Those Who Are Nearing Victory: The Quiet Heroes of Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 15 October 2026
There is something peculiarly Ukrainian about the proposition that victory in war is not achieved exclusively by soldiers carrying rifles, generals contemplating maps or politicians delivering speeches to international audiences. It is also achieved by elderly women preparing food in improvised kitchens, volunteers driving battered vehicles along dangerous roads, doctors treating wounded soldiers in overcrowded hospitals, and ordinary citizens who discover, often to their considerable surprise, that the circumstances of history have transformed them into indispensable participants in the defence of their country. Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression has produced an extraordinary generation of such people, whose names may never appear in the history books but without whom the history books might have recorded a very different outcome.
In Kharkiv, that magnificent and much-abused city of intellectual ambition, industrial ingenuity and stubborn civic independence, one such organisation bears the appropriately uncompromising name Захист заради перемоги, or Protection for the Sake of Victory. Its activities represent an important dimension of Ukraine’s national resistance: the transformation of ordinary civil society into a formidable apparatus of humanitarian assistance, military support and collective endurance. The organisation’s work is associated with the short Ukrainian documentary Ті, що наближають перемогу, or Those Who Are Nearing Victory, a title that captures something essential about the Ukrainian national character during this prolonged and exhausting war.
The history of this organisation illustrates how the Ukrainian volunteer movement has become one of the country’s most important institutions. It also raises broader questions about the nature of political legitimacy, civic responsibility and the relationship between the state and society in wartime, because Ukraine’s ultimate victory, whenever and however it comes, will depend not merely upon frustrating Russian military ambitions but upon preserving the remarkable civic solidarity that has enabled the country to survive.
From ordinary life to extraordinary responsibility
The origins of Protection for the Sake of Victory lie in the events of 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine first shattered the comfortable assumptions of post-Soviet Ukrainian life. Its founder, Iryna Zelenska, also known as Iryna Dontsova, was not originally a professional humanitarian worker, military strategist or political activist. She was a businesswoman from the Kharkiv region who had pursued an ordinary commercial career before war transformed her priorities.
Two of her sons, Yevhen and Vasyl, became involved in Ukraine’s military operations in the Donbas. Like countless Ukrainian mothers, Zelenska discovered that the state was not always capable of providing everything its soldiers required, while medical supplies, equipment, construction materials and the innumerable mundane necessities of military existence could be in short supply. Rather than confining herself to complaints about these deficiencies, she began trying to address them.
Her activities gradually expanded from assisting her sons and their fellow soldiers to supporting wounded servicemen receiving treatment in Kharkiv’s hospitals. Many had arrived from the front without relatives or friends nearby, and their needs extended beyond medical treatment to clothing, bedding, personal necessities and simple human companionship. In February 2019, these voluntary activities acquired a formal institutional structure with the registration of Protection for the Sake of Victory as a Ukrainian civic organisation.
This is an instructive beginning because it reveals something about the relationship between individual moral obligation and collective political action. Zelenska did not apparently begin with an elaborate theory of Ukrainian national identity, a manifesto concerning the proper distribution of responsibilities between government and civil society, or an ambition to establish a substantial humanitarian institution. She began with the elementary proposition that her sons and their comrades needed assistance and that somebody ought to provide it; from such modest premises, significant institutions are sometimes born.
The philosopher Edmund Burke understood society as a collection of inherited obligations, associations and loyalties that could not be reduced to the abstract machinery of government. Alexis de Tocqueville, observing American democracy in the nineteenth century, similarly identified voluntary associations as essential intermediaries between the isolated individual and the potentially overwhelming power of the state. Neither thinker could have imagined the circumstances of contemporary Kharkiv, but both would have recognised something familiar in the spontaneous emergence of Ukrainian volunteer organisations, because they represent the practical expression of citizenship understood not merely as the possession of a passport or the exercise of an occasional vote, but as a willingness to assume responsibility for the welfare of others.
Kharkiv under siege
When Russia launched her full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, Kharkiv became one of the principal objectives of the invading armies. Its proximity to the Russian border, industrial importance, substantial population and historical significance made the city an obvious target, and Russian planners appear to have anticipated that Kharkiv might be overwhelmed relatively quickly. Such expectations were encouraged by Moscow’s persistent misunderstanding of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, whom the Kremlin imagined would somehow regard Russian tanks as instruments of liberation rather than vehicles of invasion.
