By Rianna Pauline Starheim
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative, in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.
Bryan Many works on a humanitarian shelter budget on his laptop as his Ukrainian colleague, Serhii, drives the highway from Kharkiv to Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. Due to jamming to interfere with drones, the GPS shows the car near Lima, Peru.
This straight ribbon of winter highway connecting Kharkiv and Dnipro in eastern Ukraine could easily be rural America: Route 88 between Oneonta and Binghamton in upstate New York, perhaps, or Route 55 tracing the northeastward line from Bloomington to Chicago in Illinois. Wipers steadily clear the light rain that repeatedly obscures the windshield, limiting the field of view. Trees are silhouetted against a horizon that disappears into fog in all directions. It’s the perfect day from a security perspective: weather that blurs the view from the skies, and grounds Russian drones. Weather you can hide behind.
Delaware County native Bryan Many, 37, sits shotgun in the mud-streaked SUV, writing a multimillion-dollar humanitarian aid budget on a computer open on his lap. His Ukrainian colleague, Serhii, drives and the two make easy conversation in English about the impact electric vehicles will have on America’s massive network of gas stations, plans for Christmas, and Serhii’s 11-year-old cat and two-year-old dog, who get along well. Serhii asks whether the United States will withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); he’s been reading about that in the news. Bryan says he doesn’t know. You never know. It might.
Headlights of oncoming traffic emerge like eyes from the fog: a civilian cement truck, 10-wheeler tractor trailers, coach buses, many muddy and weathered passenger cars. Occasionally, a military vehicle passes, camouflage netting blowing wildly in the wind and with a cage around its forehead to protect from drones (the drone explodes on impact with the cage, rather than directly on the vehicle skin, reducing damage). The car passes a civilian café with plywood over the windows, operational again after a Russian drone attack in late October.
Every 50 miles or so, the car slows and then stops at a checkpoint, where Ukrainian soldiers check Serhii’s identification on his phone. Most Ukrainians carry their national identity documents electronically through a government app called Diia. Ukrainian males over the age of 25 are eligible for a national draft that has conscripted more than a million men since the beginning of martial law in February 2022. As the war nears its fourth year and casualties mount, desertion has increased. The military uses drones to find men trying to leave the country illegally and in cities, conscription officers patrol the metro and other public places, checking documents. For 25 to 60-year-old Ukrainian men, this type of encounter could be life changing.
The Diia app, which Ukrainians use to store their national identification cards. In the section of the app that’s shown, users can view military job vacancies and apply to join the military. Some of the jobs shown on this screen include Master Explosive Technician for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Aircraft Maintenance Technician, Warehouse Clerk, and the highly coveted position of UAV Pilot.
The road from Kharkiv to Dnipro is quiet now, but in February and March of 2022, Ukrainian tanks rolled over this pavement and warplanes flew overhead as Russia carried out a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, occupying twenty percent of the country and dramatically escalating conflict that had been simmering since 2014, when Russia annexed the 10,000-square-mile Crimean Peninsula, still claimed by Ukraine. In 2025, this road is no longer a front line—that’s dozens of miles away—but still, forest green armored vehicles and small military encampments surrounded by sand