The Long Road to Lviv: Thomas Ullmann’s Ride for Ukraine

By Matthew Parish

Sunday 30 August 2026

There are many ways to support Ukraine. Governments send weapons. Charities buy ambulances. Volunteers drive battered four-wheel-drive vehicles eastwards, carrying medical supplies, generators, drones and protective equipment. Others raise money, write articles, organise demonstrations or simply refuse to allow Europe’s largest war since 1945 to disappear into the background noise of everyday life.

Thomas Ullmann decided to get on his bicycle.

In August 2026, Ullmann rode alone from Leipzig in eastern Germany to Lviv in western Ukraine — some 1,040 kilometres — in less than six days. There was no support vehicle following him, no professional cycling team, no comfortable bus waiting at the end of each stage. It was a solitary journey eastwards across Germany and Poland and eventually across the Ukrainian frontier, undertaken for the purpose of raising money and maintaining public attention upon a war that, after more than four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Europeans are in danger of learning to regard as normal.

That is quite a long way to ride a bicycle. It is also an unusually effective way of making a political point.

Ullmann’s day job could scarcely be more removed from the romantic image of the itinerant long-distance cyclist. He is a physicist — a doctoral candidate at Leipzig University, where university records also show him teaching physics students. He is listed as an MSc and PhD candidate in Leipzig University’s Soft Condensed Matter Theory Group and as a teacher on the University’s 2026 Order of Magnitude Physics course.

There is something pleasingly appropriate about this combination. Physicists spend much of their lives reducing apparently complicated phenomena to measurable quantities. Ullmann has done something similar with European geography.

How far away is Ukraine? From Leipzig, the answer is 1,040 kilometres. How far is that really? Less than six days on a bicycle. Suddenly the war does not seem quite so far away.

Europe measured in bicycle wheels

This was one of Ullmann’s explicit purposes. Before leaving Leipzig on 15 August, he wrote that cycling to Ukraine makes the cause tangible. Lviv can seem distant from ordinary German life but, as he observed, it is only a little more than 1,000 kilometres away — a distance that can be covered by bicycle in roughly a week.

He subsequently proved his own point rather more dramatically than anticipated by doing it in under six days. The geography matters because one of the peculiar features of European attitudes towards the war in Ukraine is the psychological distance that has developed around it. To someone sitting in a café in Leipzig, Hamburg, Paris or Amsterdam, the Russian invasion can become something consumed through screens. There are maps with red arrows, grainy videos of exploding vehicles, political arguments about military aid and periodic photographs of destroyed apartment buildings.

Then the screen is switched off. The person goes to work. Ukraine continues. A bicycle does not permit quite the same abstraction. Every kilometre has to be crossed physically. Poland does not disappear beneath the wings of an aircraft. The landscape changes gradually. Town follows town, road follows road and the European Union’s eastern frontier approaches at the speed generated by two human legs.

Ullmann’s journey therefore contained an implicit lesson in European political geography. Ukraine is not some remote geopolitical abstraction situated on the edge of an imaginary continent. It is next door. Leipzig is closer to Lviv than many Europeans intuitively imagine. And if a German physics PhD student can get there under his own power in less than six days, European governments ought not to behave as though Ukraine were located upon another planet.

Not his first road into Ukraine

Ullmann’s relationship with Ukraine did not begin with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. He had cycled through the country before — in 2012 and again in 2017 — as part of a much larger history of long-distance bicycle travel. By his own account he has spent, cumulatively, almost two years of his life cycling through 28 countries across a vast area of Europe and its neighbouring regions, from northern Norway towards southern France and as far east as Armenia.

Ukraine remained with him. He recalls the kindness he encountered there and a country that appeared to him to be rediscovering its identity. In particular he remembers younger Ukrainians looking westwards and wanting closer connections with the rest of Europe. This personal history is important because international solidarity is often strongest when it ceases to be theoretical.

