“People are the only good thing that the war gave me”

Ukrainian researcher Larysa Pylgun studies the self-organization and unification of Ukrainian civic society during the war. Larysa told us how she spent the spring of 2022, how she came up with the idea for her study, how she conducted it and what conclusions she came to. The results of her work are available in Ukrainian and Russian. 

 ...At the beginning of the invasion, the authorities persuaded civilians to leave the city. The media, official and unofficial channels broadcast the following: leave the city, the war is military, not civilian business. After some time we realised that Ukraine is still Ukraine only because the Ukrainian society did not listen to the authorities and stayed. Soldiers that regain energy, level up or have extra lives only exist in video games. In reality, people who are fighting need food and water. They need clothes, and to wash their clothes. They need to clean themselves. To wash their clothes and clean themselves, they need water. To have water, they need electricity. They need someone to cook, to make tea, to help, because a person cannot survive on their own. That is why society came to be — it’s easier to survive together.

How the study came to be

The idea to study the phenomenon of self-organization and unification of Ukrainian civil society during the war came to me during the occupation of the Kyiv region. On February 24, people who denied the possibility of war just days prior, people of different ages, statuses, and political beliefs joined the fight against the enemy. Everyone around us did what they could and how they could. People's self-organization was astonishing in both scale and content.

The war found me at home, in the Kyiv region. On the first day of the war, I saw the battle for Gostomel airport from the window of my apartment in Vorzel. The next day, electricity went out, and my husband and I took our documents, cats, and dog and moved to a friend's house in a neighbouring village. In a few hours, Vorzel was occupied. We found ourselves in an active war zone. Six adults, two teenagers, two babies, three dogs and five cats. By sheer luck, our house was hidden behind a forest and planting, and the military simply did not notice it. But we saw very well how on March 3, military vehicles shot up two cars on the highway. The cars were left in heaps of metal and people's legs. There was a man, a woman and a child in each car. Even now we do not know who these people were.

We were in the zone of occupation, in the zone of active combat. In the first days of the war, friends started calling us and asking how they could help us. Other friends called and asked how they could organize help. Despite understanding all the risks, people tried, if not to stop the enemy, at least to help those who were in a more difficult situation than them.

Friends called me from different cities and asked me how they could help. Friends of friends called me from different countries, asking me to accept cars with humanitarian aid. Especially memorable were the calls with requests to find military pilots or to organize a green corridor at the border. My friends and I had nothing to do with military aviation or the border. But both issues were solved in a few hours. Military pilots started calling me with questions. “Where to go?” “What to do?”

It was then that I was first surprised at the incredible level of trust we had in each other. I still don't know the names of the people who helped us and who we helped. Some of them we became friends with, though. People are the only good thing the war gave me.

Because we ran out of food, light and heating, on March 6, 2022, we made our way under the highway, through a culvert to a village where people we knew were. Help from relatives and friends was already waiting for us there. Also, a large batch of humanitarian aid from Poland was waiting for us in Kyiv, which had “grown” considerably on the way. It had food, essentials and even natural processed coffee for me and gasoline for my car. 

We hauled the humanitarian aid from Kyiv to the province in my small Hyundai I20 via a road that was burning in the literal sense of the word. We were shot at from occupied Bucha and Irpin. Nevertheless, every day we hauled food, pet food, and hygiene products.

Stores and pharmacies on our side of Kyiv did not work. Not much worked in Kyiv in general. There were many old people and children around us. After some time, the military came. Periodically, people from the occupation zone arrived in groups. Everyone had to be fed, clothed, treated. Those within the occupation zone also asked for help (they sometimes managed to send short messages). 

Everything necessary was delivered to Kyiv, and we took it to the surrounding areas and distributed it to people. On March 17, my birthday, I spent the whole day looking for an opportunity to help people in the occupation. I found Kostya, a volunteer who was later the subject of the movie “Bucha”. He had Kazakhstani citizenship, so he managed to negotiate with the Russian military and enter the territory they controlled. He would bring food there and move people out. He buried those he found dead along the road. After the de-occupation of the region, we were told that there was no other help at that time. Only what we brought. We gave the keys to our apartment to our neighbors and let them take whatever they needed. Food, candles, batteries, matches, drinking water. I will never forget Kostya's eyes at the moment when he took the keys. He said then: “You do realize that I might not be able to bring these keys, right?”

We also repeatedly went back through the culvert to the village where they had a dairy factory. We brought what we had to the people there and brought back milk, kefir and some other dairy products. The cows could not be told that the war had started. People who stayed in the village fed the cows and processed the milk, and we distributed it to people.

On March 3, 2022, we began documenting war crimes by traveling to the site of each shelling.

Sitting in the basement during heavy shelling, my husband and I would discuss what we saw around us. We both had a background in science, in research.

For my husband, the war in Ukraine was his third one. And I asked him: “How can we explain what we see? What do the books say about it? Was it like this in other countries?” He answered that he had never seen or read about such things as what was happening in Ukraine at this point.

