The enemy is far away but the village is barricaded. Arriving in Rudnyky, you have to show your credentials before you can push the iron barrier, installed across the road. Beware of foreigners and “Saboteur”, these infiltrators at the outposts of the Russian invasion, disguised as police, taxis or journalists, in the midst of civilians. Only the inhabitants escape inspection.
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50 kilometers south of Lviv, Rudnyky has 3,000 inhabitants and some 200 refugees. As everywhere in Ukraine, the locality has formed its brigade of volunteers to stand guard, control those who are not locals and detect suspicious activities. The head of the municipal administration (a burly, broad-shouldered man in jeans and a faux leather jacket) took matters into his own hands: he gathered around a hundred volunteers and organized the rotation of the patrols.
“Everyone has their individual weapon, authorized by the government”, explains Petro, 35, owner of a grocery store. “The Russians here, I don’t really believe in it, but if they dare to come, we will fight, and our army will push them back. »
Collecting donations for the armed forces
Rudnyky, a microcosm of western Ukraine, with its large statue of Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian poet and champion of independence, its public school, its church and its war memorial. A series of low houses, lined up on either side of the road. A former site of iron ore extraction, the town is home to a collective farm and ponds for fish farming. Before the Russian invasion, many inhabitants, workers and employees traveled back and forth from their place of work in Poland.
In the cemetery, we commemorate the heroes who died for Ukraine. Helena shows the photo of Volodymyr, 21, a soldier killed March 7 in the bombing of the hospital where he had been evacuated. In September 2021, the whole village accompanied the last journey of Demyan Danyliv, 24, a soldier who fell under machine gun fire, near the village of Prychepylivka, in the Luhansk region (eastern Ukraine), leaving in mourning his mother, three brothers and two sisters.
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In Lviv, Maria moved into her restaurant full-time to oversee the collection of donations for the armed forces. Not far from there, since Thursday, February 24, when the school ceased to operate for its 412 students (aged 6 to 17), the building has been used as a depot to store donations of food, clothing and basic equipment for the troops.
In a classroom, a team of volunteers makes energy bars for the soldiers. Private trucks and cars are then responsible for transporting aid to “hot spots” designated by the military near the front. “In the Mykolaiv sector (Odessa region, Editor’s note)they lack night vision devices,” trust Mary, looking for a solution to find some.
Animator, engineer, vice-rector of the Catholic University
In Ukraine, anyone between the ages of 18 and 60 can enlist in the territorial defense force (volunteers called to serve, most of the time, near their homes, to ensure order and security in their locality or their neighborhood).
Better equipped and trained units, led by former active duty military personnel, can also fulfill ancillary missions behind regular army lines, participate in operations, guard key infrastructure or help combat subversive activities in their zoned. Since the beginning of hostilities, 100,000 Ukrainians have joined this branch of the armed forces, according to the authorities.
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“In case of attack, I will participate in the defense of Lviv”, claims Danylo Shevchak, 19, fresh out of a training day at Yavoriv, a military training camp near the border with Poland. While retaining his job as a facilitator at the regional youth center, he coordinates volunteers who come to register in the territorial defense offices.
“Our presence reassures people”, adds Nick, 31, an engineer at GlobalLogic, a software development company, co-responsible for a group of 70 to 80 volunteers, in charge of the checkpoint and patrols, in a district of Sokilnyky, a residential suburb south of Lviv. .
Higher in the system, Oleh Yaskiv, 49, vice-rector at the Catholic University of Ukraine, has been part of the battalion of the Lviv territorial defense forces since October 2021. Reserve lieutenant and graduate of the military department of the University of Lviv, this doctor of science has provided management there since the start of the war.
“We will defend ourselves to the last”
Like him, a large number of Territorial Defense volunteers are former members of Plast, the largest Ukrainian scout organization, founded in Lviv in 1911 by Oleksander Tysovskyy, Ivan Chmola and Petro Franko (son of the famous Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko). At the organization’s headquarters in Lviv, several hundred volunteers are busy collecting and transferring equipment to soldiers deployed on the front.
Every day, shipments of shoes, bulletproof vests, helmets, medicines and foodstuffs, financed by donations from private individuals and businessmen, in Ukraine and abroad, leave from the warehouse provided by Andriy Nemyrovsky, the CEO of Regno, a food import company.
Since March 8, a volunteer and protection center has been coordinating efforts and resources to deliver aid more quickly to the army and the population in areas where it is needed. “The full-scale war changed the company’s plans”, he wrote on his Facebook page. We work to provide Ukrainian defenders and ordinary people with everything they need. We are on our land and we will defend ourselves to the last. »
