult to try to meet the needs of his country when those needs are so great. “I don’t want to do this job, actually,” he says. “I’m doing it just because they need this.”

Inga Levy, an artist in her mid-30s from Kyiv who is now living in Lithuania, says people their age feel like Ukraine’s needs have to be met.

Ms. Levy was born into the USSR, but she wasn’t raised in it. “The world became more open; we saw different countries; we could travel; we got more information,” she says of her generation.

Growing up in such an environment, and watching the country mature after the Maidan revolution, gave her a sense of optimism about the country that her parents don’t share. Because of that hope, she got involved before the war in cultural preservation around her city – helping save murals and other works of art from development. “If not me,” she says, “then no one [will do it].”

She senses now a similar kind of motivation from other people her age or younger. At once, it’s encouraging and defeating. She’s already lost multiple friends.

“These young people who volunteer, going to the front line – they’re the bravest,” says Ms. Levy, who accepted a residency in Lithuania during the war. “I know that not only they are dying, but these are the most painful losses.”

“We can do something”

During Soviet rule, such losses might not have been acceptable, says Ivan Nikolenko, a 27-year-old anti-corruption activist who’s become a full-time first-aid instructor during the war.

Mr. Nikolenko was born in the eastern city of Dnipro, home to an enormous rocket plant first built by the Soviet Union. There, he grew up believing that Ukraine was almost a lost cause and that European integration was an error. Even now, he says, his parents are somewhat pro-Russian.

He understands why: They grew up in the Soviet Union surrounded by Soviet propaganda. Ukrainians at that time weren’t permitted the freedom or amount of information that younger generations enjoy today. They have this ​​”disbelief in the country, in the people – the disbelief in general that someone could wish better for them,” says Mr. Nikolenko.

“The major difference between us, like 20- or 30-, and 50- or 60-year-old people is the thing that we believe: that we can do something,” he says.

The same belief leads Kyril Bezkorovainy, 27, to write.

In 2014, after fighting began in the Donbas region, Mr. Bezkorovainy and his friends noticed that major print publications were leaving Ukraine. So he and his friends started one of their own. They focused on science writing, and made some mistakes, but have since grown into multiple magazines, podcasts, and websites.

Since the war, they’ve begun publishing about first aid, evasive maneuvers, water purification, and other survival skills. Their work has become a how-to guide for civilians surviving a war. That’s what he wants for his country: survival.

“All important stages of my life are somehow tied with these ... crucial stages for sovereignty, for democracy for our country,” says Mr. Bezkorovainy. “We are going through those challenges together with Ukraine.”

And they all will make it through, says Mr. Yakymchuk, sitting in the pizza kitchen in Kyiv next to a map of the country. Sometimes he finds old daily schedules from his time in Ohio, and still feels shocked at how different life was, just going to classes and playing music. But he doesn’t just want an easy life elsewhere.

“I want to make my own paradise,” he says, and he wants it to be in Ukraine.

Olya Bystritskaya supported reporting for this story.