Instead, Kharkiv resisted with extraordinary determination. Its defenders included regular military formations, territorial defence units, police officers, emergency workers and thousands of ordinary citizens who found themselves performing duties for which no peacetime occupation had prepared them. The city suffered devastating bombardment, destruction of residential neighbourhoods and disruption of essential services, yet it refused to surrender; for organisations such as Protection for the Sake of Victory, the invasion therefore transformed an already demanding programme of voluntary assistance into an immediate struggle for civilian survival.
In an August 2023 interview with the Ukrainian newspaper Uryadovyi Kurier, Zelenska described how she and her associates helped establish shelter for approximately forty people, predominantly children, in a basement during the opening days of the invasion. Food supplies quickly dwindled, shops were difficult to access and bombardment made even simple movements hazardous. Former soldiers whom she had assisted since 2014 responded to requests for food, while acquaintances in western Ukraine subsequently began sending humanitarian supplies to Kharkiv by passenger train.
There is something particularly moving about this account because it illustrates how relationships established during the earlier stages of the war became indispensable during the catastrophe of 2022. The soldiers whom Zelenska had once helped were now helping her to feed civilians, while people in western Ukraine were sending provisions to their compatriots in the east. Networks of friendship, gratitude and mutual obligation acquired a significance that no bureaucratic contingency plan could easily have anticipated.
The relationship between Lviv and Kharkiv deserves particular attention in this regard. These two cities, separated by hundreds of kilometres and possessing markedly different architectural traditions, political histories and cultural sensibilities, have nevertheless become partners in a common national enterprise. Lviv’s relative distance from the front enabled it to serve as a logistical centre for assistance flowing eastwards, while Kharkiv’s proximity to the battlefield made it a place where the consequences of Russian aggression were experienced with exceptional immediacy.
The exchange of humanitarian assistance between western and eastern Ukraine represented more than an exercise in logistics. It became a practical refutation of the Russian political mythology that Ukraine was an artificial country divided irreconcilably between competing regional identities. A sack of potatoes travelling from western Ukraine to Kharkiv may seem a modest contribution to the construction of national unity, but history is frequently made from such modest contributions accumulated in sufficient quantities and sustained over sufficient periods of time.
The invisible army
One of the remarkable features of Ukraine’s volunteer movement is the extraordinary diversity of its participants. Professional soldiers and former servicemen work alongside teachers, musicians, businesspeople, pensioners, medical professionals and students, while people who might previously have had little in common discover that the practical necessities of national survival provide an unexpectedly effective basis for cooperation.
By August 2023, Zelenska reported having assembled a network of approximately fifty people around her organisation, including family members, friends, doctors, entrepreneurs, former soldiers and performing artists. Their activities encompassed assistance to military personnel, hospitals, children and other vulnerable groups, as well as cultural performances intended to sustain morale. This last dimension is particularly interesting because humanitarian assistance during wartime is too often imagined as consisting principally of food, medicine, clothing and shelter, whereas human beings require considerably more than the materials necessary for biological survival.
They require dignity, companionship, humour, beauty and the occasional opportunity to forget, however briefly, the circumstances in which they find themselves. A concert in a hospital may not destroy a Russian tank, but it can remind a wounded soldier that the society for which he has sacrificed his health continues to exist; a celebration for children who have spent months sheltering from bombardment may not alter the military balance, but it can restore something of the ordinary childhood that war has attempted to steal from them.
The organisation’s cultural work has received recognition beyond its own accounts. Kharkiv National Medical University reported that Protection for the Sake of Victory, under Iryna Dontsova’s leadership, helped support a December 2023 concert for patients and staff at one of its clinical institutions. The event brought together professional performers and provided gifts and food packages, thereby demonstrating that humanitarian assistance can address psychological and social needs alongside the immediately material ones.
These activities illustrate a principle that humanitarian organisations sometimes overlook when their operations become dominated by the language of measurable outputs and donor reporting. The value of assistance cannot always be expressed in quantities of supplies delivered, numbers of beneficiaries served or administrative indicators of project completion. Sometimes the most important contribution is simply the restoration of a person’s sense that ordinary life remains possible and therefore worth preserving.