I realized that everything I had read and heard before about Ukrainian society contradicted what I was seeing with my own eyes and what I was doing myself.

After the de-occupation and our return home, we rested a bit from our experiences and decided to record everything for history, so that we could do some research someday. Our colleagues supported us, and while we had no electricity and communication, they self-organized to conduct the research. That is, we made a questionnaire, and fellow professors gave it to students who dispersed not only all over Ukraine but all over the world. The students took offense if the professors did not give them assignments. They took the data collection very seriously — I have all the video and audio recordings of the interviews, which the students took exactly according to the instructions. In this way, we were able to expand the geography of the study and interview about 2000 people. When we got access to the Internet and the ability to work, we already had a lot of information waiting to be processed.

Methodology

While discussing methodology, we realized that we had no hypothesis as to the reason why the things that happened happened. So we decided to record every case of resisting the enemy. Even if an old lady knits socks and gives them to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Since we observed only the Ukrainians' self-organization, we decided that we would be interested in the actions of the authorities only if the representatives of the authorities did something outside their official duties. Like, for example, people from the village council, who were always around. Not many people knew their positions and relation to the authorities. Only that they sometimes took more risks.

When I received the array of these interviews, I realized that it was very difficult to analyze all of this. We chose the methodology of social project evaluation, which allows us to find patterns without a hypothesis. But I soon realized that there was something I couldn't explain in any way and I needed social or political psychologists to help me. In front of me were about 2000 stories of people who were strangers to each other, some of whom had lived outside Ukraine for a long time. 2000 stories of emotions, pain, death, and everything else that the war brought to these people. It was hard to even read them — I cried.

The war in Ukraine is not only the military effort

The surprising thing for me was the 100% inclusion of people into the fight against the ene,y. Everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder:  those who voted for Zelensky, Poroshenko or someone else, and those who didn’t vote at all. What was also surprising was how much the people devalued their help. When we asked them if we could interview them, many would answer, “Oh, I’m not doing anything.” At the same time, this person would give everything they had that could be useful to those at the front or the civilians who fled the warzone. Parts of their paychecks, of course, would go towards donating to the army, to clothe the soldiers, help those wounded or even buy weapons to defend their city. With every purchase, at least a couple of hryvnias would go towards crowdfunding for something. People don’t recognise that as help. One woman told me, “Oh, I’m not doing anything.” She is a doctor. She taught everyone what to keep in their medical kit. Initially, she oversaw all the medical kits being packed to be sent to the frontlines. But she doesn’t think she’s doing anything particularly important. 

When people found out that the war started or heard the first explosions, everyone started doing at least something. From the very first hours, everyone learned how to make Molotov cocktails. From the very first days, all metal went to different constructions, anti-tank obstacles and the like. It was awfully cold then, everyone needed hats and balaclavas. Of course, it was impossible to buy them then.

One girl, who used to knit in times of peace, started knitting balaclavas from the yarn she had. We made the calculations later — the materials for one balaclava were about 200-300€ — the yarn was very expensive. Everyone loved them — the people on the roadblocks in one of Kyiv’s neighborhoods said they were very warm and cosy.

Everyone did what they could. Those who could cook, cooked. Those who could help out on the street went out. Those who could tell the world what was going on via the Internet, wrote. The most important thing is that all this was not because someone told them what to do or organized this. People organized themselves, there were no leaders. 

There were already a lot of Telegram channels, groups, and chat rooms where people exchanged information — who needed what and who had something extra. I wrote, “I have diapers, take them away”. I got a call, “Where do I go?” While I went to Kyiv for another portion of humanitarian aid, they came to my region to pick up diapers and took them to the Zhytomyr region. I did not see these people, I do not have their names or license plate number. But I know for a fact that everything got to its destination. Other people helped us in the same way.

There were groups of people who drove around the city and broke holes in walls near the doors to feed animals left alone in empty houses and apartments. Many left to run some errands on the 23rd and could not return. Some left to see their parents, leaving their cat alone for a day.

There were people who bought and distributed medicine to the old, sick and wounded. People who gave first aid. People who helped others leave occupied territories gave food and material goods. People built back electric power lines after shellings. Others collected what was left of people’s remains so that their relatives could give them a proper funeral.

The key findings of the study 

I managed to involve psychologists and even artificial intelligence in analyzing the results of the study. Together we made interesting and unexpected conclusions, the correctness of which I have verified over time using the work of social psychologists. Our research showed that people in Ukraine unite around a problem, not around a leader. Power is not a goal or value for volunteers at any level. All volunteer activities are built upon horizontal ties without any reference to an organization, position or document; a person makes a voluntary commitment. Volunteers help each other. Horizontal ties are formed and strengthened. The study did not identify people who have withdrawn from solving problems caused by the war. Citizens' self-organization is more effective than the activities of official authorities. The behavior of Ukrainian civil society is determined by the mentality that has been shaped by Ukraine's complex history. Ukrainians value freedom highly, and they tend to actively protest against regimes that do not suit them.