Dzyga’s Paw: The Technology of Ukrainian Resistance

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 22 September 2026

There is something peculiarly Ukrainian about naming a military technology charity after a dog.

The story of Dzyga’s Paw, or Лапка Дзиґи, begins with Dzyga herself, the dog belonging to the organisation’s founders, Dimko Zhluktenko and his wife Iryna. In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dzyga apparently ran around a parcel being prepared for Ukrainian soldiers and left her pawprints upon one of the uniforms. The pawprint became the inspiration for the organisation’s name, logo and even its official stamp.

Behind this charming piece of Ukrainian eccentricity lies an exceptionally serious organisation. Dzyga’s Paw has developed from an improvised volunteer initiative into a sophisticated Lviv-based charitable foundation supplying Ukrainian military units with drones, communications systems, satellite terminals, night-vision equipment, thermal imaging devices, autonomous power systems and other technologies indispensable to twenty-first century warfare.

Its history also tells us something important about the transformation of Ukrainian society since 24 February 2022.

From IT to the front

Before the full-scale invasion, Dimko Zhluktenko worked in information technology. When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, he abandoned his career and began using his own savings and his network of friends and acquaintances to obtain equipment for people he knew serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

What began as an essentially personal exercise became something considerably larger. Zhluktenko mobilised an online community, initially through Twitter, while he and Iryna subsequently established a formal charitable foundation. The organisation has since attracted donors from more than 70 countries. Its website presently records more than US$6.5 million in equipment delivered to Ukrainian military formations and more than 100 Ukrainian units reinforced through its activities.

This evolution is characteristic of some of the best Ukrainian voluntary organisations that emerged after the invasion. They did not begin with institutional grants, international conferences or elaborate organisational charts. They began with somebody receiving a telephone call from a friend at the front saying that his unit needed something.

Then somebody found it. Then somebody paid for it. Then somebody drove it east. Only afterwards came the institution.

Fighting a technological war

Dzyga’s Paw distinguishes herself from conventional humanitarian charities because she expressly concentrates upon supporting Ukraine’s military effort. The foundation explains its reasoning quite openly: the humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine exists principally because Russia invaded Ukraine and therefore helping Ukraine defend herself addresses the cause of the humanitarian emergency rather than merely its consequences.

That position may make some traditional Western charitable organisations uncomfortable. Nevertheless it reflects the realities of life in wartime Ukraine. There is little value in repairing the windows of a school if Russian forces subsequently occupy the town in which the school stands. Nor can food parcels protect an apartment building from a Shahed drone. Humanitarian assistance is indispensable, but so is preventing the humanitarian catastrophe from expanding.

Dzyga’s Paw concentrates particularly upon technology because this is an area in which relatively modest donations can produce disproportionate effects.

Modern warfare in Ukraine is increasingly a contest between sensors, communications networks, unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare systems, data processing and extraordinarily rapid cycles of technological adaptation. A comparatively inexpensive drone may provide reconnaissance for an artillery battery. A Starlink terminal may preserve communications when conventional infrastructure has been destroyed. Thermal imaging equipment may allow soldiers to identify approaching threats at night. An FPV drone costing a tiny fraction of a traditional weapons platform may perform tasks that once required vastly more expensive military equipment.

The organisation’s origins in Ukraine’s IT community are therefore particularly valuable. Its volunteers are not merely purchasing whatever soldiers happen to request. Dzyga’s Paw says that requests are vetted and that its technological expertise is used to assess, source and test equipment before supplying it to military formations.

This is important because wartime charity can otherwise become inefficient. Soldiers may request equipment with which they are familiar rather than equipment best suited to their purposes. Technology may be obsolete before it reaches the front. Communications equipment may be incompatible with existing systems. Drones may prove unsuitable for the electronic warfare environment in which they are expected to operate.

The difference between buying technology and understanding technology is therefore substantial.

Drones, Starlinks and the changing battlefield

The scale and diversity of Dzyga’s Paw’s completed projects illustrate how Ukrainian military volunteering has evolved.

The foundation has funded night-vision drones for the 93rd Mechanised Brigade, hundreds of Starlink terminals, unmanned aerial systems, FPV drones, anti-drone systems, mine probes, equipment for deminers and other specialist military technology. Its publicly recorded projects include a campaign that supplied 202 Starlinks to 28 Ukrainian military units. Another substantial project, Night TRIAD, raised more than US$300,000 for 68 DJI drones and associated equipment for seven brigades.

These are not glamorous items in the traditional vocabulary of war. There are no battleships or fighter aircraft here. Yet this is precisely why organisations such as Dzyga’s Paw matter.

Ukraine is fighting one of the world’s first genuinely mature digital wars. Commercial technology and military technology have become intertwined. Equipment originally designed for photographers, telecommunications customers, hobbyists or industrial users may be adapted within weeks for military purposes. Software changes constantly. Frequencies change. Countermeasures provoke counter-countermeasures.

The Ukrainian soldier of 2026 consequently depends upon a technological ecosystem that conventional military procurement systems were never designed to supply quickly enough.

Volunteer organisations have filled part of this gap.

The importance of trust

There is another reason why Dzyga’s Paw deserves particular attention: transparency.

