April Huggett: A Canadian Who Chose Ukraine

By Matthew Parish

Friday 2 October 2026

There are many different kinds of foreigner in wartime Ukraine. There are diplomats who arrive in Kyiv with security details and carefully prepared schedules. There are journalists who travel eastwards for a few days before returning to Warsaw, Berlin or London. There are aid workers, volunteers, adventurers and occasionally people whose motives are difficult to understand. Then there are a much smaller number of foreigners for whom Ukraine ceases to be a cause observed from abroad and becomes instead a personal commitment around which their lives are reorganised.

April Huggett belongs emphatically to the latter category. A Canadian from British Columbia, she had no Ukrainian ancestry and no particular connection with Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. She had three children, a comfortable home and an antiques business. The images emerging from Bucha changed the direction of her life. What began as a humanitarian journey intended to last just 18 days ultimately led her into the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

That transformation did not happen overnight, and this is an important part of Huggett’s story. There is sometimes a temptation to romanticise foreigners who come to Ukraine during the war, imagining a dramatic moment in which an ordinary civilian suddenly decides to become a soldier. Huggett’s experience was more gradual and therefore perhaps more instructive. She began by doing the least glamorous work imaginable: raising money, buying supplies and taking them to people who needed them.

She organised fundraising in Canada, including a garage sale that reportedly raised about $7,000, and travelled to Ukraine with humanitarian assistance. She subsequently began delivering food, water and other supplies into increasingly dangerous parts of the country. Over the following years her work took her to places including Bakhmut, Orikhiv, Zarichne, Siversk and Kupiansk. She also became involved in evacuating animals from frontline areas. Frontliner reported in March 2025 that her fundraising had eventually approached $1 million for humanitarian assistance, military equipment and vehicles.

These numbers are impressive, but numbers are not really the point. The remarkable feature of this sort of work is persistence. Ukraine has received extraordinary international sympathy since February 2022, but sympathy inevitably fluctuates. News cycles move elsewhere, donors become tired and yesterday’s emergency gradually becomes today’s familiar background tragedy. The people living in Siversk or Kupiansk do not have the luxury of becoming bored with the war.

Huggett stayed.

By January 2024 she was delivering water in Siversk, where electricity had already disappeared and civilians remained amid increasingly difficult conditions. She was also supporting Ukrainian military units operating in Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, among them the 93rd Separate Mechanised Brigade “Kholodnyi Yar”. Her humanitarian work increasingly brought her into direct contact with the consequences of the fighting and with people whose lives could not be insulated from it.

There is an uncomfortable lesson here about humanitarian work in a prolonged war. Humanitarian assistance saves lives, but by itself it cannot remove the reason why those lives require saving. Food can be delivered to a bombarded town and water can be carried into a place whose infrastructure has been destroyed, but neither action prevents the next bombardment. Huggett eventually reached her own conclusion about this dilemma. After losing people she knew and watching communities she had tried to sustain being progressively destroyed, she decided that humanitarian work alone was no longer enough for her.

In August 2024 she began discussing joining the Ukrainian military. On 9 December 2024, according to Frontliner, she signed a contract and joined the medical service of the Alcatraz Battalion of the 93rd Brigade. The woman who had once sold antiques in a quiet Canadian mountain town had become a combat medic in one of Ukraine’s most experienced mechanised formations.

Her Ukrainian call sign is “Babtsia” — grandmother. It is an affectionate and slightly comic name that appears to capture something important about the role she has adopted. Military organisations require weapons, ammunition and tactical competence, but they also depend upon innumerable acts of care that rarely appear in accounts of battles. Soldiers need medical records, health checks, clean clothing, hygiene supplies, transport and somebody who notices what has been forgotten. Huggett brought something of her humanitarian instincts into military service rather than abandoning them when she put on a uniform.

