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Kyiv, Ukraine – One of the 70 missiles that Russia fired into Ukraine during the hours-long attack early on June 15 exploded above Mariya Prokopchuk’s house.
It rocked Kyiv’s eastern neighborhood with a deafening explosion, but most of its debris fell into a nearby algal pond, startling a dozen ducks.
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The attack shattered hundreds of windows in the area, blowing razor-sharp glass or plastic and dust into the rooms.
“Three centimeters, and (the bruises) would have pierced my skull,” the doctor told Al Jazeera.
He said he was “not alarmed” by the explosion that killed five civilians, injured a dozen people and started a fire, including at the Kyiv-Pecherska Lavra, a centuries-old Orthodox Christian building known as the “Vatican of Ukraine”.
But Prokopchuk feared the missing windows would make his first-floor apartment a target for burglars.
Hours after the 4am explosion, Dobrobat, Ukraine’s largest “volunteer army”, ended its crisis.
More than 100 volunteers arrived to remove the debris and install temporary windows made of honey-colored boards.
‘I was angry’
They came with truckloads of lumber and filled the air with the sound of battery-operated chainsaws.
“These guys are talented and they try to fix things,” Prokopchuk said as he sat at his kitchen table as three of Dobrobat’s volunteers finished fixing his windows. The clothes would keep her rooms dark but safe until she got a government grant to support plastic innovations.
Dobrobat is the Ukrainian acronym for “Battalion of Kindness,” and it has more than 55,000 volunteers who have already helped restore the homes and homes of more than a million Ukrainians, according to the group’s spokesman Vadym Severyn.
“Regardless of the amount of work, regardless of the amount, the number of people volunteering to work, the result is always the same – 100 percent of the people who asked for help to find it,” said Al Jazeera, standing outside the destroyed building.
Despite its fast-response approach, Dobrobat sends volunteers only after damaged areas have been cleared of unexploded mines and other hazards, he said.
Many of the volunteers are Ukrainian, and some jumped from their cars or buses in other areas after hearing about the June 15 attack in Kyiv.
But tourists from thirteen countries have also joined them, arriving in Ukraine for months.
One of them is Lars Fersters, a retired blacksmith from the town of Njurunda in northern Sweden, who joined the army after hearing about the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in the areas where he lived in Ukraine.
“I was angry, and I asked myself, ‘Is there anything I can do’?” The 70-year-old, dressed in an orange and white vest, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to Prokopchuk’s broken window that he was about to repair.
The Fersters use sign language and a translation software to communicate with their Ukrainian friends and the people living in their homes that they are helping to fix.
Besides quick repairs including tarpaulin roofs, Dobrobat also offers long-term repairs.
Last year, the Fersters worked with volunteers from Canada, China, Israel, and the Netherlands to build a new roof for a 73-year-old woman’s house in the Kyiv neighborhood of Irpin.
The building was destroyed by a Russian shell on the first day of the full-scale invasion in 2022 – along with more than 3,000 homes in the town of 65,000.
On June 15, less than 100 meters from the Fersters, an American man was cutting large panels with woolen ropes, pieces of wood that reach in different directions and are securely connected.
Jason Hercula bled to get to Ukraine – the 37-year-old hairdresser from North Carolina said he sold his water to buy a plane ticket to Poland, then took a night train to Kyiv.
“I have burned down two houses, so I know what it’s like to lose my house and I want people to return to their homes as soon as possible,” he told Al Jazeera.
Faster than the world
Dobrobat is part of a volunteer movement that includes millions of Ukrainians and provides civilians and soldiers with almost everything faster than public institutions.
Volunteer groups raise funds for drones, fire jackets, night goggles and shrapnel-proof goggles, medical aid, prosthetics, support equipment, shoes, batteries and heaters for tunnels and bunkers.
They evacuate the elderly, children and pets to frontline areas – and rush to liberated areas to provide immediate aid.
“It took them three days to get me insulin,” said Mikhail, a 67-year-old diabetic from the northern village of Yahidne. he said Al Jazeera in 2024, he remembers his near-death experience two years earlier, during the one-month regime of Russia.
He nearly died of an insulin shock after Russian soldiers put him in a school basement with 366 people aged 90 to 91 days and kept them there for four weeks in pitch darkness next to the bodies of neighbors.
A group of volunteers helped plaster the bullet-riddled walls and roof of Mikhail’s house, where Russian soldiers stole all valuables, ate his pigs and even a dog, broke many furniture and left excrement on the floor before returning at the end of March 2022.
Even Ukrainian schoolchildren volunteer to make candles out of empty tin, cardboard and wax, assemble drones and weave camouflage nets to cover many canals and roads to protect against Russian drones.
Volunteers sometimes switch to other, more difficult jobs on the go.
Army SOSthe group that provides the front with flak jackets and paper maps, was able to develop applications for tablets or mobile phones that allow soldiers to find and send real drone settings.
The pace of volunteering is often unmatched by government agencies that are in power and are often accused of corruption.
“If we are dealing with volunteers, things will happen,” an employee who identified himself only by his sign, Baloo, told Al Jazeera. “If we’re dealing with the government, the chances are 50/50.”
