Drones, drugs and bullet-proof vests: life as a war courier in Ukraine

Ask what Ukraine is like, five weeks after Russia invaded, and Mirek doesn't hesitate.

“It’s very dark there,” he says. “No light in apartments after certain hours. They turn off street lights and even on roads and highways. It’s dangerous to drive fast.”

Mirek has driven lots – and fast – all over Ukraine lately.

As others hold benefit concerts, agonise over arms deliveries or offload worn-out clothes, Mirek has discovered other dark talents to battle the wartime darkness that has fallen over Ukraine.

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“We basically smuggle,” he says matter-of-factly, taking a small sip of wine.

The Warsaw resident is in his mid-30s and is not really called Mirek, but to protect his privacy and his improvised aid effort, he asks that his name, appearance and other identifying details be withheld.

He is just back from delivering drones and other supplies to Irpin, just as the town near Kyiv was taken back – in ruins – by Ukrainian defence forces.

In the last years Mirek made lots of Ukrainian friends and was a regular visitor across the border. On February 23rd he boarded a night train home in the southern port of Mariupol, now another city shattered by war. He was in the western city of Lviv when Russia invaded Ukraine, hurried home to Warsaw, began making phone calls and launched his career as a war courier.

As he describes it, his work sounds simple. He has secured the necessary travel papers from his Ukrainian friends, now in the military. He asks them what they need, finds it, buys it and delivers it. Sometimes he spends his own money, sometimes it’s donated money, but the aim is always the same: to get what’s needed, where it’s needed, when it’s needed.

“Bullet-proof vests, for instance. You cannot transport them without a concession, theoretically it is a crime, but no one will punish you,” he says. Then there’s the drugs.

“I just organised 80 packages of morphine, methadone and other opiates,” he says. “Our government is very inefficient transferring this stuff. They talk about smart helping but it doesn’t work.”

This is a WhatsApp war, where a stranger on a train shows you videos of rockets zipping through their neighbourhood, scrolls on to an offer of a spare room from a stranger – and then smiles in hope

It's a regular weekday night in Warsaw, but the conversation is as surreal as the idea of war in Ukraine, four hours down the road. Here in Poland, war is neither red flashing television news alerts nor social media virtue signalling.

War here is lots and lots of people, on the streets and in train stations, disorientated and despairing people who have left everything behind and may have nothing to return to. War here is children who are eerily calm, comforting parents whose voices are ragged with low-level hysteria, tearing like the ripping of cloth.

This is a WhatsApp war, where a stranger on a train shows you videos of rockets zipping through their neighbourhood, scrolls on to an offer of a spare room from a stranger – and then smiles in hope.

As 2.4 million Ukrainians fled over the border in the last five weeks, Poles have met this historic tragedy with unprecedented generosity.

All Ukrainians are entitled to 18-month visas here, granting immediate access to healthcare, welfare and schools. But much of the day-to-day effort is private or run by local government: after a short stay in city reception centres, most Ukrainians are being housed with families or in apartments, assisted along the way by an army of volunteers.

But their extraordinary effort is already flagging and, like the stretched financial resources of Polish towns and cities, even this deep well of generosity will eventually be exhausted.

Mirek's adventures sound like an Ernest Hemingway rewrite of Graham Green's The Third Man but with – we hope – real and not counterfeit medicine

On Thursday night, one of Poland’s major Facebook volunteer groups, offering everything from rooms to therapy, closed down. As private charity dwindles, no one knows how central government in Warsaw will cope.

For Mirek, rather than wait for more people to flee or for the Polish government to step up, his priority is to help people return home to what remains of their lives and homes.

While national and international aid agencies do their part, Mirek is winging it with a loose network of unlikely allies. From pro-migrant leftists to hard right Polish nationalists, their common goal is to free Ukraine.

“Everyone has own agenda and no one is showing all their cards,” he says with a smile.

As Mirek talks in short, matter-of-fact sentences – of smuggling drugs into Ukraine and refugees out of Belarus into Ukraine and Poland – his adventures sound like an Ernest Hemingway rewrite of Graham Green's The Third Man but with – we hope – real and not counterfeit medicine.

In this 21st century war, the main character isn't navigating the sewers of Vienna but rural backroads to avoid motorway snipers near Kyiv.

With Google Maps his constant companion, he shows me a screenshot of a regular alert that pops up: "The Government of Ukraine has issued a warning for X, take shelter immediately. Tap here to change settings." From what to what: alive to dead?

Mirek gets the alerts mostly in the countryside, he says, where there are no air-raid sirens but where he has nowhere to shelter. So he drives faster.

In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the war, he has found spectacular beauty, too, in the darkness: a wide open night sky, full of stars.

Though coy about what he supplies, some of which can’t be mentioned in case it identifies him, Mirek insists he leaves the transports of guns and ammunition to others. Even so, the risk is still real.

At a recent cross-country mission he was stopped by ageing Ukrainian men at a civil defence checkpoint, armed with rifles that looked like they had last seen action in the second World War.

Their wariness melted way when they heard Mirek had drones. Like children, they asked to see them – and the Starlinks, portable satellite dishes and terminals developed by Elon Musks’s Space X.

They connect to the company’s satellites in orbit and have allowed Ukraine’s military guide strikes on Russian tanks and positions. This war is less about arms than a farewell to drones.

As midnight passes in Warsaw, Mirek begins to flag. Perhaps it is the second bottle of red wine but it seems as if the walls of the century-old apartment around us have been listening to us – in sorrow.

Like the sleeping Polish capital, this building has seen a lot in the last 100 years. And now once more, in 2022, the dining room is filled with late-night talk of war, bombings, refugees and smuggling.

Watching Mirek all evening, he seems to grow calmer the more hair-raising the exploits he is relating. Apart from a solid moral compass, another motivation, he says, is personal unhappiness in his life which lifts when he is helping others.

He expects no medals later for his efforts now, nor does he want them. He will be happy once the border guards continue leaving his cargo boxes unopened. It will all be fine, he will be fine.

“I’m not going to die, at least not in the immediate future, I want to live but I’m not afraid of dying,” he said. “I believe that I am an adrenaline junkie these last years, if I am honest with you. It’s probably not good – but I do a lot of good stuff with it.”