Brian: When I moved to Kharkiv full time, April 2024, I had brought my Springer Spaniel Annie, with me. We nicknamed her Humanitariannie, and they used to have these little billboards by the sidewalk with Patron photos warning kids about unexploded ordnance and that type of thing. So I got some great photos of my dog Annie looking at the billboard, and I photoshopped a bunch of hearts in the air like she was infatuated with Patron, and it became kind of a running joke with me and my friends.
And then I remember- so I became a big fan of Patron, and we’re doing a delivery somewhere in Donetsk Oblast at a military- like a stabilization point. And somebody mentioned Patron, a soldier we’re talking so I said, “Yeah, how’s patron doing?” And the guy told me that Patron had been killed in a strike or something like that. And I was so bummed out. I was like, oh, you know, my dog loves Patron. I love Patron, I have a stuffed Patron doll in my apartment. So come to find out, Patron is alive and well and doing fine. But I’m a big fan. Yeah, good international greeter for diplomats. I’m sure you’ve seen that.
Vic: Yeah, I’ve seen Zelensky has met him and all sorts.
Brian: Macron and Trudeau from Canada, being greeted by him.
Vic: So do you think that the current Pes Patron is the original Pes Patron?
Brian: I do, I have every reason to think- even though a lot of them kind of look the same that breed. It’s funny, I guess there’s a huge surge in- he’s a Jack Russell Terrier, I think? So there’s a huge surge in sales of Jack Russell terriers.
Vic: Yeah, I’ve had a couple of Ukrainians say that to me, that like it’s annoyed them a little bit, because there’s so many dogs needing homes due to people evacuating, and then everyone’s buying Jack Russell’s because Pes Patron.
Brian: Yeah, it’s so sad. We do deliveries occasionally to some of the rescue place like ARK, Animal Rescue Kharkiv. They especially need canned dog food to get the dogs some protein, because you can buy cheap dry food but it’s mostly grain, so we do deliveries, and it’s so sad. Like ARK has one facility, they have like, three or four hundred dogs there. It’s an old there’s an old racetrack just up north of here, and- horse racing track. So they use the old stables they’ll have like seven or eight dogs. At least it’s an area where they can run around in. But it’s so sad because a lot of the dogs that they’ve rescued from the abandoned villages, they’re starving, and they end up chewing on like rocks and stuff. Their teeth are all gnarly and broken. It’s really sad, yeah. But I agree with your point, if only people would adopt, I feel like that in the United States too. Same way. I’ll never buy another dog. My Springer was a rescue.
Vic: Okay. Are there any other stories of any other characters that you’ve heard that you found particularly compelling. Like, do you know about the Ghost of Kyiv?
Brian: Is that the pilot? Yeah, a little bit. I remember hearing about a while ago, yeah, and Baba Yaga. Stories like that. No, I’m gonna be a boring interview. No, not really.
Mary: Do you carry anything for good luck when you go on your missions to Donetsk?
Brian: Yes, I have, oh, what do you call it? What do you call the good luck charm? Yeah, the, there’s a name for it?
Mary: The good luck charm.
Brian: No, but there’s a specific name. It’s handmade by some Ukrainian grandmother. We have it in the van.
Vic: Like a little doll?
Brian: Yeah, not stuffed. It’s like woven.
Vic: Motanka?
Brian: The English word… Oh my God, it’s, it’s like a figurine of a woman. It’s like yarn…
Vic: With the cross for the face?
Brian: I should go grab it. It’s been in there for so long, I forget, stuffed away in a door. But the drones haven’t gotten us yet, so hey, who knows?
Vic: Yeah, it’s working.
Brian: We’ve had a couple hairy encounters down Donetsk Oblast with drones. We do a lot of humanitarian aid deliveries to the frontline villages, but the frontline villages we go to are getting further and further away because of the drones.
We had one incident about two weeks ago. We had to get out of the vehicles, and we had two vehicles, we had to get out of the vehicles and go hide in the woods, and we could hear a drone in the area. And we have drone detectors that intercept the radio signal that goes to the Russian drone pilot. So if you see your vehicle in the centre of the screen and it’s closing in- you know, we don’t wear seat belts, so you only get that time, get the hell out of the van, you run in separate directions and go find cover. So we’ve had to do that a couple times, but they haven’t gotten us yet.
So we had a little conference, and we talked about where we’re going to go from now on. We’re going to start getting a little further away from the front, even though we want to help these villages. It’s just getting too dangerous, and if we get killed, we can’t help anybody. Or the van gets blown up, or something like that. So we’re having to go further and further away from the front unfortunately. But there are still a lot of places that need a lot of help, or they have a lot of displaced people there.
Vic: I was down in Balakliia the other day, and they were saying that a lot of people from Izium have moved back to Balakliia because even though it’s not great, it’s less bad.
Brian: Oh yeah, Balakliia is pretty safe overall, they get hit occasionally. But Izium is not all that bad, we drive through there once or twice a week. They’re putting up a lot of drone netting on all the main roads. Have you driven down there at all?
Vic: Not to Izium. We just went as far as Balakliia because my translator knew some people there, so we went down to speak to them.
Brian: Yep, yeah, we do regular deliveries to a church down there, Balakliia, but to us, that’s like the easy zone <laughs>. We don’t gear up or anything to go there. There’s no sense in it. But that’s, that’s about a third of the way to where we go now.