The politics of voluntary action
There is a temptation to describe Ukraine’s volunteer movement as essentially apolitical, motivated by humanitarian compassion rather than political ambition. This interpretation is understandable, particularly because many volunteers have little interest in electoral competition or the ideological quarrels of professional politicians, but it is nevertheless incomplete. The volunteer movement is profoundly political, although not necessarily partisan, because it concerns the distribution of power and responsibility within society, the relationship between citizens and institutions, and the capacity of ordinary people to organise themselves independently of government direction.
In this respect, Ukraine’s contemporary volunteer organisations form part of a much longer tradition of civic mobilisation that includes the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014 and the subsequent development of a more assertive Ukrainian civil society. The essential political lesson of these movements is that the state does not possess a monopoly upon legitimate collective action: citizens may organise themselves to defend constitutional principles, provide essential services, expose abuses of power or resist foreign aggression without awaiting instructions from ministers or government departments.
Indeed, one reason Ukraine survived the opening stages of the full-scale invasion was precisely that its society had developed an unusual capacity for decentralised initiative. Where official institutions were overwhelmed, local communities improvised; where established supply chains failed, volunteer networks created alternatives; and where conventional hierarchies proved cumbersome, personal relationships and mutual trust enabled rapid decisions.
This should not be mistaken for an argument that the Ukrainian state is unnecessary or that voluntary organisations can substitute indefinitely for properly functioning public institutions. Modern warfare requires sophisticated military command, industrial production, taxation, diplomacy and administrative coordination on a scale that informal networks cannot provide. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian experience suggests that a resilient state is not necessarily one in which government controls everything, but rather one in which government possesses sufficient authority to coordinate national defence while allowing society the freedom and confidence to organise itself.
That distinction will acquire even greater importance when Ukraine eventually moves from wartime survival towards reconstruction. The habits of voluntary cooperation forged under bombardment ought not simply to disappear when the emergency recedes, because they represent a reservoir of social capital that many ostensibly more stable European societies might envy.
The ethics of humanitarian assistance
The moral significance of organisations such as Protection for the Sake of Victory extends beyond their immediate practical achievements. They represent a particular understanding of human solidarity in which obligations arise not simply from legal rules or contractual commitments but from the recognition of shared vulnerability. People assist one another because another person’s suffering imposes a moral claim upon them, even when no statute, employment contract or governmental instruction requires them to respond.
Immanuel Kant understood human dignity as deriving partly from the capacity of individuals to act according to moral principles rather than merely pursuing their immediate interests. Contemporary Ukrainian volunteers provide a striking illustration of this distinction, because they could reasonably choose to protect their own families, preserve their resources and avoid unnecessary exposure to danger, yet many instead accept additional responsibilities towards people whom they have never met and from whom they can expect no material reward.
Such behaviour is not unique to Ukraine, and it would be sentimental to suggest that Ukrainians possess some exclusive national monopoly upon moral courage. Comparable acts of generosity have occurred in innumerable conflicts and humanitarian emergencies throughout history. What distinguishes the Ukrainian experience is instead the scale, duration and institutional sophistication of its voluntary mobilisation, together with the circumstances in which it has developed.
For years, Ukrainian volunteers have operated under conditions of persistent military danger, economic uncertainty and personal exhaustion. Their activities have frequently required them to navigate damaged infrastructure, interrupted communications, shortages of essential materials and the psychological consequences of prolonged exposure to suffering. The ethical achievement lies therefore not merely in the initial decision to help, but in the determination to continue helping after the novelty of the emergency has disappeared.
There is a considerable difference between performing an isolated act of generosity and sustaining an institution devoted to the welfare of others through years of war. The former may be inspired by an immediate emotional response, whereas the latter requires discipline, administrative competence, perseverance and the capacity to maintain relationships under considerable pressure. It is precisely these less glamorous qualities that distinguish effective humanitarian organisations from well-intentioned but ephemeral charitable initiatives.
Trust, accountability and the future of Ukrainian civil society
One of the most important questions facing Ukraine’s volunteer movement is how its extraordinary wartime achievements can be translated into durable institutions capable of contributing to the country’s reconstruction. The answer will depend substantially upon public trust, because voluntary organisations ultimately depend upon the confidence of the people who donate money, provide supplies, volunteer their time or permit them to act on behalf of vulnerable communities.
