Ukraine Aid with Charles McBryde

surreal moment going into my experience with Ukraine. I double majored in history in comparative religion in college, and I was kind of interested in sort of the post Soviet sphere, and I worked on some kind of post Soviet issues when I lived in Washington, d C. After school, and also was deeply interested in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is kind of why I took an interest in that region.

So I remember, in like twenty fifteen, I watched this Vice video called Russian Roulette that popped up on my YouTube feed, and it just completely it just put Ukraine on the map for me in a way that I'd never really thought about before. I thought of it as the Ukraine. Yeah, my Muscovite Russian history professor had always talked about it as a part of Russia, and she had denied, you know, I was during the Midan the Revolution of Dignity, I was in college, and she denied

that Ukraine had any autonomy. She echoed all the putinesque sort of talking points about CIA intervention and neo Nazis and stuff, and I didn't really know what. I didn't know at that point. So then I, yeah, I got I got interested in in sort of what was happening in the lead up to the Russian invasion. And I had been following this guy who went over to Syria

a couple of years ago named Aidan Aslin. And in my conversations with with aid and he'd sort of told me a little bit about kind of what stuff was like in going on in Ukraine, and I got very interested in I was following him and all of his friends and what they were doing. And at that point, I had, you know, about four or five years of nonprofit humanitarian experience under my belt, as long as as well as sort of a historical political understanding of the region.

And so when the when the war happened, when the full scale invasion happened, I immediately started trying to fundraise, trying to help out, trying to educate, and sleep to try and cut through Russian propaganda because there were a lot of people in my sphere who were just retweeting straight

up Russian propaganda. They were elevating you know what you and I know who are basically Krimlin adjacent individuals in the United States who have Sway and leftist circles, some of whom have re emerged in the Palestine discussion, much to my chagrin.

and yes, yes, I am in retrospect. So the second week of the war, I booked a plane ticket, flew over there, across the train and the pole, and scared out of my mind, got in touch with the Ukrainians I'd been talking to previously, and after a mad hustle from the train station, was very comfortably drinking tea in a cute little apartment in Leviv with somebody's grandmother. And I was like, this is this is crazy experience. So

I spent two months in Ukraine. At the beginning, my attention was to sort of identify gaps in the medical supply chain, particularly things that were going to be initially overlooked in the mad dash of refugees and resettlement and all that sort of stuff. And one of the things we identified was like prescription medication for people coming from the East to the West. And yeah, I think it's important that not a lot of realized that people coming

from Eastern Ukraine. A lot of them had never visited cities like Leviv until the start of full scale invasion, predominantly Russian speakers, and you know, for them, Leviv was almost like going to Poland, and it was a very new thing for them. But you know, your medical issues don't stop just because someone invades their country. In fact,

oftentimes they get worse. And so what I was trying to do initially was was find a way to address that, and that led me into contact with Rostislov Philippinko, who's one of my dear friends and the co founder of the organization that we started together called Mission HARKV. So that organization worked initially on prescription medications and then started distributing high end oncology drugs, which are very difficult to transport, very lucrative to steel, and very difficult to store because

they have to be kept at a constant temperature. So we focused on those things while everybody else was focusing on tints and you know, and clothes for refugees and

that sort of stuff. And as a result, we carved out a very interesting niche in terms of the humanitarian response and are still you know, going strong with that today and so that was initially kind of why I went over there for that first two months, and since then I've been back over to film a documentary, sort of an artistic short documentary called Note of Defiance, and then I was involved with another documentary project which is hopefully forthcoming in the next year.

the common Ukrainian name for it. You'll also hear it referred to as like the twenty fourteen revolution of the

madn Revolution. They're all talking about the same thing, which is when the guy who was the President of Ukraine trying to make himself into a dictator, the stude Victor Yanikovich, who is this incredibly wealthy oligarch who literally built a golden palace for himself with like a fake lake that had a boat on it, that was a restaurant for just him, for like the level of rich oligarch asshole we're talking about here, cracked down really brutally on a

student protest, which it kind of culminated in this kind of escalating occupation of the Center Square in the capitol that basically got built into an ice fortress in like the middle of the Ukrainian winter. This very very like pretty epic story of successful resistance because this guy is eventually forced out the police riot unit, the bearcoot who had done had been literally killing people by dropping them

naked in like ice drifts and stuff, are disbanded. It's a really remarkable story, and I just kind of fell into it because my friend connected me with a couple of people who were on the ground there, who were friends of hers, who were Ukrainian in the tech industry, who traveled to the US every year or so for burning Man, and so when this occupation of the madn started, they were like, well, we know how to, like we're used to making soup and food for large numbers of

people and like running little chunks of a camp. So we'll just start, We'll just do the thing that we do at our camp out over in Maidan. And they were part of the thing they were part of was the Automidon, which was this like mobile unit of resupply where people would like basically drive supplies to and from

different areas of occupation in the city. It was a pretty dangerous job as things escalated, but that was my ind and I wound up talking to like, I don't know, twenty or thirty people like actively the entire time the occupation was going on. There's like two folks I never was able to get back in touch with who just kind of like dropped off at a certain point. Like it was a really sketchy time for a lot of people.

But I wound up traveling there the year after, right after the early part of the invasion, started to report from Avdifka, which is, you know, was had been under siege for a year at that point and is still under siege today. For an idea of like that's a decade now basically that that this this little town has been shelled.

that's not what happened. And then there was like this counterpoint of realizing a few years later that oh, a shocking number of people on the left think it was a bad thing that they overthrew their government. Yeah, which, yeah, I guess gets us into the kind of thing you wanted to talk about, which is the difference in providing military aid to Ukraine versus Israel.

arms industry of any kind and primarily killing civilians. So I can very easily justify one of those groups of people getting US weapons and one of them not needing any additional weapons.

One of the things that I talk about, and I talked with Sharin about this when we went on Instagram Live together, is that a lot of leftists seem to live in kind of a weird little cinematic universe where only the US and Israel can be the bad guys, and by extension, France and the UK you know, and YadA YadA. But as a result of that, they have this just really strange view of global affairs that literally

no one in the countries they're talking about share. Somehow, Russia and Iran and China and Cuba are all aligned in a sort of anti imperial axis because they oppose

the interests of NATO in the United States. And I think that's just so, that's that's patently ridiculous, but it plays a big role in conversations like what's going on in Palestine, yes, or people will invoke, well, why are you giving all this money to Ukraine instead of giving money to people the relief for the Maui fires, or you know, doing why are we doing medical medicare for all.

So it's like it's a convenient because it's the military industrial complex, it's the Iraq War, it's all these things that we as leftists were taught to hate, but it's there being used for good. It's like America is actually being the arsenal democracy and doing the thing that we did in World War Two that helped the Soviet Union march into Berlin.

We didn't just build a bunch of new Bradley's. We had a shitload of them, we weren't using them anymore because they were not very useful in the conflicts that we were fighting, right that Bradleys.

trying to compare or demonize Ukrainians. We should demonize the media for not representing Palestinians in the right way. But I think that is kind of the origin of the comparison that I saw anyway.

the same light as Ukrainian resistance. I certainly agree with that stance. That's not the refault of anybody in Ukraine. Right this we are not talking about a country that

exercises power on the global stage. We are talking about a cash poor nation that has been struggling with Russian imperialism for most of the time that most of the people listening this, actually all of the time that everybody listening to this has been alive in one form or another, right, And so I think it's perfectly fair to point out the ways in which the media reports unequally on these conflict, on what's happening in Palestine, what's happening on stuff like Buka,

and on the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza.

New York. You know Ukrainians, you're familiar maybe even with some Ukrainian media, and it's kind of like this accessible thing, you know. And also like there's other aspects of it to which you're even stranger, which is that Ukraines produces like a huge amount of the world's fashion models. That's a very accessible thing for people to get behind in the nice liberal media. And you could see these in these initial broadcasts being like I've never seen anything like this.

With seeing all these European looking refugees, it's like, all right.

helped defeat the Nazis were Ukrainians. As a note is you often see this thing where people will point out there were a significant number of Ukrainians that fought with the Nazis, and they tend to ignore that, like, yeah, and there were even more Ukrainians who fought with the Red Army. Like, both of those things happened. It was a world war and Ukraine was right in the middle

of it. It's a very ugly situation. And it kind of comes down to this inability of a lot of people to not even nuanced to care about accuracy when that accuracy is not like ideologically convenient, when it points to some of the ugliness and messiness of war. I find that very frustrating. Like I sympathize with because I was reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis from the refugee trail right after actually I was in Ukraine, and it

is unfair that like Ukrainian refugees were treated differently. But the people to blame for that is the news media, not refugees who have lost their homes. In fact, I suspect that a lot of Ukrainians have a different attitude themselves towards the suffering that they witness during that period of time because they've now been through it. It's just like a human thing now, you know what that's like?

but not at Ukrainians. Like I think even now, we should have criticized the media back then, but like they're doing the same thing now with their fucking headlines about Israel and Palestine. It's always how it's presented versus the people it's presenting. Like when someone when some dumb newscaster is standing in front of a group of Ukrainian refugees behind him and he's like, these are not Arabs, these are white people. They didn't say that he did, so I don't know. Yeah, And also, like.

covered refugees coming off of a railcar. You know, they have a lot of opinions on these sorts of things. They feel patronized, they feel babied in some senses, and they feel like they will be ultimately abandoned by us, which is already coming to pass. And as the attention shifts to things like Gaza, you know, it's difficult for them to feel like they have any friends.

about Ukraine. There was still a lot of bridge, but suddenly it was like, you don't have to be obsessed with Ukraine. You know, Ukraine's now a second page story instead of a first page story. That was around the same time that the Russians withdrew from Kiev, So suddenly there wasn't there wasn't this expectation that Kiev was going to fall and the capital be taken in Zelensky would

be captured, and it started to slow up. Even then, you know, the donations dried up, the attention dried up, and by the time I went there in the winter of twenty twenty three last year, it was like people already wanted to forget. I mean, I live in Los Angeles, and a lot of people here were saying things like, oh wow, is that still going on? Really nice, well meaning people who knew I'd been over there, they were just like, is that you know, is that still a war going on?

as that became clear Americans, it didn't. It doesn't fit into that like ninety minute Hollywood vision of how a conflict is supposed to go right. There was no the Ukrainians didn't blow up a death star and end it right, like I mean, actually that's not what happens in the movies either, but like it's still it was not the quick, clean end that a lot of people were expecting and

hoping for. And as a result, people are like, well, now it's a quagmire and now it's like we have to start looking for some way out of this thing, which by the way, has cost us very little. Like my stance on like when is this over is like, well, I guess when Ukraine says it's over, right, Like if the Ukrainians want to come to the negotiating table and

negotiating into hostilities, then like that's their business. But up until that point, I think the business of the United States is to continue to meet our treaty obligations, which we should. We should note like the United States and NATO are obligated to support Ukraine in a war over its sovereignty because they gave up their nukes. With that understanding, right, this is what happened when we told the country, yeah, yeah, we said you'll give up her nukes, and we got

your back like this. This was the promise we made. And as far as I'm concerned, that's the only interest I haven't like. My answer is like, how long should we support them? Well, as long as they're fighting, and.

It seems like everyone has an F sixteen. I think we're giving them a turkey now too, Like it's not a big deal to give a couple of F sixteens to the Ukrainians or a couple of Bradleys or Abrams

or what have you. And I think that people especially on the right, but also on the left, who get obsessed over the amount of money that we're sending or the amount of equipment in personnel, especially when they see these worries about corruption, they don't they don't understand the scale of how small this actually is relative to the United States other commitments, like to Israel. And yes, they get sort of myopically focused on this, and they use

it as a reason to dislike Ukraine. The right will never like Ukraine because Zelensky was the guy who made Trump look bad and got him impeached. I think it's that simple. Yeah, it's wild that like well, also, I mean the Russian interference and stuff. You know, the Republican Party now resembles Russia more. But it's wild that Republicans, you know, thirty years ago were super anti Russia and now they Russia's best friend, and they think Ukraine are sort of Satanists whatever.

huge amounts of assets over the years. At the moment, like right now, the Pentagon, like as of November twenty sixteen, had failed six audits in a row, and as far as I can tell, I don't think they've actually ever passed an audit of like all of their resources. Like there's huge amounts trillions of dollars in assets that like

we can't fully document. It's it's when you think about like the amount of money that we've actually sent over there as a defense or as a percentage of just like the stuff that we can't fully account for in our militaries like Arsenal, it's it's a tiny fraction of that, let alone a fraction of like our defense department's total assets.

And it also this gets back to when people talk about like corruption in Ukraine, and by god, Ukraine has a history of government corruption, which is part of what the revolution in twenty fourteen was about, right, But it's particularly silly to complain about that as a reason not to send them weaponry when we know the US Defense Department is massively corrupt, a huge amount of corruption, involving not just like not specifically even like military officials, but

involving civilian contractors, involving like the agencies we contract to, involving the money that we've sent over the course of like the eight trillion dollars or so that we've spent on the war on Terror. A huge chunk of that, hundreds of billions of dollars of the money that we spent on the War on Terror is just gone. Billions of it disappeared in the form of cash pallets that we just lost, right, Like, this is the amount of money that it has cost us to support Ukraine in

this war. Is a rounding error of the shit we lost just as a matter of business, like just as like as.

and one, the Taliban and control. But now they have billions of dollars worth of America the state of the art American military equipment.

this depth of recruiting that they can pull on. But they're taking out recruiting ads in like Saint Petersburg, in Moscow and in like the wealthy that they're going hard on like recruiting from wealthy urban centers instead of sort of the traditional rural areas where they bring in all their recruits, which is evidence to me that they're suffering from a manpower shortage in the same way that the

Ukrainians are. Yeah, and that's one of the things that particularly frustrates me when people say that we're not what are we getting for our money? Because that's it, Like Russia is on the ropes. People just don't want to admit it. People see a slight incremental Russian gain or they feel like there's a standstill on the Ukrainian counter offensive and they think, oh well, let's just throw in

the towel. It's like, no, you can't stop the pressure now, and Putin is finally kind of ready to come to the negotiating table, it seems, and the Ukrainians, you know, need our help more than ever, And that's kind of the frustrating aspect. I went on the Hill TV the other day to talk with someone who said, basically, she said, is there any hope for Ukraine? Like very already fatalistic about the whole thing, like are they already on the ropes? And I was like, no, they're not on the rope.

So this is a narrative that we need to change. We need to understand that there's a very there's a huge difference between what military aid gets us in Ukraine versus what it gets us in Israel and Afghanistan.

But when we're talking about like the Ukrainians firing or giving them him Our systems or giving them Bradley's, we are talking about weaponry that is being used to break fortifications on along a line of contact, which isn't as zero never is a zero civilian casualty endeavor because those don't exist in war, but is a significantly less like involves significantly fewer civilian losses then the kind of wars that we have fought for most of the time that

I've been alive, right, because we're simply not using the weapons are not being used in the same way. Bombarding a trench lion is not the same as firing a cruise missile at what you're pretty sure is a terrorist hideout in a city, you know, right.

And we talk on this show, on my other show about a lot of horrible things our government has been involved in, which doesn't which does not detract from the fact that US aid and particularly food aid, is like a survival matter for tens of millions of people around the globe. Right, Like this is one of those things when the Republicans are talking about wanting to cut all foreign aid that the US gives to basically everyone but Israel.

What that means when you talk about that, you are talking about like starving populations of people larger than most major American cities. Because the US is massive, and the aid that we give is you know, usually not it's not really that significant a chunk of our budget, but for the countries, for a lot of countries that receive it, it's like critical to survival food aid and medical aid

that we've given over the years. And I think that also gets into like one of the things that's important about understanding like how what impact you might have on what's going on in Ukraine. You don't have to if you have too much of a bad taste in your mouth over the idea of supporting US military aid to anywhere. There's a lot of aid that's not military that's necessary

right as you do, Charles. People need medicine right like you are having a positive outcome on like the people in Ukraine, if you are helping to increase their access to food and medicine. And that's not morally complicated. It's always there's always some moral complexity in handing out weapons around the world. Handing out medication is incredible simple from an ethical standpoint, at least from where I. You're never a bad guy for giving medicine. It doesn't even matter who it's too, Like.

other individual people. You may not have access to a HIMR system or any more Bradley tanks to give the Ukrainians, although if you do, please please give them over they'll appreciate them. But there are a number of ways in which you can help, like the actual people suffering on the ground. And I think that that's like, that is right now what regular people can actually do.

to rethink their stance on an issue interest. I have received texts from aids to congressman Republican and Democrat who sit on like House Armed Services Committee or you know, Defense and that sort of stuff, saying like, hey, what's with this Ukraine? Like what's your take on the Ukraine stuff? Should we be giving them all this money? I don't really support it, but you went over there, do you think they're using it?

