“I think saving that girl was the most amazing evacuation of the year, maybe even of the whole war,” says Leonid Nomerchuk, a military and police chaplain whose volunteer group has helped thousands of Ukrainians flee front-line areas since 2022.
“It was really a miracle. What the guys did was incredible.”
As in so many aspects of wartime life across Ukraine, volunteers in eastern regions provide a vital service to civilians who are too poor or leave it too late to make their own escape from the grinding advance of Russia’s military.
As enemy forces approach, and air strikes, shelling and drone attacks intensify, only groups with armoured vans can reach people facing constant danger and potential occupation; eventually it becomes too risky for any non-military vehicle to enter the so-called kill zone, and civilians must somehow flee on foot, or await their fate.
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Nomerchuk’s Volunteer Rescue Group, also known as Spasinnya (Salvation), received a call earlier this month from a woman asking them to evacuate Lyuba, her 13-year-old niece, from the front-line village of Rodynske in Donetsk region; her parents had vanished and she was being looked after by Vasyl, an elderly neighbour.
But even police rescue teams had stopped going into Rodynske, which is just 10km north of Pokrovsk, a small city that is now partly occupied amid some of the fiercest fighting of the war. So Nomerchuk’s team parked their minibus several kilometres from the village, and two volunteers set out across the fields to find Lyuba.
Nomerchuk says he cannot run after a knee operation and would only have been a burden to the men who took on the task – Mykhailo Bochkov and an American, Wes Miller, who left their body armour and helmets behind so they could move faster.
“They were walking through deep mud, crossing fields, passing near our military positions – thank God our soldiers didn’t shoot them. Four times they were attacked by enemy drones. At the Rodynske coal mine they managed to make it into a dugout, which protected them,” Nomerchuk says
“It took them about six hours to reach Rodynske, and they spent the night in an abandoned house. There was a big drone overhead searching for them, but thankfully they weren’t found.”
Before dawn the next morning, Bochkov and Miller made their way to the house where they had been told Lyuba and Vasyl were hiding.
“Thank God, they were still there in the basement. Lyuba was so happy – they had thought no one would go into that hell to bring them out,” says Nomerchuk.
It was a foggy morning – unfavourable for drones – and they all reached Nomerchuk and the waiting minibus safely in about four hours.
“Lyuba was well, except for slight injuries from when a wall had fallen on her during shelling. She arrived with her little dog, Lola, which was pregnant and which she wouldn’t leave behind,” says Nomerchuk.
“And Vasyl was so happy. He had taken responsibility for Lyuba when her parents left – no one knows where they went or what happened to them – and he had promised not to leave her behind, and to get her to safety.”
It is a particularly dramatic example of the evacuation work undertaken by volunteers and aid groups since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which takes place every day all along a front line that now stretches for some 1,200km.
As the US launches another push for a peace deal, the Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine abandon the small cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and other parts of Donetsk region that it still controls – a move that could trigger an exodus of the 250,000 or so people who still live there.
Groups like Spasinnya and East SOS receive evacuation requests via their hotlines and social media, assess the danger, then send vehicles to bring out as many people as possible, offering them support on arrival in a relatively safe city such as Pavlohrad or Dnipro.
“Since the escalation at the start of summer we’ve mostly been evacuating people from Donetsk region – Dobropillia, Druzhkivka, Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Lyman – and also southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region,” says Roman Zhylyenkov, an evacuation driver with East SOS whose hometown of Kreminna was occupied in 2022.
“People are told how it all works on the hotline. We say they can bring two or three bags, but sometimes we turn up and they’re waiting with 15 bags. If we have lots of people to collect, then we’ll tell them gently that they can only bring essentials. And we take their pet dogs and cats too,” Zhylyenkov explains.
Plastering a minibus with the name and logo of an aid group offers little or no protection – evacuation vehicles are often targeted by Russian drones, and last week an armoured van operated by Spasinnya was hit and burned out in Lyman.
“You never know what dangers you’ll face,” Zhylyenkov says. “The situation is changing all the time, and the range of weapons is growing. Now there are drones on fibre-optic wires that can fly for something like 40km. Anything can happen.”