Humanitarian organisations frequently operate at the intersection of private generosity, international funding, public resources and urgent human need. Their effectiveness depends upon flexibility, but their legitimacy depends upon accountability, and these requirements are not necessarily contradictory. Indeed, the most successful voluntary institutions are often those that combine rapid practical decision-making with transparent financial management and clear organisational responsibilities.
Zelenska herself emphasised the importance of personal reputation and accountability in her 2023 interview. She described the need to report regularly on assistance received and distributed and stressed that maintaining the confidence of donors and partners was fundamental to the organisation’s work. This is an important statement of principle, although naturally the assessment of any organisation’s financial governance requires more than an interview with its leadership, and independent verification, reliable accounting and appropriate external scrutiny remain essential standards for humanitarian institutions generally.
There are nevertheless indications of the organisation’s continuing institutional presence. Ukrainian corporate records identify Protection for the Sake of Victory as a registered non-governmental organisation established in February 2019, while a related charitable foundation bearing the same name was registered in April 2023. Such institutionalisation matters because Ukraine’s reconstruction will require voluntary organisations to evolve from emergency networks based heavily upon personal relationships into durable bodies capable of maintaining public confidence over the longer term.
The broader challenge is whether Ukraine can preserve the virtues of its wartime volunteer movement while developing the institutional safeguards necessary for peacetime governance. Excessive bureaucracy risks extinguishing the spontaneity and initiative that have made Ukrainian civil society so effective, whereas insufficient accountability risks undermining the confidence upon which charitable institutions depend. Finding the appropriate balance will be one of the less celebrated but more consequential tasks of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.
The women who hold Ukraine together
There is another dimension to the story of Protection for the Sake of Victory that deserves particular attention: the remarkable contribution of Ukrainian women to the country’s survival. Much international reporting about Ukraine’s war has understandably concentrated upon military operations, weapons systems, territorial changes and diplomatic negotiations, and the resulting narrative can privilege the activities of men in uniform over the less visible contributions of women who have sustained families, communities, hospitals and humanitarian networks.
Yet Ukraine’s resistance would be incomprehensible without the extraordinary organisational abilities of women who have assumed responsibilities far beyond those anticipated in their previous lives. Some have become soldiers, while others have become medics, emergency workers, humanitarian coordinators, international fundraisers, logistics specialists and community leaders. Many have simultaneously maintained responsibility for children, elderly relatives and displaced family members, creating a form of wartime labour that is indispensable but frequently difficult to record in official statistics.
The story of Iryna Zelenska belongs within this broader transformation. Her journey from commercial entrepreneurship to voluntary assistance, and subsequently to the leadership of a formally registered civic organisation, illustrates how wartime necessity can create new forms of public leadership. Such leadership does not necessarily require electoral office, because some of the most influential figures in Ukrainian public life exercise authority derived principally from personal reputation, organisational competence and the confidence of their communities.
This is not an argument that volunteers should automatically become politicians, or that humanitarian achievements necessarily confer the skills required for public administration. The qualities necessary to manage a charitable organisation are not identical to those required to govern a municipality or formulate national economic policy. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s volunteer movement has created a substantial reservoir of practical leadership experience that ought not to be ignored when the country eventually turns its attention more fully towards reconstruction and political renewal.
There is, after all, something refreshingly concrete about leadership acquired through solving actual problems. The women and men who have organised humanitarian assistance under bombardment may sometimes possess a more realistic understanding of public administration than those whose experience consists principally of discussing it in comfortable conference rooms.
Victory as a process rather than an event
The title Those Who Are Nearing Victory invites a final reflection upon the meaning of victory itself. In conventional military history, victory is often presented as a discrete event: an army surrenders, a treaty is signed, a capital is occupied or a defeated government collapses. Such events are undoubtedly important, but they rarely capture the full complexity of national survival.
Ukraine’s victory, whenever it comes, will necessarily possess several dimensions. There will be a military dimension concerning the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces to defend the country and deter renewed aggression, a diplomatic dimension involving the establishment of a durable international security framework, and an economic dimension requiring the reconstruction of devastated communities and the creation of conditions in which displaced Ukrainians can return home.
