Torhalla and the People Who Refuse to Look Away
By Matthew Parish
Monday 28 September 2026
There is a particular sort of person whom one encounters repeatedly in Ukraine after more than four years of full-scale war. They are not soldiers, at least not formally. They do not occupy ministerial offices, appear at international conferences or issue portentous statements about the future of European security. They simply decide that something needs to be done, discover how to do it and then carry on doing it for years after most reasonable people would have become exhausted.
Torhalla-Maarja Metsniin is one of these people.
An Estonian volunteer working with Ukraine Aid Operations, usually known as UAO, Torhalla has become part of that extraordinary informal international infrastructure that has grown around Ukraine’s Armed Forces since February 2022. It is an infrastructure built from volunteers, donors, engineers, drivers, fundraisers, small businesses and people who discovered, sometimes quite unexpectedly, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine presented them with a personal moral question to which neutrality did not seem an adequate answer.
Torhalla’s answer was initially to go to the Polish-Ukrainian border. A week after the full-scale invasion began, she travelled to Poland and started helping Ukrainian women and children fleeing the war. In the first months, her work remained predominantly humanitarian. Then, like many foreign volunteers who spent time close to Ukraine, her understanding of what Ukraine required began to change. Helping the victims of war was indispensable, but there was another way of helping them: giving the people defending Ukraine the equipment with which to stop the aggressor creating still more victims.
She began transporting pickup trucks and aid from London to Ukraine. From there her work evolved into something altogether more sophisticated. Today she describes herself essentially as a middle person: somebody connecting Ukrainian military units with organisations, companies, sponsors and donors capable of supplying what those units require. She helps with logistics, communications and fundraising campaigns and with the extraordinarily complicated task of making sure that the right piece of equipment reaches the right Ukrainian soldiers at the right moment.
That description, characteristically, makes the work sound simpler than it is.
Modern war has created a peculiar logistical ecosystem in Ukraine. A military unit may discover that it needs thermal imaging equipment, generators, communications equipment, electronic warfare systems, vehicles, aerial drones or unmanned ground vehicles. The requirement may be urgent and may change within weeks because Russian tactics change, frequencies change, technology changes and the battlefield itself changes. Somewhere else in Europe or North America there may be people willing to pay for precisely this equipment. Between the two stands the problem that confronts almost every charitable organisation in wartime: how to transform goodwill into something useful.
That is the space in which UAO operates.
Ukraine Aid Operations was established in 2022 and concentrates overwhelmingly upon supplying Ukraine’s defenders directly. Its public accounts reveal the scale the organisation has achieved. According to its April 2026 transparency report, it had raised more than $14 million since 2022, excluding Amazon donations. Of those funds, 91.97 per cent went directly towards equipment, while operational costs accounted for just 5.44 per cent.
Those numbers matter because wartime charity ultimately depends upon trust. Somebody sitting in London, Tallinn, Toronto or Chicago sends fifty dollars to an organisation operating thousands of kilometres away. They cannot accompany the money. They cannot inspect the warehouse, drive the vehicle across Ukraine or stand beside the soldiers when the equipment is delivered. They have to believe that a chain of strangers will behave honourably.
UAO has therefore made transparency central to its operation. Deliveries are documented, recipient units sign records confirming receipt and photographs and videos of equipment reaching Ukrainian formations are regularly published. The organisation is formally registered through entities in Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States, where its foundation has US 501(c)(3) charitable status.
Yet spreadsheets tell only part of the story. The more interesting phenomenon is the network of human beings behind them.
Torhalla has travelled repeatedly to Ukrainian units near the front and UAO has publicly documented her delivering equipment to formations fighting in some of the most dangerous parts of the country. In 2024, for example, she delivered a Matrice 30T thermal drone to the 105th Territorial Defence Brigade and equipment including power supplies and drone jammers to soldiers of the 79th Air Assault Brigade operating around Pokrovsk.
By 2026, the technological character of the war had moved still further. UAO’s work increasingly encompasses the machines that now define the Ukrainian battlefield: aerial drones, ground drones, electronic warfare, communications equipment, generators and the supporting technology necessary to keep all of these systems functioning.
This is where people such as Torhalla occupy an unusual position. They live somewhere between the civilian and military worlds. They hear what soldiers say they actually need, rather than what distant observers imagine they need. They see equipment that works and equipment that does not. They watch Ukrainian engineers modify machines almost as soon as they arrive because a battlefield dominated by drones and electronic warfare punishes technological complacency with astonishing speed.
The result is something approaching an unofficial international supply chain for innovation.
Governments remain overwhelmingly the most important providers of heavy military assistance to Ukraine. Private charities cannot supply Patriot batteries, combat aircraft or brigades of armoured vehicles. But wars are not fought exclusively with billion-dollar weapons systems. They are also fought with generators, pickup trucks, thermal cameras, communications equipment, power stations and innumerable unmanned machines whose individual cost may be comparatively modest but whose absence from a particular position may have immediate consequences.
The great achievement of organisations such as UAO is therefore not that they replace governments. It is that they fill the thousands of gaps governments inevitably leave behind.
There is also something distinctly Estonian about Torhalla’s story. Estonia is a small country that understands Russia in a way that much of western Europe historically did not. Its experience of Soviet occupation is not an abstraction confined to history books. The restoration of Estonian independence took place only in 1991 and the Russian frontier remains physically close. For many Estonians, the proposition that Ukraine’s struggle concerns the security of Europe is consequently not geopolitical rhetoric but an observation grounded in national memory.
Torhalla nevertheless represents something broader than Estonia. Ukraine’s foreign volunteers have come from virtually everywhere. Some arrived for a fortnight and stayed for years. Some began by carrying boxes and eventually found themselves coordinating complicated international supply networks. Others became engineers, medics, fundraisers or drivers. They have discovered skills they did not know they possessed because war presented problems that somebody had to solve.
There is little glamour in most of this work. There are endless telephone calls, customs problems, broken vehicles, spreadsheets, warehouses, requests for equipment, fundraising targets that have not yet been met and journeys across a very large country whose roads become progressively less comfortable the closer one travels towards the fighting. Then another Ukrainian unit sends another request.
So they begin again.
Perhaps this is the most remarkable feature of Torhalla’s story. Heroism in war is naturally associated with the extraordinary acts of soldiers under fire. But wars lasting years require another, quieter quality as well: persistence. The willingness to do something useful on the first morning of a catastrophe is admirable. The willingness to continue doing it after four years, when the television cameras have moved elsewhere and the world’s attention has become distracted, is rarer.
Ukraine Aid Operations is ultimately an organisation constructed around that quality.
It converts the generosity of strangers into objects that Ukrainian soldiers can actually use. A donation becomes a drone. Another becomes a generator. Several become a vehicle. Somewhere along the chain somebody raises the money, somebody finds the equipment, somebody completes the paperwork, somebody drives it across Ukraine and somebody such as Torhalla places it into the hands of the people who asked for it.
Then those people return to the front.
The history of Ukraine’s resistance will eventually be written principally around its soldiers, as it should be. But somewhere in the footnotes there will have to be space for the extraordinary international civilian army that formed behind them: the volunteers who drove through the night, raised money from strangers, negotiated with manufacturers, carried boxes across borders and refused to accept that there was nothing an individual could do about the largest European war since 1945.
Torhalla-Maarja Metsniin belongs among them.
She went to the Polish border because Ukrainian refugees needed help. She stayed because Ukraine continued to need help. Four and a half years later, she is still here.
Sometimes courage consists of going to war. Sometimes it consists simply of refusing to look away.
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