Route 66: The Kharkiv Garage Keeping Ukraine Moving

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 26 September 2026

There are businesses that adapt to war, and there are businesses that cease, in any meaningful sense, to be businesses at all. Route 66, a vehicle repair workshop in Kharkiv, belongs to the latter category. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, its owner, Konstantin, has turned the garage into an informal support centre for soldiers, police officers, emergency medical personnel and volunteers operating in and around one of Ukraine’s most heavily bombarded cities.

The workshop itself is considerably older than Route 66. It was built during the Soviet period by Konstantin’s father-in-law and survived into independent Ukraine as a place for repairing cars, tyres and wheels. After 24 February 2022, those mundane skills suddenly became essential to keeping people alive. With most of Kharkiv’s repair businesses closed and Russian forces fighting on the approaches to the city, Konstantin stayed behind.

Four and a half years later, he is still there.

Matthew Parish: Tell me first about yourself and Route 66. What is this garage and what did you do before the full-scale invasion?

Konstantin: My name is Konstantin and this is Route 66. The business existed before the beginning of the full-scale war. This workshop is unique in Kharkiv in some ways and the building itself was constructed by my wife’s father back in the days of the Soviet Union.

We repair cars here. We repair wheels and tyres and essentially everything associated with keeping vehicles on the road. That was what we did before the war. Obviously, what we do here has changed a great deal since then.

Matthew Parish: Where were you on 24 February 2022? When did you realise that your ordinary life had ended?

Konstantin: I was at home with my family. We were sleeping and, for some reason, I woke up about 15 minutes before everything started. I went onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette and I heard a huge explosion. Then there was another one, and another, and then dozens of them.

That was how it all started. It was probably the first time in my life that I was truly terrified. I was not frightened for myself. I was frightened for my family and for what their future was going to be.

Matthew Parish: What happened in the first days and weeks? When did you decide that Route 66 was going to become part of the war effort?

Konstantin: I had expected that a full-scale war might happen, so in that sense I was somewhat prepared. I brought my family here, to my office. Perhaps it was actually a more dangerous place, although it felt protected because it was enclosed on all sides.

Then we began helping people. The Russians were completely destroying several districts of Kharkiv and it became extremely important to get people out of those places. At the beginning of March, I sent my family away and I stayed here to help.

I was born in Kharkiv. I have lived here all my life and I never seriously considered leaving. I believe that a man should either defend his land or help the people who are defending it.

At the beginning, the situation with vehicles was terrible. One of the first things damaged during shelling is often a vehicle’s tyres and wheels. Civilians, soldiers, police officers and the emergency medical services all needed repairs, while almost everything in the city had closed. There were perhaps three or four workshops operating across Kharkiv.

Our location was particularly important because this is the direction towards Staryi Saltiv and Vovchansk. There was very heavy fighting in that direction.

Matthew Parish: What sort of vehicles began arriving here?

Konstantin: Everything. There were vehicles damaged directly by combat, vehicles damaged by the terrible roads and vehicles suffering from ordinary mechanical problems made much worse by the conditions in which they were being used.

It is difficult for me to identify one particular vehicle from that period because there were simply too many. At the beginning it was an endless stream of cars. Literally an endless stream. You have to remember that there were only three or four workshops working in the city and there was extremely active fighting in this direction.

Matthew Parish: Is repairing a military vehicle fundamentally different from repairing an ordinary civilian car?

Konstantin: Yes and no. Mechanically, of course, a car is a car. But with a military vehicle nobody cares what it looks like. Appearance is irrelevant. Comfort is irrelevant. What matters is whether it works and whether it can do what the soldiers need it to do.

The soldiers try to maintain their vehicles themselves for as long as possible. They repair whatever they can and keep them running. So by the time a vehicle finally reaches us for a serious repair, sometimes it is difficult even to call it a car any more.

We carry out repairs that would make absolutely no economic sense in civilian life. In normal circumstances you would look at the value of the vehicle, look at the cost of repairing it and say that it simply was not worth doing. War is different. Volunteers are helping, we are doing the work without charging the soldiers and we try to return the vehicle to them because those vehicles save their lives.

Matthew Parish: How do you find the money and spare parts to keep doing this?

Konstantin: That has become very, very difficult. It was difficult at the beginning of the war and now it has become extremely difficult again.

During 2023, 2024 and perhaps part of 2025, it felt as though the whole world had united around us and was helping us. Now, unfortunately, people are very tired of the war. That makes our work much harder.

Our economy and our state simply cannot provide everything that is needed, so there are many things we have to do ourselves. We search for substitutes. We find universal parts that can be adapted. We improvise. Somehow we find a way out of the situation.

Nobody finances Route 66’s work for the military. I finance it myself. At the beginning, all our savings went into helping. Now we still have some civilian vehicles coming here for ordinary paid maintenance. We take the money we earn from those civilian jobs and use it to help the military, the police and the ambulance services.

That is basically how it works.

Matthew Parish: After so many vehicles, is there one particular repair that has remained in your memory?

Konstantin: It is very difficult to choose a particular car. There have been too many.

The truth is that I don’t remember the cars so much as I remember the people: our soldiers, our law-enforcement officers and the people who help us.

That is also one of the realities of modern warfare. A vehicle can disappear very quickly. You can repair a car and two weeks later it is gone because it has been completely destroyed. So you stop becoming attached to the machines. The people are what you remember.

Matthew Parish: You also recover and evacuate damaged vehicles. How dangerous is that work?

Konstantin: We do vehicle evacuations with the truck. Over these years of war we have recovered roughly 100 vehicles, mostly military ones and a much smaller number of civilian vehicles. We do that free of charge.

Recovering a military vehicle is dangerous in modern warfare, particularly because of drones. Drones are simply a huge problem.

A recovery truck might travel at around 90 kilometres per hour. If you are trying to escape from a drone, you would need something capable of 160 or 170 kilometres per hour. A truck obviously cannot do that. So the whole process of recovering a vehicle can be very dangerous, both for the people and for the recovery vehicle itself.

Somehow we keep getting through it. The truck comes back battered by fragments, stones and everything else. And I am not even talking about the roads, because in some of these places the roads effectively no longer exist.

Our English friends also help us with repairs and maintenance, so somehow we continue finding ways to manage. But throughout these four and a half years of war, I have never taken a penny for recovering a military vehicle.

Matthew Parish: After doing this for so long, what would victory mean to you personally? At what point could you say that the war was finally over?

Konstantin: That is a very difficult question for me because I don’t know what the end of this war can really mean.

There are no winners in war. There are only people who lose less than others. Even if we return to the borders of 1991, what happens then? Russia will still be there. We will still have to live beside it and our children and grandchildren will have to live beside it.

They will not simply calm down. That is the problem. So it is very difficult for me to say what victory means or at what moment I could say that everything was finally over.

Matthew Parish: Finally, imagine that people in Britain and elsewhere in Europe are reading this. After four and a half years, many of them will admit that they are tired of hearing about Ukraine and tired of the war. What would you say to them?

Konstantin: Perhaps what I am going to say will sound harsh.

If you are tired of the war in Ukraine, then one day you may find yourself tired of a war in your own country.

Between Russia and the rest of the civilised world there is Ukraine. As long as we hold on, the rest of the civilised world can continue living a relatively peaceful life. People who imagine that this is all something distant, something that happens only in Kyiv or Odesa, need to understand clearly that the same thing can happen to them.

At the same time, I am very, very grateful for all the help we have received. Our country is grateful for it. Without that assistance, our situation would have been immeasurably more difficult.

But we do not have another choice. We are here, and we have to continue.