From Canada With Love

KHARKIV, Ukraine—The abandoned industrial warehouse on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, looks like any other in the country. Rusted equipment and half-shattered windows dominate the building, likely unused for decades. The early March chill hangs in the still air.

Among the wreckage sits something new: 25 armored personnel carriers (APCs), their metal plating gleaming in the sunlight. The vehicles—a mix of FV103 Spartan and FV432 APCs, all British-made—have been procured by the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), a Canada-based nongovernmental organization that is working with Ukraine’s armed forces. They are being delivered to Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces in a landmark package that organizers hope will mark a new phase of critical aid shipments to support upcoming Ukrainian operations against the Russian invasion.

The delivery is the result of more than six months of effort by UWC organizers, chief among them Andrew Potichnyj, who has come along to present the vehicles to their recipients. He is still somewhat in disbelief that his team has managed to pull it off.

“It’s actually kind of surreal,” says Potichnyj, looking at the row of Spartans. “Something we started discussing in October is now almost ready to go—that’s pretty cool.”

Potichnyj, a Toronto native and member of Canada’s 1.4 million-strong Ukrainian diaspora, has been involved in organizing deliveries of supplies to Ukraine since 2014, when Russian-backed militants in the country’s east first began fighting. His experience led UWC’s leadership to turn to him to lead their Unite With Ukraine initiative when they looked to expand their support last year.

“When things started ramping up [in Ukraine] in early February [2022], UWC President Paul Grod asked me if I would be interested in leading this project,” Potichnyj says. “I’ve been doing this on a much smaller scale since 2014, arranging equipment for friends and doing stuff like that for the guys who were fighting. So when Paul offered me this, I thought about it for a few days and then said, ‘yeah, let’s go for it.’”

On March 7, 2022, Potichnyj arrived in Ukraine, where he’s been ever since.

Unite With Ukraine’s initial focus was personal gear—“body armor, helmets, proper first aid kits and some drones and night vision [equipment],” Potichnyj says. It wasn’t until the fall that they started to dream bigger, inspired by the Ukrainian soldiers they were helping: the newly inaugurated Territorial Defense Forces (TDF).

“When this program was initiated in February [2022], [UWC leadership] really wanted to put an emphasis on the TDF,” Potichnyj says. “This was a new structure, and it was identified as one that probably doesn’t have the budget of other structures, nor does it have the support on a massive scale that the international partners give to the armed forces,” he says.

The TDF have played a crucial role in Ukraine’s defensive efforts. Officially established in its current form only at the end of 2021, it has been characterized as “the biggest mobilization of civilian fighters since the Second World War.” The volunteers and reservists that make up the formation were envisioned as a sort of lighter complement to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, holding ground and carrying out simpler tasks while the professional military focused on the most intense combat areas. Growing to 110,000 strong already by the end of May 2022, the TDF took part in the defense of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and other cities in the first month of the war alone.

As the war continued, so did the need for new equipment. That’s where the UWC, which Potichnyj says has raised over $40 million to date, saw an opportunity to help.

“The idea [for this vehicle delivery] first came together once we started talking to Gen. [Ihor] Tantsyura, the TDF’s overall commander,” Potichnyj says. “One of the mistakes I see a lot of Western experts make here is that they come to Ukraine trying to sell them something they think Ukrainians need. When in reality, we all need to listen to the Ukrainians and hear what they need, and then try to make it happen. And this, what we’re looking at here with these armored evacuation vehicles, is an example of that,” he says.

Tantsyura explained that his dream was to outfit every TDF brigade with 25 armored vehicles. After consulting with TDF advisors, Potichnyj and his team took that idea and began exploring the market. They eventually settled on the British-made FV103 Spartan and FV432 APCs, finding a private supplier in the United Kingdom with a number of the vehicles available.

“We filtered through a lot of salesmen who want to sell things for three, four times the actual value, until we ended up finding a supplier in Britain, who buys decommissioned equipment from the U.K.’s armed forces,” Potichnyj explains. “His business model before the full-scale invasion was actually renting [these vehicles] as props for weddings and parties and stuff like that. … We ended up sending a team to Britain to actually check the equipment, and it fit the bill for a very reasonable price,” he says.

Surprisingly, such vehicles are legal and available on the private market, as part of their dual-use (civilian-military) nature. “There’s no weapons [presently] on any of these vehicles—these are designed for transportation,” Potichnyj explains. Additional legal support by the U.K. and Ukrainian governments smoothed the process, and by late February, they were in Poland and ready to go.

Now, they’re here in Kharkiv—and their new owners, the men of Ukraine’s 127th TDF Brigade, couldn’t be happier.

Artur, a 30-year-old lieutenant colonel from Kharkiv who only provided his first name, as active-duty Ukrainian service members aren’t permitted to give their last names, has fought with the 127th for more than a year, first repelling the Russian assault on the city at the war’s outset and later taking part in the September 2022 counteroffensive that saw Ukraine liberate nearly the entirety of Russian-occupied Kharkiv oblast. He says the Spartans and FV432s will be crucial for saving his men’s lives.

“The main task of armored vehicles is preserving the lives of soldiers,” Artur says. “Can you imagine driving in a regular car during a mortar or artillery attack? Because that’s what we’ve had to do until now. Here, with these specialized vehicles, you drive [in a combat zone] and you’re not worried about a thing. Short of a direct hit, you can actually survive to get to the wounded soldiers and evacuate them,” he says.

While much safer than civilian vehicles, the Spartans and FV432s are still vulnerable on the incredibly deadly modern battlefield. Three of those delivered in March have since been lost, including one confirmed destroyed near Bakhmut on May 15. That makes continuing the deliveries even more important. Potichnyj and his team have the plan to do just that—and at a far greater scale.

“Ideally, we’ll be buying hundreds of these,” says Potichnyj. “This first batch is a proof of concept, going to one of the brigades involved in the hottest [combat] areas of eastern Ukraine. Now we can continue with that.”

At the time of writing, another shipment of 15 armored vehicles purchased by UWC was already on its way to Ukraine.

For Potichnyj, it’s the example of Ukrainians across the world coming together that has been the hallmark of this effort.

“Since not many NGOs, if any, are doing this at the moment, we see this as the most effective way to spend the money raised from the entire Ukrainian diaspora,” he says. “We’ve got donors from over 70 countries who have contributed to this purchase, and every donor can see that even their $20 bill is in this movement here. It may seem like it’s not a lot, but when a lot of people get together and do something large-scale, this is the end result,” Potichnyj says.

No one appreciates that more than those Ukrainians in the 127th.

“We are so grateful, to Canada and everyone else [who donated to this],” says Yanyk, a reservist who also declined to give his last name. “There’s a saying in Ukraine: ‘A million threads make a shirt.’ So here you go, a thread, a thread, a thread, and now our brigade has its shirt.”