The Human Conveyor Belt: A Lunchtime in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Monday 28 September 2026
Somewhere in Kharkiv there is a warehouse whose address it would be unwise to print. There are many such places in Ukraine, buildings without brass plaques, reception desks or public-relations departments, where things arrive and from which they depart, generally towards places where people urgently need them. On a bright and unexpectedly pleasant sunny day, an enormous Heavy Goods Vehicle has arrived, packed almost to the ceiling with food and water destined ultimately for soldiers and civilians living close to the front.
There are thousands of boxes, enormous sacks of pasta that feel considerably heavier when you are the person carrying them than when you see them stacked innocently on a supermarket shelf, pots and bottles of cooking oil and great quantities of bottled water. Water is amongst the least glamorous commodities in a war and amongst the most important, because without it everything else stops. Every last item has to come off the lorry, be carried across the yard, sorted somehow and then begin another journey eastwards.
There is no forklift ballet here, no beautifully choreographed logistics operation in which men in fluorescent jackets consult clipboards while hydraulic machinery moves pallets according to a computer-generated plan. Instead there are perhaps a hundred volunteers, and they have formed themselves into an immense human chain stretching from the cavernous interior of the HGV across the yard and into the building where the supplies are to be stored.
One person stands inside the back of the lorry, another immediately below and then there is another and another, each separated by only a few feet. A box is lifted and passes into one pair of hands, then another and another; a bag of pasta follows, then cooking oil, bottled water and yet another box. Within a few minutes everybody has forgotten how many there have been, and the human conveyor belt of wartime Ukraine has begun its work.
It is also complete chaos, because nobody seems entirely certain who is in charge and instructions are shouted, contradicted and then forgotten. The line periodically collapses because somebody has wandered away, somebody else has decided that a particular stack of boxes ought to be somewhere different and a third person has discovered that the object he has just been handed is substantially heavier than he expected. People swap positions, somebody calls for more volunteers at the back of the lorry and somebody else calls for fewer because suddenly too many people are standing in precisely the same place.
Telephones ring in the middle of all this and are answered while their owners continue passing boxes with one hand. The chain breaks, reforms and breaks again, yet somehow the supplies continue travelling across the yard and the apparently inexhaustible interior of the HGV gradually begins to empty.
This peculiar combination of disorder and effectiveness is one of the signatures of Ukrainian civil society in wartime. Viewed for five minutes it looks faintly ridiculous, but viewed over several hours something remarkable becomes apparent: the lorry is becoming empty, the warehouse is becoming full and the system, if one may call it that, plainly works. Nobody has prepared an organisational chart explaining why, and possibly an organisational chart would only make matters worse.
Nearby is a makeshift café, itself part of the sprawling operation, and here another aspect of wartime Kharkiv is playing itself out over lunch. Soldiers, police officers and members of the SBU come in, eat and disappear again, some alone and others in small groups, while telephones sit beside plates or remain permanently in hands. Calls interrupt meals, conversations are abbreviated and people appear and disappear with the peculiar urgency that has become normal in a city living relatively close to an active front.
There is little ceremony about any of it, and the people eating do so with the grim determination familiar to anyone who has spent time around Ukraine’s military cities. Food is fuel and lunch is something to be fitted between whatever happened before and whatever is going to happen next. A telephone rings and somebody gets up, another uniformed figure arrives to take his place and somebody else is already speaking into his telephone before he has finished swallowing.
Outside, meanwhile, the boxes keep moving, and the contrast is striking because superficially this is such an ordinary summer scene. The sun is shining, people are laughing and somewhere further down the human chain somebody has made a joke that travels along it rather faster than the pasta does. Volunteers complain theatrically about their backs and people who did not know one another an hour earlier are giving each other instructions as though they have been colleagues for years.
There are young people and older people, men and women, people obviously accustomed to physical labour and others who plainly are not. Nobody particularly cares about these distinctions because if you have two functioning arms then there is something you can carry, and there is always something else waiting to be carried.
This is what the Ukrainian war effort looks like away from the dramatic photographs. Wars are represented through explosions, tanks, drones, trenches and ruined buildings because those things make compelling images, but armies and civilian populations do not survive upon images. They survive upon water, cooking oil, pasta, canned food, medical supplies, batteries, socks, generators, vehicles and ten thousand other mundane things that have to be purchased, transported, unloaded, sorted and transported again.
Some of the food being unloaded here will go towards feeding soldiers, while some will go towards civilians living close to the front, including people who for reasons of age, poverty, stubbornness or simple attachment to their homes have remained in places from which almost everyone else has departed. Somewhere further along the chain, these anonymous boxes will become meals, and that transformation depends upon logistics of a sort that rarely makes the evening news.
In Ukraine those logistics frequently depend upon people simply turning up. This is one of the features of the country that outsiders can find difficult to understand, because Ukraine’s wartime resilience is not exclusively the product of the state and sometimes the state can seem almost incidental to the process. A colossal parallel structure has emerged since the full-scale invasion, comprising charities, volunteer groups, drivers, mechanics, cooks, fundraisers, warehouse workers, expatriates, soldiers’ relatives and ordinary citizens who spend portions of their lives moving things from places where they exist to places where they are needed.
