Dear {{First Name | Reader}},

The toughest part about living in Kyiv these past three months has been the sleep deprivation. Attacks on the city are up about 4x since a certain change in US politics this year. While there is of course a threat to life and limb with ballistic missiles and Shaheds hitting your apartment at night, the more chronic and present threat is to physical and mental health. A few months is enough time to get to a sense of the toll that chronic stress takes, as young people in the prime of life mention in passing an upcoming doctor’s appointment for treatment of what you would think of as a later-in-life disease; or just the brain fog that takes hold when you have one night a week of no sleep at all from explosions, and many other nights of disrupted sleep from air raid alarms and mid-air explosions as air defense guns down incoming drones.

I tend to think a lot about these less-reported impacts of war. The divorces that happen because one spouse wants to stay while another wants to head to a safety in Europe. The scores of teenagers who are studying abroad who may never come back and what this kind of brain drain will mean to the rebuilding and repopulation of the country. This stuff weighs heavily on the country.

Last week’s ballistic missile and Shahed attack on Kyiv was especially deadly, with 28 confirmed dead and more than 134 wounded—as usual, all civilian targets. I just focused on trying to keep my dog calm and that helped keep me calm. I can best describe it as like experiencing a very loud series of earthquakes with lots of tremors and aftershocks.

Do I regret the move? Not in the least. Every attack only strengthens my resolve. Three months in, I like the people and country even more than before and feel very fortunate to be in this place at this time in history, knowing that in some very small way I’m playing a role in shaping it in favour of what I stand for.

Here’s a few of the things I’ve been working on since I last wrote:

With the increased attacks on civilians, fire and rescue workers are facing the toughest and deadliest phase of the war yet. Because their every day is a peace-time fire and rescue worker’s worst day, they wear through equipment at a pace that’s unsustainable for official replacement. One of the most visible manifestations being that many are fighting fires in a heat wave wearing winter firefighting suits. This must be what hell feels like. For about $30 a pop I’ve been able to buy dozens of summer suits and have been able to get many sets of second-hand high-visibility jackets and heavy-wear shoes donated—thank you to Verein PCs für Alle in Austria for sourcing the used stuff.

In one of my many group chats, a sort of SOS was put out from a volunteer: as happens too often now, a source of US corporate funding evaporated without notice. This stuck them with a full tractor trailer load of donated fitness equipment destined for veteran rehabilitation, pallets of food for the guys at the front, and fish netting to use to build drone-safe transport corridors. The load was worth about €160,000 but they had no funding to ship it. We were able to come to the rescue and cover the €5,500 it took to ship from Ireland to Ukraine. For me it was a big win as a chance to both work with and connect two great organizations for the first time, Misneach Ukraine from Ireland 🇮🇪 and Operation Change from Sweden 🇸🇪.

We got the gear successfully rolling and delivered to Operation Change’s warehouse in Dnipro, and they are now doing last-mile delivery with their vans across the East. Misneach has a limitless supply of gear they can get donated, especially as they’ve teamed up with one of Ireland’s biggest fitness chains that’s replacing all their equipment and giving them first dibs on it. The challenge is to find support for the next tractor trailer shipments; I will try another one or two but it’s more than our group of supporters can afford.

As a general rule right now, it’s possible to find goldmines of valuable gear to be donated across Europe but the bottleneck is getting the money to pay for the tractor trailer load. If you can help, please reach out to me.

A huge thanks to McArthur Medical Sales Inc. in Ontario, which has donated hundreds of their SpeedSplint products over the past couple of years. These have provided more comfort and saved more limbs of troops and civilians in the worst moments of their lives than we will ever know. He’s just provided another 100 of them which I’ll personally bring back in a duffel bag with me, as I’m in Canada right now spending time with family.

Donations of medical equipment—especially CAT7 tourniquets, Israeli bandages, chest seals, and literally anything that you can imagine that would be of use in trauma meidicine are desperately needed. To give you an idea of how bad the situation has been these past three years: I regularly buy plastic cling wrap at the supermarket to give to medics for use in sealing life-threatening wounds. Please always keep this front of mind when you talk with people who work in the medical profession and can help us with donated items or funding.