Countries are abstractions. People are not. A traveller remembers the person who gave him directions when he was lost, the family who offered somewhere to sleep, the stranger who produced food or water, the jokes exchanged despite inadequate common language and the peculiar intimacy that arises when one travels slowly through somebody else’s country.

Cyclists experience this more than most travellers. They do not encounter countries through airport terminals and hotel reception desks. They encounter villages, roadside shops, rainstorms, broken bicycle components, unexpected hospitality and the kindness of strangers.

For Ullmann, therefore, Russia’s assault upon Ukraine was not merely an attack upon a square of coloured territory on a map. It was an attack upon a country he knew. That creates obligations of its own.

The purpose of discomfort

There is another dimension to long-distance charitable cycling that deserves attention. It is deliberately difficult. Nobody needs to cycle from Leipzig to Lviv. There are trains. There are buses. There are cars. There are aeroplanes that can take a traveller much of the way. Modern Europe has devoted enormous ingenuity to eliminating precisely the sort of discomfort Ullmann voluntarily embraced.

That is the point.

Before his departure he described the hardship of the ride as part of its purpose while immediately placing it in proportion: whatever difficulty he experienced would remain infinitesimal beside the involuntary hardships Ukrainians have endured for years. This distinction is essential.

The charitable endurance athlete is not reproducing the suffering of the people for whom he raises money. He cannot. Six days of exhaustion upon a bicycle cannot replicate four and a half years of air-raid alarms, mobilisation, bereavement, displacement, missile attacks and uncertainty. Instead the voluntary hardship is symbolic.

It says: I am prepared to inconvenience myself for you.

In an increasingly comfortable western world, that is not an insignificant statement.

Money is important. But solidarity also acquires meaning through effort. It is easy to press a button on a telephone. It is harder to pedal another hundred kilometres when one’s legs already hurt and tomorrow promises precisely the same thing. Ullmann did both — he raised money and he made himself the advertisement for raising it.

A serial fundraiser on two wheels

Nor was this his first such exercise. In August 2025 Ullmann cycled from Halle in Germany to the Dutch coast in four days, raising money for UNITED24. That campaign exceeded its initial €1,500 target, ultimately raising €1,917 from 19 supporters. The money was directed towards Ukrainian causes including defence and demining.

For his 2026 journey, Ullmann chose an even more ambitious route and a more explicit destination: Ukraine itself. His declared objectives before departure were threefold. First, to raise money for Ukrainian needs where he believes western governments continue to provide insufficient assistance. Second, to maintain awareness of the invasion and to remind Germans in particular just how geographically close Ukraine actually is. Third, the ride was intended as an act of defiance.

That last motive is perhaps the most interesting. Russia’s war against Ukraine has always possessed a psychological dimension extending far beyond the battlefield. Russian strategy relies heavily upon intimidation — upon convincing opponents that resistance is dangerous, expensive and ultimately futile. It encourages the belief that Russia is enormous, inexhaustible and frightening and that sensible people should therefore accommodate its demands.

The bicycle is an almost comically modest answer to this philosophy. There is no armour plating. There are no missiles. There is no geopolitical grandeur. There is simply a man pedalling east.

Yet perhaps that is precisely why the gesture works.

The authoritarian imagination loves scale — enormous military parades, gigantic flags, massed ranks of soldiers, nuclear missiles crawling through Red Square and speeches about historical destiny. Civil society answers differently. A volunteer buys a van. Someone sends a generator. A grandmother knits camouflage netting. A student raises money. A German physicist gets on his bicycle and rides to Lviv.

Thousands of such actions accumulate into something dictatorships frequently underestimate: a society’s refusal to be intimidated.

The university and the bicycle

There is also something worth saying about Ullmann’s profession. Scientists are sometimes imagined as inhabitants of a politically detached world — people concerned with equations, laboratories and questions remote from the messy compromises of public affairs. This is unfair to science and to scientists.