This structure is decentralised almost to the point of anarchy, which is simultaneously its weakness and its strength. There is duplication, there are misunderstandings, organisations fail to speak to one another and volunteers invent solutions to problems somebody elsewhere has already solved. There are badly packed vehicles, inexplicable shortages and mountains of donated items that nobody quite knows what to do with, and anyone arriving with expectations of Germanic logistical precision would probably suffer a nervous breakdown before lunchtime.
Nevertheless the boxes move, and in the circumstances that matters considerably more than the organisational chart. Ukraine has discovered during this war that improvisation can itself become a system, because the country has repeatedly been forced to solve problems faster than institutions can devise formal procedures for solving them. When a military unit needs something, somebody telephones somebody; when a village requires food, somebody knows a driver; when a vehicle breaks down, somebody knows a mechanic; and when several tonnes of supplies arrive at a warehouse, messages are sent around and a hundred people appear.
Then those hundred people somehow organise themselves into a line and begin lifting. What looks like disorder therefore conceals a rather sophisticated social mechanism based upon personal responsibility, informal networks and a shared understanding that somebody has to do the work and there is little point waiting for somebody else.
There is something profoundly democratic about the spectacle. The person passing you a box may be a student, an accountant, a businessman, a pensioner or somebody temporarily without employment, but for the few seconds during which that box travels between you none of those distinctions matters. There is only the weight of the object and the necessity of passing it onwards, preferably without dropping it on anybody’s foot.
Nobody individually is doing very much, and that is precisely the point. One person could not unload this lorry without machinery, whereas a hundred people can. One person cannot feed a military unit or sustain an isolated frontline community, whereas thousands of people performing small tasks can create a logistical network of extraordinary resilience.
War encourages grand language, and politicians naturally speak of national destiny, historical struggle, sacrifice, courage and victory. Sometimes such language is necessary because nations require stories through which to understand enormous collective experiences, but wars are actually sustained through millions of actions too small ever to enter history books. A woman passes a bottle of cooking oil to the man beside her, who passes it to somebody else, while elsewhere a driver starts a van, somebody cooks lunch, another person transfers fifty euros and yet another knows somebody who has a generator and somebody else who knows where it needs to go.
This is how a country fights a war, not merely through its armed forces but through an accumulation of mundane acts of usefulness. Heroism, in this sense, may be too grand a word for what is happening in the yard, because nobody here is pretending that passing sacks of pasta constitutes an act of battlefield courage. Yet a modern army cannot function unless an immense number of people behind it perform precisely these unremarkable tasks.
Meanwhile the café continues serving lunches as police officers come and go, SBU personnel eat quickly and soldiers circulate through the room with their telephones repeatedly demanding their attention. Nobody outside knows precisely what any of them is doing and nobody needs to know, because Kharkiv is a city in which discretion has become an ordinary civic virtue. People learn not to ask unnecessary questions about where soldiers are going, what particular buildings contain or why particular vehicles have appeared outside them.
The volunteers likewise have no need to know the eventual destination of every box passing through their hands. Their responsibility may extend for no more than three feet, from the person behind them to the person ahead, yet if everybody accepts responsibility for those three feet then the contents of an enormous HGV can cross an entire warehouse yard.
By afternoon everybody is tired, arms ache and shirts are damp, while the apparently inexhaustible interior of the lorry finally begins to reveal its floor. People can see the far wall and this discovery produces a renewed burst of enthusiasm, because human beings invariably work better when they can see the end of an unpleasant physical task. The jokes become louder and the disorder does not diminish, while somebody is still shouting instructions that directly contradict instructions being shouted by somebody else.
Yet eventually the final boxes come down and the enormous vehicle that arrived full stands empty. The warehouse that began the day with space is crowded with provisions waiting for the next stage of their journey eastwards, and tomorrow, or perhaps tonight, some of them will be loaded once again onto other vehicles.
Other hands will lift them and other drivers will carry them onwards. Eventually somebody near the front will open one of these boxes without knowing anything about the hundred people who stood beneath the Kharkiv sunshine passing it from hand to hand. A soldier may eat the pasta, an elderly woman in a battered frontline village may receive the cooking oil and a bottle of water may be handed to somebody who has spent the day working somewhere considerably more dangerous than this chaotic warehouse yard.
The volunteers will never meet most of these people, but there is no reason why they should. The entire system works precisely because every participant accepts a tiny portion of responsibility without necessarily knowing the people at the other end of the chain, and this principle extends far beyond the physical line of volunteers standing in the yard.
There is nothing intrinsically heroic about passing a box three feet and nobody will receive a medal for carrying a sack of pasta across a warehouse. There will be no military citation recording that somebody spent a sunny afternoon with aching shoulders shifting bottled water, but multiply that insignificant act by a hundred people and then by thousands of warehouses, kitchens, garages, workshops and volunteer centres across the country and one begins to understand something about how Ukraine has endured.
The war effort is taking place at the front, but it is also taking place far behind it in scenes that are simultaneously chaotic, cheerful, exhausting and mundane. On this sunny day in Kharkiv, it consists of a disorderly line of ordinary citizens laughing, sweating and passing enormous quantities of food from one pair of hands to another, each waiting for the next box and each doing his or her little bit.