Ukraine’s volunteer economy rests upon trust. A donor in London, Toronto, California, Warsaw or Sydney may transfer €20 to people whom he or she has never met, for equipment destined for soldiers whose names may never be disclosed for security reasons. Multiply this transaction several thousand times and suddenly a Ukrainian brigade has drones.

But this system works only for so long as donors believe that the money arrives where it is supposed to. Dzyga’s Paw has therefore made transparency a central part of its institutional identity. Its website provides public reporting of donations, purchases and equipment deliveries through an automated reporting system, with data designed to permit donors to follow the conversion of financial contributions into equipment.

The numbers from 2025 provide an instructive example. The foundation reports that during that year it raised US$2,141,242 from donors in 71 countries, with 6,871 unique donors. It delivered US$1,765,655 in military equipment. According to its annual accounts, 90.5 per cent of expenditure went on military aid, 8.3 per cent on operations and 1.2 per cent on logistics.

One figure is particularly revealing: the median donation was just US$16. That tells us something extraordinary about the Ukrainian war effort.

Dzyga’s Paw is not principally the creature of oligarchs writing enormous cheques. Thousands of ordinary people scattered across dozens of countries contribute sums roughly equivalent to the cost of lunch. Those small payments are aggregated, professionally administered and transformed into sophisticated equipment delivered to Ukrainian soldiers. Sixteen dollars becomes part of a drone. Another sixteen dollars becomes part of a communications terminal. Thousands of such contributions become an intelligence, reconnaissance and communications network. This is crowdfunding transformed into national defence.

Civil society at war

There has been much discussion since 2022 about the resilience of Ukrainian civil society. The phrase is sometimes repeated so frequently in international conferences that its meaning becomes obscure. Dzyga’s Paw provides a useful practical illustration of what it actually means.

A functioning civil society is not merely a collection of NGOs. It is a network of citizens capable of identifying problems and organising solutions without waiting for the state.

The Ukrainian state naturally remains responsible for equipping her Armed Forces. Yet no defence ministry in the world can respond perfectly to every rapidly changing requirement across a front extending for hundreds of kilometres. Bureaucratic procurement procedures inevitably move more slowly than technological innovation.

Civil society occupies the space between institutional capability and immediate necessity. A drone unit may discover today that a particular piece of equipment works. Tomorrow other units want it. Within weeks Russian electronic warfare changes and something different is required. The conventional procurement cycle may take months or years. Ukrainian volunteers sometimes accomplish the same process in days. This does not replace the state. It complements her. And it makes Ukraine unusually formidable.

The international dimension

Dzyga’s Paw also performs another function that is easily overlooked. By attracting donors from more than 70 countries, she creates thousands of individual connections between foreigners and Ukraine’s defence.

Governments may change. Elections may produce shifts in foreign policy. Parliamentary coalitions may collapse and international attention may wander towards the next crisis. Personal relationships are more durable.

Someone in Britain who has contributed repeatedly towards drones for a Ukrainian unit no longer experiences the war entirely as something happening on television. Someone in Germany who helped purchase Starlinks has acquired a personal stake in Ukraine’s survival. Someone in the United States who has followed photographs and reports showing equipment purchased with crowdfunding begins to understand Ukrainian soldiers not as abstract figures in a geopolitical dispute but as identifiable human beings.

This international community is itself a form of strategic capital. Dzyga’s Paw therefore does something more profound than purchasing equipment. She converts sympathy for Ukraine into participation in Ukraine’s defence.

A pawprint upon history

There are enormous institutions involved in the defence of Ukraine: governments, intelligence agencies, defence ministries, multinational corporations and military alliances. Their decisions involve billions of dollars and occasionally determine the course of the war.

Yet Ukraine’s survival has also depended upon countless smaller institutions.

Some began in kitchens. Some began in garages. Some began with vans driving towards the Donbas. Some began with programmers writing software late at night. Some began with friends collecting money on social media.

And one began with a dog putting her paw upon a military uniform. Dzyga’s Paw represents something characteristic of contemporary Ukraine: humour combined with deadly seriousness, technological sophistication combined with improvisation and private initiative combined with an overwhelming sense of public responsibility.

The organisation did not wait for somebody else to solve Ukraine’s problems. Its founders identified something they knew how to do and started doing it. Four years later, millions of dollars of equipment have reached Ukrainian defenders, thousands of donors across the world have become involved and more than one hundred Ukrainian military units have benefited from the network that grew from those first informal efforts.

Ukraine has survived Russia’s invasion for many reasons. Her soldiers have displayed extraordinary courage. Her people have endured hardships that outsiders can barely comprehend. Western governments have provided weapons, money and diplomatic support.

But Ukraine has also survived because ordinary Ukrainians repeatedly refused to behave as though solving the country’s problems was somebody else’s responsibility. Dzyga’s Paw is part of that story.

And behind the drones, satellite terminals, radios, batteries, thermal cameras, cables, vehicles and innumerable other pieces of equipment travelling eastwards from Lviv towards the front, there remains the organisation’s improbable emblem. A dog’s pawprint. In the history of Ukraine’s resistance, even the smallest paw can leave a surprisingly large mark.

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Dzyga’s Paw is a Lviv-based Ukrainian charitable foundation providing technological and other equipment to Ukraine’s defenders. Further information about its projects, public financial reporting and ways to support its work may be found on the foundation’s website. Donations are very welcome: ⁠Dzyga’s Paw — official website and donations.