Frontliner observed her conducting medical training and reported that she helped establish medical records and regular health screening within her battalion. Her work therefore illustrates something easily overlooked about modern armies. The effectiveness of a military formation does not depend solely upon the people firing weapons at the front. Behind them exists an enormous human infrastructure of medics, mechanics, logisticians, drivers, communications specialists and organisers whose work keeps soldiers alive and allows combat units to function.

Huggett’s experience has also given her an unusually intimate perspective upon the technological transformation of the Ukrainian battlefield. When she first travelled through frontline areas in 2022, drones were far less dominant than they subsequently became. By 2024 and 2025, FPV drones had transformed calculations about movement, evacuation and survival. She has described how people operating near the front increasingly have to think about the range of hostile drones and how quickly apparently ordinary journeys can become dangerous.

Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of Huggett’s work is neither technological nor military. It is the fact that she did not have to do any of it.

Canada is thousands of kilometres from Donetsk. Huggett could reasonably have concluded that Ukraine’s tragedy was terrible but belonged to somebody else. She could have made a donation, attended a fundraising event or displayed a Ukrainian flag and nobody could fairly have criticised her. Instead she travelled to Ukraine, repeatedly entered dangerous areas, raised substantial sums of money, supplied civilians and soldiers and eventually placed herself under Ukrainian military discipline as a combat medic.

That distinction matters because solidarity is an easy word to use and a difficult principle to practise. International solidarity with Ukraine is usually discussed in billions of dollars, artillery shells, sanctions packages and diplomatic communiqués. Those things are indispensable, but they can make international support appear abstract. Ultimately every international relationship consists of decisions made by individual human beings. Huggett’s decision was simply to keep doing more.

There is also something particularly Canadian about the symbolism of her presence, although perhaps not in the obvious sense. Canada possesses one of the world’s largest Ukrainian diasporas and has maintained close relations with independent Ukraine for decades. Huggett, however, did not come because of Ukrainian family origins. When she travelled into dangerous communities, the word that transcended the language barrier was “Canada”. Her presence became, in miniature, an expression of a relationship between two countries.

This is one reason foreigners serving Ukraine can have an importance disproportionate to their numbers. A Canadian medic cannot determine the outcome of a war involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But she can demonstrate to Ukrainians in a battered eastern town that somebody from the other side of the world has decided that what happens to them matters. In wartime, when isolation and exhaustion are themselves weapons, that is not insignificant.

None of this requires romanticising war. Huggett herself has spoken openly about its personal cost, including separation from her children, the deaths of friends and the psychological burden of repeatedly watching people she cares about enter danger. In more recent interviews she has described Ukraine not simply as somewhere she came to assist but as a home she is unwilling to abandon. Her satisfaction is measured less in abstract military achievements than in seeing soldiers return alive.

That may ultimately be the most admirable feature of her story. It is not principally a tale about seeking adventure or glory. It is about responsibility expanding step by step. First there were Ukrainians who needed humanitarian supplies. Then there were communities she came to know. Then there were soldiers she supplied. Eventually there were soldiers for whose medical welfare she assumed a direct responsibility.

Ukraine has produced countless such stories among its own citizens since February 2022. Teachers became soldiers, accountants became drone pilots, programmers became military engineers and ordinary families turned their cars, homes and savings towards keeping their country alive. April Huggett’s story is unusual because she was under no national obligation to participate in this extraordinary mobilisation. She chose to become part of it.

One day the war will end, and the foreign volunteers who came to Ukraine will have to decide what Ukraine means to them in peace. Some will return home. Others will stay. All of them will carry experiences that will be difficult to explain to people who did not share them.

Whatever course April Huggett ultimately chooses, Ukraine owes people like her something simpler than mythology. It owes them recognition. Not because foreigners who serve Ukraine are more courageous than the Ukrainians who have borne overwhelmingly the burden of this war, but precisely because they chose voluntarily to share a small part of that burden.

April Huggett came from Canada intending to help Ukraine for 18 days. Years later she is still there, wearing a Ukrainian uniform and looking after Ukrainian soldiers. In an age abundant in declarations of solidarity, there can be few clearer definitions of what solidarity actually means.