Our friends at NAFO, who have brought in about 700 donated vehicles, estimate that each vehicle will save 30-40 lives. I love this quick take on how one of their trucks saved 79 people in 24 hours. Here’s me by the way last Monday handing over a NAFO truck to the 70th Brigade, after the convoy arrived from Tallinn, Estonia.

If that math holds up, then let’s think about what it means for this 2002 Mitsubishi Pajero I bought for the troops last week. We paid €4,000 for it, and it needed another €500 of welding and fixing up in Ukraine. If we take the mid point of 35 lives, and the total capital expense of €4,500, that’s about €130 per life saved. Well, we’ve saved lots of lives with $10 tourniquets too, but I’d say this is pretty good value for money; and unlike a tourniquet, a truck can be used for all manner of support work as well. So let’s keep the trucks rolling!

I’m funding repair, maintenance, and new tires on a continuous basis for our “fleet” of purchased vehicles and for others. Eagle-eyed readers will spot the Norwegian license plates on this Pajero. Lately I’m scouring that market because the combination of strict emission laws and high labour costs means that the resale value of these gas-guzzling beaters is rock bottom. Combine that with the fact that Norway isn’t part of the EU so I can save some bucks on EU export paperwork means that this otherwise insanely expensive country has great deals on trucks.

As I’ve been in trains and buses for more than a hundred hours in the past month, I had some time to geek out on vehicle research, with my sidekicks YouTube and ChatGPT. I’ve gained an outsized appreciation for the Mitsubishi Pajero as an undefeatable workhorse. For that reason, I am going to buy one myself and use for my own dicier missions going forward. I’ve put my trusty VW Passat up for sale in Austria; I love that thing with all my heart but it’s not up to the Ukrainian roads in the East (well, or the West for that matter!)

I think we were a bit nuts to host another 200-person edition of Invest in Bravery in Prague just one month after our 200-person Kyiv edition, but we did it and it was great. The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave us their palace for the day and we had keynotes, panels, and a pitch showcase of 20 Ukrainian startups. It was awesome travelling with our delegation of 40 Ukrainians which included government representatives, defensetech founders, and soldiers of the ultra-elite 3rd Assault Brigade. We have a little summary video in case you want to get an impression. I once again emceed the event and was very happy to be back in Prague, one of my favourite cities in the world and maybe the place I’ll retire to one day.

I was very proud to be Canadian as the Prime Minister announced a C$2 Billion package at the otherwise not so great G7 conference recently. Crucially—and this can’t be emphasized enough—Canada was explicit that its Ukraine funding counts towards its NATO funding commitment, which sets a vitally important precedent that will extend across NATO countries. It’s almost more important than the funding itself and is a bold signal and line in the sand. Political Analyst Ariana Gic explains it well in her LinkedIn post.

It’s always been my plan to “go official” with my volunteer and fundraising work once I arrived in Ukraine. To this end, I’ve now registered an official foundation, Roxolani Trust. The Roxolani were a Ukrainian tribe that existed during the peak of the Roman Empire, and were known for their courage and resilience as they protected Ukraine, and I fell in love with the name. I can already receive donations by IBAN and am working on the online donation processing piece, and have a team of awesome volunteers / friends who are building a website to be proud of (the one that’s up now is a placeholder). Perhaps most important, I can now issue my own humanitarian aid customs declarations to import everything from painkillers to Pajeros into the country.

I remain very positive about Ukraine’s victory in this war. It’s also abundantly clear to me that it’s a question of holding the line as russia exhausts itself and implodes on itself as its wealth evaporates, inflation and interest rates run north of 20%, and infrastructure crumbles — here’s a good summary from Prof. Darin Gerdes. Let’s keep helping them hold the line while keeping casualties low.

Thank you to the many of you who have asked how I’m doing personally. I’m holding up just fine though the sleep deprivation is very hard. I’ve put pretty much all of my career work in climatetech on hold at least for the rest of the year so I can hit the road and work on the ground with troops and not worry about where I’ll take my next Zoom call from. Having the access and network I have, the most high-value work is the cross-pollination I can do between military, volunteer and humanitarian organizations, and supporters like you. I’ll continue to keep my head down and avoid unnecessary risks beyond what’s needed to be effective.

Thanks for sticking with me through thick and thin, 💪

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