In Ukraine, this firefighter and all-round rescuer seeks to provide hope

For the Ukrainian firefighter near the war’s front line with Russia, the work is never done. This day showed why.

After he ended a long shift putting out flames at 8:30 a.m., he did not go home. Instead he changed clothes, pulling on a uniform labeled “Ukrainian Rescuer,” before jumping into his car and racing toward the front to evacuate two civilians as incoming artillery fire engulfed their village.

“It was a heavy situation today. I had to evacuate people under shell fire,” says Ivan Subotin, a well-known local fireman and founder of a volunteer rescue organization, started in 2020, called Search Donbas.

Russian advances along this southeastern corner of the front line – accompanied by an apparent Russian strategy of reducing to rubble villages and towns before seizing them – mean that Mr. Subotin’s workload increases by the day.

“I have been through a huge number of evacuations,” says Mr. Subotin, who the day before was busy putting out brush fires sparked by extreme heat in Myrnohrad, a coal mining town in eastern Ukraine.

“Of course, some people evacuate with good advance time, get their things, and it is more orderly,” says Mr. Subotin. “But there are also those who just leave under shelling.

“We pick them up; you see them stinking, sweating after spending a few weeks in a cellar; they haven’t seen daylight for some time, and have just one plastic bag [of belongings] left,” he says. “When you take them to a city with electricity and water, they are shocked.”

The situation was tranquil a few months ago during initial evacuations, he says, “but now people are panicking and did not expect the front line to move [toward them] so quickly. There are Russian drones everywhere; people are running around with their eyes wide open.

“The war has become difficult; I don’t have a drone-jamming antenna,” Mr. Subotin says. “Even I am scared. The Russians are targeting every car.”

The charity that Mr. Subotin founded with three friends has expanded into a 50-person-strong organization. Volunteers don’t stop at rescuing people. On one memorable occasion they saved eight cows, an accomplishment that required walking 12 miles to safety under extremely hazardous conditions.

But why take such risks, even if to save the lives of your fellow citizens? For Mr. Subotin, the answer is about not just helping out, but also providing a ray of hope to Ukrainians after 2 1/2 years of devastating conflict since Russia’s 2022 invasion.

“This is important, that you are helping people believe in something good again,” he says.

In July that ethos earned him his seventh award of official recognition, in the form of a medal with a white cross – a Cross of Civic Merit. It was given to him by the military administration of Pokrovsk – the city just west of Myrnohrad – which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says has become the primary target of Russia’s summer offensive.

As the Russians advance on this front, Mr. Subotin has told people to evacuate as soon as they can, especially if they have children, who can be very easily traumatized by a rushed evacuation, he says. But many remain reluctant.

“A lot of people say, ‘I will just wait this out.’ I hear the same thing everywhere; then when it gets bad, they panic,” he says. “I tell them it is stupid to ‘wait this out’; what does that even mean?”

Those rescued are most often grateful, though some act as though they are entitled to evacuation, no matter the risks to volunteer rescuers, says Mr. Subotin. Donations have dropped off somewhat, he adds, “because people have less, and the war has dragged on,” but Search Donbas has a high level of public trust and a broad contributor base.

Indeed, Mr. Subotin’s local reputation is such that, when the firefighter was putting out the brush fire, a local pastor, Oleksandr Radin, who was helping put out the flames, asked him, “Do you know Ivan Subotin?”

Mr. Radin says he was pleasantly surprised to meet him for the first time, amid the swirl of smoke and ash from the fire.

“He’s a great man,” he says.

Likewise, one member of Mr. Radin’s church, military chaplain Vasyl Kovalov, recalled with gratitude how Mr. Subotin had put out a fire in his house just a month after the Russian invasion.

But is the firefighting rescuer optimistic about the state of the war in Ukraine?

“It’s hard to answer this question,” Mr. Subotin says. “One day you wake up and you are full of energy; you know you will evacuate some people. But then you come to those people and see the whole village is on fire, everything is burning, people are in misery, they are traumatized, and you just think, ‘What’s going to happen to my house?’

“You come back home after such an evacuation, [and] you have sediment in your heart and your soul, and it pushes you down. And you have only one question: ‘What’s going to happen next? What’s in the future?’” he says.

His answer?

“Just the work,” says Mr. Subotin. “We have to do what we do. You wake up every morning; you know you have a job here; you have people to help.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.