The university at its best has always produced people who participate in civic life precisely because intellectual independence encourages them to think about the societies around them. Physics teaches nothing directly about the morality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But intellectual seriousness encourages a person to examine claims, evidence, consequences and responsibilities.

Ullmann has interests extending beyond physics. His writing has addressed Ukraine and the war, and his Pragmatic Papers article explaining the ride is not the work of somebody who stumbled accidentally into a fundraising campaign. It reveals a considered view about the danger of allowing the war to become normalised.

Normalisation may indeed be one of Ukraine’s greatest long-term enemies. In February and March 2022 virtually everybody watched Ukraine. In 2026 the war competes with elections, scandals, economic anxieties, celebrity gossip and every other demand upon the western world’s notoriously limited attention span.

Yet Ukrainians do not have the luxury of becoming bored with the war. The drones still arrive when people are sleeping. The missiles still destroy homes. Soldiers still die. Families still wait for telephone calls. Cities in eastern Ukraine still empty as the front approaches. The fact that outsiders have grown accustomed to these things does not make them less terrible.

This is why small acts of apparently eccentric determination matter. They interrupt complacency.

A man arriving in Lviv after cycling 1,040 kilometres from Leipzig invites an obvious question: Why did you do that? And the answer brings the conversation back to Ukraine.

Arrival in Lviv

Lviv is an appropriate destination for such a journey. For centuries it has been one of those cities in which the various strands of European history collide — Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, Austrian, Armenian and many others. Today it is unmistakably Ukrainian while remaining unmistakably European. Since 2022 it has also become one of the great gateways between Ukraine and the rest of the continent. Refugees have travelled westwards through it. Volunteers, journalists, diplomats, soldiers, aid workers and supplies have travelled eastwards.

Ullmann arrived by perhaps the slowest method available. That makes the journey more meaningful rather than less. He had been in this region before Russia’s full-scale war. He remembered a country whose people had shown him hospitality. Years later, when that country was under sustained attack, he returned.

There is a certain moral symmetry in this. Hospitality creates memories. Memories create loyalties. And sometimes loyalties send you 1,040 kilometres across Europe on a bicycle.

The politics of doing something

Western discussion of Ukraine frequently becomes trapped between enormous abstractions. What should NATO do? What should Washington do? What should Berlin do? How much money should the European Union provide? What sanctions should be imposed? Where should weapons come from?

These are indispensable questions. Ukraine’s survival ultimately depends upon decisions involving billions of euros, industrial production, armies and governments. But there is another question: What should I do?

The answer cannot always be dramatic. Most people cannot manufacture air-defence missiles or negotiate security guarantees. Nor should they imagine that individual charity can substitute for government policy. But individual action is not therefore meaningless. Ullmann’s bicycle ride illustrates the contrary.

One individual devised something he could do. He used an ability he already possessed — long-distance cycling — and turned it into fundraising, publicity and political symbolism. Then he started pedalling. Six days later he was in Lviv.

There is a useful philosophy concealed inside that simplicity. The scale of the Ukraine war can induce paralysis because the problem is so enormous that any individual contribution appears absurdly small. But almost every worthwhile collective endeavour consists of absurdly small individual contributions.

A volunteer’s vehicle does not win a war. A donated drone does not win a war. A hundred euros does not win a war. A bicycle ride certainly does not win a war. Yet armies, charities, democracies and international movements are ultimately composed of individuals deciding that doing something is preferable to doing nothing.

Thomas Ullmann has cycled across much of Europe during his life. In August 2026 he chose a road that carried more significance than most. It began in Leipzig. It ran eastwards for 1,040 kilometres. And it ended in Lviv — in a country at war, but also in a country whose friends continue to find their way back. Sometimes even by bicycle.

---

To learn more about Thomas Ullman's journeys and to assist him in his fundraising, please go to https://pragmaticpapers.com/articles/im-cycling-to-ukraine-heres-why and his donation page: https://whydonate.com/fundraising/rideforukraine26