We continue to tell you more about our Ukrainian team. Meet Vadym Abramov, a Kyiv native, is 56. He once worked in food supply for restaurants. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, he’s been our Ukrainian team.

Every day, he and one other colleague pack and ship all of the Leleka`s parcels to medics — and that’s $200-230K worth every month. All the other physical labor rests on his shoulders too: receiving and unloading large deliveries of medical supplies, as well as maintaining our Kyiv office “workhorse,” the tireless green van.

Vadym started volunteering in 2013, at the Maidan. Later, at one organization, he helped with logistics — running into the ATO zone with everything the military needed, from food, medicine, first-aid kits, thermal imagers, and scopes to the vehicles themselves.

“Today, what people see, all this monthly aid to the front from Leleka really does pass through our hands, our backs, our knees. For example, when purchases arrive from the U.S., it can be 5, 7, even 10 pallets. Tons of cargo that have to be carried into the warehouse, sorted onto shelves, and then turned by hand into fully assembled medical backpacks,” Vadym says.

The work is hard not only physically but also emotionally. “The worst is when backpacks aren’t picked up from the post office — because someone can no longer come for them. You’re supposedly just processing a returned parcel, but you understand that the person was killed or wounded,” he adds.

Recently, our Kyiv office was damaged in a nighttime Russian missile attack. “We’d settled in here — and it was destroyed in a single night. In moments like that, your hands drop. But then you remember who all of this is for — and you keep working with doubled strength,” the man explains.

When there’s a great deal of work, or when one of the warehouse’s mere two employees falls ill, volunteers come to help — and sometimes even the servicemen themselves: “There’s Liosha, our regular volunteer, who has never once said no. And Arkadii — a ninth-grader nearly six-foot-three, who for the second summer in a row is helping out at the warehouse, loading boxes during his school break.”

Our Ukrainian colleagues joke that in Leleka`s photos Vadym always comes out looking like a “professional.” He just smiles: in his youth he moonlighted as a runway model back in the Soviet-era ateliers.