Vic: Okay, so quite a few hours.
Brian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then once we get to- we gear up usually once we get to the Donetsk Oblast boundary, there’s a big checkpoint. Not a big checkpoint, a significant checkpoint at the border where they’ll search the van and stuff like that. They get strict there. But the drone netting now, it’s starting in Izium, almost all the way down. Unfortunately, a fair amount of it- a bunch of the drone netting came down with the ice storms we had. It got weighed down, and believe it or not, the metal poles crumpled under the weight. So a lot of the poles were bent to 90 degrees. So last time we were there was a couple days ago, they’re reinstalling the netting on a lot of the highways. You think all the man hours that went in to put that stuff up.
Vic: Yeah. I mean, even on the drive down to Balakliia, we saw that they were putting wooden posts up alongside a particular stretch. It seemed like a weird one to do because it was not that far out of Kharkiv, but I guess preparing for-
Brian: Yeah, they’re doing it at some of the checkpoints just to protect the soldiers, but then the highway between there is clear.
[Interview interrupted due to other people arriving, and sirens sounding. GPS signals are commonly jammed during air raids]
Vic: Yeah, I’ve noticed my GPS- for some reason, it kept sending me to Russia, but the guy I was with, it kept sending him to Peru.
Brian: Oh, Peru, yes, the latest, yeah.
Vic: Yeah. I don’t know why mine was going for Russia. I’ve noticed that- I don’t know if it’s because I’ve got a weird phone that’s like, ruggedized, and it seems to use some nonstandard services. I don’t know if that makes it respond to spoofing differently.
Brian: Yeah, when we first started coming to Kharkiv in 2022 it would always tell us we’re in the middle of the river, the Kharkiv River, no matter where you went. And I didn’t know the city back then. So one time, we’re trying to get out of the city to go back to Kyiv, and it must have taken us, like, an hour and a half to get on the highway because we didn’t speak the language. Yeah, it was- but now I’m lucky, I know that a lot of the streets here, so I have no trouble getting around.
Vic: And how’s your language skills now?
Brian: They haven’t progressed much since I got here <laughs>. Google- oh, my latest is using ChatGPT for live translate. Does two way translating. So, like, I just picked up that [gestures to van] at the mechanic shop. I had a regular conversation with a guy. You don’t have to switch languages. It just automatically detects it and translates it for you. Oh, it’s great. Works awesome, yeah. But yeah, I probably speak like 30 words of Ukrainian, that’s about it. Thank you, please, you’re welcome. Coffee, of course, kava. Bez moloko [without milk].
Vic: So when you say kit up, what do you mean by that?
Brian: Helmet and vest.
Vic: Does that help much when there’s a drone?
Brian: It all depends where the shrapnel goes, you know. Might as well increase your odds a little bit anyway. Between that and not wearing the seat belts, we can jump out. You do what you can do, and then the rest- it’s all about managed risk, you know. Like I was telling Mary when I first moved to Kharkiv, I was getting acclimated to the explosions, but what really put my mind at ease living here especially, is one of the first days I moved into my building, a 17 story building. I was running the stairs up and down for exercise, so I went up the 17th floor, and they happened to be working on the roof, and the door to the roof was open. So being Ukraine with no liability laws, the guy said, “yeah, go take walk up out on the roof”. So I walked out there, and you had a 360 panoramic view of the city, and I realized how immense this city is. And then you look around like if one or two Shahed drones or missiles come in, the odds of you getting directly impacted are so, so tiny. And even when it hits somebody’s apartment, it’s amazing how few people get killed. I’m not trying to minimize it. It happens, but it’s pretty amazing. Like they’ll launch bunch of Shahed drones into the city, and, you know, there might be five people injured or something like that, nobody killed. So it’s pretty surprising.
But when we go south and work with a military chaplain who lives in Slovyansk, he’s dialled in with all the military units. So we get a reading on where we’re going, how hot it is that day, because how many drones are using varies a lot along the front line. If there’s a lot of drone activity, we’ll stay away from that area. So it’s just, you know, educated risk. You try to try to increase the odds as best you can. But beyond that, yeah, there’s always a risk. I missed the old days when we used to go, like, within a mile or two of the Russians. You could watch an artillery duel, and, you know, it was crazy, the stuff- I remember being outside the city of Toretsk and just looking at it through binoculars, and you could watch, you know- you could hear the Ukrainians fire a Howitzer and then watch it hit somewhere. It was insane to think about doing that nowadays. You gotta be suicidal. So, yeah, things have changed a lot. I’m sure you hear that from a lot of people. It’s, it’s a totally different war nowadays than it was back then.
Vic: So when was that roughly?
Brian: 2022, early 2023. You know 23 there are drones starting to come out, but they’re pretty rare overall, not too much of a concern, yeah. Because they were expensive back then too. Nowadays- I just heard that Ukraine, I think in the next year, they’re gonna get like 7 million drones produced for them. I mean, that’s mind boggling, those numbers. If you told me that two years ago, I would have said you’re crazy, but they’re so cheap and plentiful now. Unfortunately, Russia’s doing the same thing.
Vic: So how often are you running these missions?
Brian: Once or twice a week down near the front. And then I supply food pantries in Kharkiv here. So we’ll- I have a warehouse. We get pallets- hello!
[Interview cut off by someone else arriving]
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