Trafficking for the Nation

Since the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014, military crowdfunding networks have been central to the Ukrainian war effort. As regular forces and militias departed for what was then called the “anti-terror operation” in eastern Ukraine, activists mobilized their connections and social media followers to procure everything—from food and technical gear to drones, vehicles, ammunition, and light weapons—to make up for deficient military logistics. Crowdfunding networks spread through all social strata but were often coordinated by middle-class people. Since then, military activists have emerged as key mediators between frontline units and donors and supporters in the rear.

These war brokers often operated informally: on a cash basis and relying on the diaspora, smugglers, and colluding customs officials to import vehicles and restricted items while avoiding official duties, registration, and scrutiny. The 4x4 vehicles, often with political slogans on makeshift number plates, became the symbol of the contradictions of Ukraine’s expanding informal war economy. As the war in Donbas entered a stalemate following the Minsk Peace Accords in late 2014-early 2015, Ukraine’s courts started to receive a steady trickle of cases seeking to determine ownership of and responsibility for volunteer-supplied SUVs that ended up in road accidents, were stolen, or seized far from the front lines by police unwilling to put patriotism above missing registration papers.

In October 2021, against the backdrop of Russia massing its forces on Ukraine’s borders, I arrived in Kyiv to study the networks that were the backbone of this informal economy. The “volunteers,” as the crowdfunding activists are commonly known, with whom I spoke joked that I was five years too late: with a protracted economic crisis and the incorporation of militias into the regular armed forces, the crowdfunding movement had subsided after 2015. Its most active members joined executive state bodies or were elected to office. Most of those assuming public office managed to hold it for a short time only. Meanwhile, the state’s spending on the military increased by 72 percent between early 2014 and 2021, reducing the latter’s reliance on crowdfunded aid for basic supplies. The once dynamic and diverse field of crowdfunding activism became carved up between several “oligopolist”—networks that had managed to professionalize and specialize their activities and to diversify their income—and individual activists who persisted in sending small supplies to the military, as acts of care as much as out of meeting needs.

The cooperation on which the people’s economy of war thrived created densely interconnected civic networks linking veterans groups with political parties, Western-funded NGOs, and state institutions. It cemented a heterogenous coalition of veterans, activists, and political parties, united by shared opposition to the Minsk Peace Accords. After Russia fully invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this alliance became the foundation for a new mass mobilization.

The crowdfunded economy exploded in the “big war” as the size of the defense forces trebled to over a million and the fighting intensified. The National Bank of Ukraine and the three largest military charities—UNITED24, Come Back Alive, and the Serhiy Prytula Foundation—raised some €870 million in 2022. Come Back Alive, in whose offices I had done fieldwork, saw an almost 233-fold increase in receipts: from €0.6 million in 2021 to €143.5 million in 2022. Sums that once would have taken a year to collect were now gathered in days. Smaller organizations sprang up alongside these large ones: almost eight times as many of them were established in 2022 compared to 2021. Many charities and NGOs shifted their activities toward the expanding war economy.

Last year, half of Ukrainians provided financial support to the military, veterans, or the displaced. Donations to formal organizations, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the giving is not to registered charities, but to activists accepting cash or using private bank accounts. The donations they collect are rarely visible or reported to the state. Having spent decades battling a “shadow economy” that deprived the state from due revenues, Ukraine is now relying on volunteer crowdfunding that is heavily from the shadow economy as an additional source of revenues for the war. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that military crowdfunding would have developed on the same scale without peoples’ experience of doing business in the shadows.

The shock of the “big war” in 2022 undermined distinctions between licit and illicit, official and irregular, just as the violence of revolution, annexation, and separatist war had done eight years earlier. But with the war “descending into the ordinary,” to borrow from the anthropologist Veena Das, the Ukrainian state has started to look for ways of asserting control over informal flows. Their volume has been high enough to make the Ministry of Finance suggest that it would tax (at 19.5 percent) donations received by those not registered with the tax authorities as military activists. By early summer 2023, some 5,000 people had registered—a tenfold increase on the previous year, but still only a small proportion of those involved in voluntarily supplying the defense forces. The volunteers’ concern about their impending confrontation with the state and its “paper army” is palpable in the cliché I increasingly heard: “After the war, we will all go to prison for money laundering and smuggling.”

Individual volunteers operating informally to speed up aid deliveries, often risk falling afoul of customs and banking regulations. Following the 2022 invasion, the National Bank of Ukraine imposed severe limits on outbound transfers and foreign withdrawals for individuals to protect hard-currency reserves. Forced to procure most of their supplies abroad, volunteers who operate without the backing of charities and other organizations, have had to find ways of making cross-border transfers that significantly exceed the bank’s limits. For this, volunteers have relied on brokers with access to bank accounts in multiple countries, with money paid into a Ukrainian account and paid out of a foreign one. This has given rise to the Ukrainian equivalent of the hawala: the informal, honor-based value transfer system of the Islamic world. In this context, volunteers mix forms of interactions—donations, commercial purchases, gifts, and promises—normally kept separate for reasons of law and morality. Justified from the point of view of the “people’s logistics,” their workarounds can easily appear questionable to officials.

In September 2022, two volunteers in L’viv—the sculptor Oles Dzyndra and the activist Yuri Muzychuk—were charged with selling crowdfunded vehicles imported as humanitarian aid. Commenting on the case, one activist, Sviatoslav Litynskyi, explained that it is not unusual for cars brought in as humanitarian aid upon an official request from one military unit to be instead given to another unit in greater need. In such cases, the recipients are charged for the vehicle (the charge is usually crowdfunded too) so as to pay for a replacement for the originally intended recipients. “According to the letter of the law, this is a sale of humanitarian aid,” said Litynskyi. The offense carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison with forfeiture of property.

The charges against Dzyndra and Muzychuk were dropped in September 2023. But their and other similar cases have spurred defensive mobilizations in a volunteer community prepared to fight the state bureaucracy in order to help the nation. This anti-bureaucratic sentiment, with nationalist and growing libertarian undertones, is becoming the distinctive feature of wartime political life. Driven by the requirements of national defense and the dynamics of the informal war economy, many volunteers seem ready to turn against the state where they see it standing in the way of winning the war. If and when the imperative of urgent national defense recedes, these middle-class “traffickers” and logisticians of people’s aid will play a greater role in politics too. But how exactly this happens will depend on leaders articulating the volunteers’ grievances and demands into large collective projects.

https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/volontery-dopomoha-humanitarka-viyna/32011853.html

Taras Fedirko is anthropologist and lecturer in organized crime and corruption at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. He was a visiting fellow at the IWM in 2023.