Natalia Abiyeva is a real estate agent specializing in apartment rentals in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. But lately, I’ve learned a lot about battlefield medicine.
Bundles of hemostatic granules, he discovered, can stop catastrophic bleeding; Decompression needles can relieve pressure on a punctured chest. At a military hospital, an injured commander told him that a comrade had died in his arms because there were no airway tubes available to keep him breathing.
Ms Abiyeva, 37, has decided to take matters into her own hands. On Wednesday, she and two friends drove out in a van to the Ukrainian border for the seventh time since the war began in February, carrying onions, potatoes, two-way radios, binoculars, first aid supplies and even equipment. of mobile dentistry. Since the start of the war, he said, he has raised more than $ 60,000 to buy food, clothing and equipment for Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine.
“The whole world, it seems to me, is supporting our great enemies,” Ms. Abiyeva in a telephone interview. “We also want to offer our support, say, ‘Guys, we’re with you.'”
Across Russia, grassroots movements have emerged, led largely by women, to help Russian soldiers. There is evidence of some public support for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort, but also for the growing recognition among the Russians of his army, which they held before the invasion as a class fighting force. unfortunately, it was not prepared for a major conflict. .
Attention packs for Russian troops often contain inspirational messages. This card says “#forourguys”. Natalia Abiyeva says she wants her country’s troops to know they have supporters.
The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the family care packages for Americans in the Iraq war. Most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision goggles, a sign that Russia’s $ 66 billion defense budget has failed to produce essential equipment for modern warfare.
“No one expected such a war,” Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the Volga city of Novokuybyshevsk, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for that.”
Ms. Plotnikova, 47, has already traveled 1,000 miles to the border with Ukraine twice, carrying a total of three tons of aid, she says. Last week, he posted a new list of urgently needed items on his VKontakte page, the Russian social network: bandages, anesthetics, antibiotics, crutches and wheelchairs.
Medical equipment is in high demand, in part due to the growing firepower of the Ukrainian army, as the West increasingly strengthens it with powerful weapons. Aleksandr Borodai, a separatist commander and member of the Russian parliament, said in a telephone interview that materials were needed to treat “large-scale” shrapnel wounds and burns on the Russian side of the front. More than 90 percent of Russian injuries in some areas, he said, have been caused recently by artillery fire.
Borodai said his units had observed the use of 155-millimeter shells fired by U.S. shells, and that Russia’s leadership may have underestimated the West’s determination to support Ukraine.
“It’s not making the military operation go faster from our point of view; it’s making our situation more difficult, I don’t deny it,” Borodai said, referring to Western arms deliveries. “Our military leaders may not be prepared for such massive support from the West.”
A Ukrainian weapons team carrying a 155 mm M777 howitzer artillery piece in Donetsk. Such weapons are “complicating our situation, I do not deny it,” said a Russian-backed separatist commander. Credit … Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The Ukrainian military, taking advantage of Western support for its cause, is benefiting from a much broader crowdfunding campaign that offers millions of dollars in donations on items such as drones, night vision goggles, rifles and consumer technology.
Most of the groups that collect donations for Russian soldiers appear to be operating independently of the Russian government. They depend mainly on the personal contacts of volunteers in individual units and in military hospitals who pass lists of what they need most urgently.
In Russia’s state media, these groups are rarely mentioned, perhaps because they undermine the message that the Kremlin has the war firmly in hand. But sometimes the message is leaked to the Russian audience.
“Our service members keep saying they have everything they need,” a television segment said in April about these volunteers, “but a mother’s heart has a will of its own.”
Outside the state media, however, supporters of the war point to private donations as the key to victory. Prussian military bloggers, some of them members of Russian troops, are asking their followers to donate money to buy night vision equipment and basic drones.
“Our boys are dying because they don’t have that equipment,” one blogger wrote, while “the whole West is supplying the Ukrainian side.”
The necessary equipment, largely imported, can be purchased at Russian sporting goods stores or ordered online. Starshe Eddy, a popular military blogger, wrote that consumer drones manufactured by Chinese giant DJI “have gone so far in combat operations that it’s hard to imagine war without them.”
Tatyana Plotnikova has traveled to the border with Ukraine twice. Medical supplies collected by Ms. Plotnikova.
Ms. Abiyeva, the real estate agent, showed her Telegram account a Nikon Prostaff 1000 laser-equipped rangefinder that she bought for $ 400. Nikon says the article “makes seeing and moving deer up to 600 meters a reality.”
“With this kind of technology everything is better and faster, wouldn’t you say?” Mrs. Abiyeva wrote, adding a wink emoji and a heart emoji.
Ms Abiyeva says she began seeking help after her husband, a captain, was sent to Ukraine and felt “powerless” to affect the course of events. She visited the hospital attached to her husband’s local military base and obtained contact information from surgeons deployed in the war. Since then, they have sent requests directly to him and passed on his contacts to his colleagues.
When a field hospital surgeon requested arterial embolectomy catheters to treat artery obstruction, Ms. Abiyeva found another volunteer in St. Petersburg to make the 700-mile journey to deliver 10 immediately. Mrs. Abiyeva said that when she met the surgeon on his own trip to the region a week later, he told her that six of the catheters had already been used.
“We may have saved six lives,” he said.
The Russian army’s seemingly urgent need for essential medical equipment and basic consumer devices made abroad has led some Russians to wonder how the Kremlin has been spending its huge military budget, more than 3 percent. total economic production of the country. On the VKontakte page of Zhanna Slobozhan, a donor coordinator in the border town of Belgorod, a woman wrote that talking about raising money for drones and gun sightings “makes me think that the army is completely abandoned at the mercy of destiny “.
“Let’s make sure we don’t at least abandon our boys,” Slobozhan replied. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr Putin visited a military hospital for the first time since the start of the war on Wednesday. He later told officials that although the doctors he met had assured him that “they have everything they need”, the government should “respond quickly, quickly and effectively to any need” in military medicine.
Boots and shoes left at an abandoned Russian checkpoint near Chernobyl, Ukraine, in April. Credit … Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
However, the idea that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are poorly equipped is increasingly infiltrating Russian public discourse, both among opponents and supporters of the war. In a documentary about the mothers of soldiers released last weekend by Russian journalist Katerina Gordeyeva, seen about three million times on YouTube, a woman describes her son using a cable to re-attach the soles to his boots.
An association of retired Russian officers issued an open letter on May 19 stating that the public was raising funds for equipment that the military was sorely lacking “even though the government has a lot of money.” The letter excludes the war effort of Mr. Putin as unenthusiastic, urging him to declare a state of war, with the aim of capturing all of Ukraine.
But on the ground, the concerns are more prosaic. With the arrival of summer, ticks carrying Lyme disease have come out, and Belgorod volunteers have been making homemade insect repellent, putting it in spray bottles and delivering it to the front. .
A group of women collecting donations in the area learned that some of Russia’s backed separatist forces were so ill-equipped that they used shopping bags to carry their belongings. On their Telegram account with about 1,000 followers, the group made an urgent call for backpacks, along with shoes, Q-tips, socks, headlights, lighters, hats, sugar and batteries.
“That’s because they understand that they are not alone,” said Vera Kusenko, one of the coordinators of the Belgorod group, who works in a beauty salon as a specialist in eyelash extensions. “We hope this ends soon.”