There must also be a moral and institutional dimension. A country that successfully defends its territory while losing the civic solidarity that sustained its resistance would have achieved only a partial victory, whereas a country that preserves its democratic institutions, voluntary associations and habits of mutual assistance will possess foundations upon which a more prosperous and resilient future can be constructed.
This is why the work of organisations such as Protection for the Sake of Victory matters beyond the immediate delivery of humanitarian assistance. Every wounded soldier who receives support, every displaced family that finds assistance, every child who experiences an afternoon of happiness despite the war and every community that discovers its capacity for collective action represents a modest but meaningful contribution to Ukraine’s future.
Such contributions are difficult to quantify, and they seldom attract the attention of international television cameras. They do not possess the dramatic simplicity of a battlefield victory or the diplomatic glamour of a summit between heads of government, but they are indispensable precisely because wars are ultimately contests between societies as much as between armies. The society that retains its cohesion, confidence and sense of purpose acquires a strength that cannot easily be measured in tanks or artillery shells.
The real meaning of Ukrainian resilience
Visitors to Kharkiv frequently remark upon the city’s peculiar combination of suffering and normality. Buildings bear the scars of bombardment, yet cafés reopen; air-raid sirens interrupt ordinary conversations, yet people continue discussing literature, university examinations, football and the innumerable trivialities that constitute everyday life. There is something almost absurd about this determination to preserve normality in circumstances that are anything but normal, but it is precisely this refusal to surrender ordinary human existence to the demands of war that makes Kharkiv such a compelling symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
The city’s volunteer organisations embody the same spirit. They are not necessarily composed of extraordinary people in the conventional sense, because their members have families, occupations, personal disagreements, financial anxieties and the ordinary imperfections of human character. They become exhausted, frustrated and occasionally disillusioned like everybody else, yet what distinguishes them is their willingness to continue acting despite these limitations.
The documentary’s title is therefore particularly apt. Those who bring victory closer are not necessarily those who claim to possess a grand strategy for achieving it; they may simply be those who recognise that something needs to be done today and undertake the task without waiting for somebody else to assume responsibility.
Hannah Arendt distinguished between the abstract structures of political power and the human capacity to act collectively in the public sphere. Her understanding of political action emphasised the unpredictable possibilities created when individuals come together to pursue common purposes, and Ukraine’s volunteer movement offers a striking contemporary illustration of this insight. From the seemingly unremarkable decision of a Kharkiv mother to help her sons and their fellow soldiers emerged an organisation that has participated in sustaining military personnel, wounded servicemen, vulnerable civilians and the broader civic life of a city under attack.
There is no need to exaggerate these achievements or to transform any individual volunteer into an implausibly flawless hero. The documented history is sufficiently impressive without embellishment, and what matters most is the example it provides. In an era when political leadership is increasingly associated with public relations, carefully managed appearances and the relentless pursuit of personal visibility, organisations such as Protection for the Sake of Victoryremind us that some of the most consequential forms of leadership are exercised far from the cameras.
They are exercised in hospital corridors, improvised shelters, humanitarian warehouses and the countless other places where the immediate needs of vulnerable human beings take precedence over political ambition. Ukraine has produced many heroes during its long struggle against Russian aggression, some of whom will be remembered in military histories, others in political memoirs and still others in monuments erected after the war; the volunteers of Kharkiv deserve a place in the national memory no less prominent than those whose achievements are more easily measured in territory defended or battles won.
For these volunteers have demonstrated that the defence of a country involves considerably more than the defence of its borders. It involves preserving the human relationships, moral obligations and civic institutions that make the country worth defending in the first place, and perhaps this is the most important lesson suggested by Those Who Are Nearing Victory: victory is not simply something awaiting Ukraine at the conclusion of its war, but something Ukrainians have been constructing patiently through countless acts of solidarity since Russian aggression began.
In Kharkiv, amidst damaged buildings and the continuing pressures of war, that construction carries on. Its architects are not always famous, they do not necessarily possess political titles or military decorations, and many began their journeys in entirely ordinary occupations; yet when history demanded something extraordinary of them, they answered, and in doing so they have helped demonstrate why Ukraine has endured.
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The short film referred to in this article can be viewed here:
