This is a series of posts I’ll make about my experience in Poland and Ukraine during the Russian military invasion and attempted takeover of Ukraine in 2022. The Russians began their full invasion in February 22nd and like many people, I stayed up many days and nights straight without sleeping glued to the news, worried sick. I have many friends in Ukraine having visited about 5 times before and we were all talking about what was going on. It was very chaotic. People were fleeing, some were staying, people didn’t know if they would ever be able to return or even if their house would still be there on their eventual return.

In those days, my friend Yura -who I met in Istanbul with a group of Ukrainian acroyoga teachers some years prior- began reaching out. He had been quickly drafted and was about to begin military training in the forests near Lviv, a city in western Ukraine near the Polish border. The situation was so chaotic that the Ukrainian government didn’t have enough uniforms, weapons, body armor for all the new thousands of recruits drafted immediately after the invasion. It was a dire situation, thousands upon thousands of Russian soldiers were advancing from every direction, Kyiv could fall any time, the nation could be lost.

So Yura messaged me asking if I could get him some military grade body armor and some other things like tactical knee pads, gloves, etc. Of course I wanted to help. I had already bought a ticket to Poland because I wanted to help in some way. I’m not someone with military training or anything like that but I felt that this invasion was so unjust that something needed to be done. At the time, Ukraine had closed all their airspace and no commercial planes were flying in Ukraine because Russian missiles and rockets were hitting cities and airports. So to travel to Ukraine one must arrive in Poland and then travel by road to the Ukrainian border and cross there.

My friend Ryan refurbishes medical equipment so when I began to explain my trip to Ukraine on Facebook, we communicated and he donated several duffel bags of surgical instruments of all shapes and sizes. I would then take these and personally deliver them to a hospital in Ukraine or the front lines where they may need them. So I bought a ticket Chicago O’hare to Warsaw, Poland and prepared to go.

Unfortunately, I got the message from Yura about two days before my flight and you can’t simply go down to your local gun shop and get military grade Level 6 (European) body armor. It’s not something gun stores normally have on the shelf. I looked online and while I was able to find some there, even with next day shipping it would not arrive in time. So I thought, when I get to Poland I’ll look around and see if I can find some military grade body armor and bring it over to my friend Yura.

So I arrived at Chicago O’hare airport with a giant hiking backpack full of metallic surgical instruments, a suitcase and a carry on also filled to brim. Everything was just massively overweight. So as I was checking in the bags at the counter, there were a lot of counters with agents and as I get called I notice the guy had a small pin with Ukrainian colors.

I put the hiking backpack on the scales and you know at carnivals they have the big hammer and you hit the thing and see the numbers go up and if you hit hard enough you win a prize? Well I was winning all kinds of prizes. The thing just goes off the scales it was so heavy but as I’m talking with the guy I mention that it’s full of metal instruments on its way to a Ukrainian hospital. And it turned out the check in agent was Ukrainian.

So he says, just wait a minute and he goes and talks with someone and comes back and says normally you’d have to pay hundreds of dollars for the overweight, plus the extra bags, etc. but we’ll waive it today. Good luck in Ukraine. I was so relieved because I thought I might not even be able to go through to my flight with all this crazy heavy stuff. So it was very providential that of all the people at the long line of counters in Chicago O’Hare the one guy who called me up was from Ukraine. That day we became friends on Facebook and then I went aboard.

I arrived in Poland in late March. I had posted on Facebook a couple days before my trip in a Facebook Group that I was a volunteer coming from the states and need some help going from Warsaw to the Ukrainian border. And immediately someone responded and said yea, let me put you in contact with this person and this person. And sure enough within hours, these Polish guys said that they would meet me at the airport and help. It was amazing. When I arrived at Warsaw it was pretty late at night and the passengers who weren’t vaccinated had to get Covid tests right there at the airport. So that actually delayed me quite a bit as I wasn’t expecting it but the Polish volunteers waited for me. There was no way to communicate with them but thankfully they waited an hour or two for me to exit the airport.

Finally after the Covid test showed negative I was allowed to get my bags and go out and there was a car waiting for me with a couple Polish volunteers who I never met before but drove me straight to Lublin, about two or three hours drive south. Lublin is about halfway to the Ukrainian border.

So we arrived at some insane time like 3am or something and we went straight to a restaurant where another Polish guy who owned the place was waiting for me. It was just incredible. The fact that the guys drove me down there, another guy kept his restaurant open with hot food ready just for me was beyond incredible. So I had an excellent Polish dinner, welcome to Poland.

There I met Mihal, the Polish volunteer who I would spend the next few days with at his house. I should write an entire post just about this time because I was so impressed. I can definitely say Polish guys are the best, really incredible guys. After spending a few days with Mihal, I began to call him Saint Mihal because of all the volunteer work that he was doing was above and beyond. I’ll have to write a part 2 for sure because everyone should know.

Anyhow, the following photos are from my stop in Lublin, Poland which is about half way between Warsaw and Przemysl, a town on the Polish/Ukrainian border. Millions of refugees have come through this border crossing.

While I was in Lublin, I learned a lot from the Polish perspective. Poland has suffered what Ukraine is suffering in World War 2 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and took over Poland. So Poland remembers and they have really stepped up helping Ukrainians in their time of need.

Below is a gallery of what I found in downtown Lublin, Poland. I was only there for about a week but I could see that Polish people are very hospitable and very helpful. Stories in the captions.