a green light to send that over there. And I think if more people, you know, were, especially now when a lot of congress people don't want to engage with the gaza issue but are looking for like good wins with their constituencies, like get to know your local Ukrainian constituency in your area, start a campaign to go to the regional office of your congressmen, find out which committees they sit on, and pressure them for sending aid to Ukraine. I mean that is something you can do. But on

the individual level, yeah, you can still raise awareness. You can connect the decolonial struggle of Ukrainians to that of Palestinians and other peoples. Someone who does this extraordinarily well is Yulia Timoshenka. Not the Ukrainian politician. She's a young Ukrainian influencer and advocate who went to Nyu Abu Dhabi and sort of got kind of got pilled on the whole Palestine thing and has really eloquently tied the Palestinian

and Ukrainian struggles together. So you can point people towards resources like that and let them know that there are at least some people in Ukraine who see that, who see that connection. And then you can also, of course, you can support humanitarian initiatives in Ukraine very carefully. Please

just do so very carefully. I would say there's a lot of there's a lot of people who went over there and started initiatives that were more or less good, but mostly kind of ineffective because they did not actually engage and include Ukrainians in that process. My role with everything involving Ukraine is just like just to ask Ukrainians about it, Ask Ukrainians what they need, figure out what it is that their priorities are, and make sure that

you're including them on your philanthropy and your charity. They will understand what is most impactful. My organization has experienced a lot of success by being entirely run by Ukrainians and being based in Arkiv, and as everyone else is funding and resources have dried up. Mission Arkiv is being handed project from larger NGOs who are leaving the region.

Because we focused on a local response. It also means that you know, donations to organizations like that go farther because they're going to higher Ukrainians rather than paying for the flights of some Westerner to go back and forth, you know, and do a fundraising you know, coming in from New York and do a fundraising pitch and go back. It's actually going towards This was a commitment I made to myself and my partner when I went over there.

My partner at Mission Harkive was that I was never going to expense like a flight or a meal or anything to Mission Harkive. So you know, all that's come out of my own pocket. And that means that every donation that we have gets to go pretty much directly into our programs. So you can still do that as

an individual, you can help in that way. And the awareness thing is a huge part people are forgetting Ukrainians feel abandoned, like making even just the act of putting a Ukrainian flag on your note or like tweeting about Ukraine occasionally is seen as such a huge act of solidarity at the stage in the game that the Ukrainians will love you for it.

in the most cost effective way possible. And I really like what you said about, like the importance of verifying that where you are supporting is not just doing the work, but is like doing the work in the best way possible. And one of like the really important things to look at for is like, well, how much money are they spending on sending Westerners to and from this place?

the support. I think that's always really important to try to do your research so that the support you give, the awareness you raise, and the money that you donate actually goes where it needs to get I think.

so they fly themselves out there. Maybe it's a war and they want to be a hero where they want to present themselves as a hero, and they end up raising a bunch of money for their quick and stuff and then stay far away from the fighting line, living in nice hotels like you said, Or maybe it is like you said, well, meeting people who just take up air from the people who need it and take up they're like sponges that just absorb all this Western energy

because they're they're a relatable face. And I've encountered all of those people in Ukraine. The reason I went to Ukraine is because I was like, if I'm going to fundraise for this initiative. People are going to give more, They're gonna be more invested if they see an English speaking American talking to them about this stuff. But I came in with the perspective that I can't be centering

myself on this. The idea is to deflect onto what the Ukrainians are doing and elevate their stories rather than saying I'm here, I'm posing with the Bakhmut entrance sign. I just delivered seven muffins and a generator to like a place that was cleared out by the Ukrainians, you know,

six months previously. It's more like, Okay, how do you take Americans are very generous people, how do you take American philanthropy, American dollars, American wallets and directed towards the people who are actually going to change, who usually are not Americans. These large NGOs, they serve a purpose, The UN serves a purpose. Doctors without Borders, direct relief, you know, World Central Kitchen. They do a great job in like

a specific thing. But a lot of times, if you're giving to the United Nations or you're giving to one of these big NGOs, that sets a fundraiser in the immediate aftermath of something. Your money is going to remodel an office in Rome or New York or Washington, DC, and you're not really reaching the people that you're trying to help. And I think if more Americans understood that, they'd be more responsible with sort of how they spend their money in a philanthropic sense.

dot com, and that's where we'll be. I'm kind of shifting towards more long form content to write about my experiences with these things and sort of a more digestible long form wave people engaging with important issues like this. Oh and if you're interested in the organization I help set up in Ukraine. It is mission dot harkive on Instagram or missionharkive dot com.