Russians Crowdsource Supplies for the Military
Natalia Abiyeva is a real estate agent in Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. But lately, she has been learning about battlefield medicine. At a military hospital, a wounded commander told her that a comrade died because there were no airway tubes available.
Ms. Abiyeva, 37, has taken matters into her own hands. On May 25, she and two friends set out in a van for the Ukrainian border for the seventh time, bringing onions, potatoes, two-way radios, binoculars, first-aid gear and a dentistry set. Since the start of the war, she said, she has raised more than $60,000 to buy food, clothes and equipment for Russian soldiers.
“The whole world, it seems to me, is supporting our great enemies,” Ms. Abiyeva said in a phone interview. “We also want to offer our support, to say, ‘Guys, we’re with you.’ ”
Across Russia, grass-roots movements have sprung up to crowdsource aid for soldiers. They are evidence of some public backing for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war — but also of the recognition among Russians that their military turned out to be underprepared.
Russian soldiers’ most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.
Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the city of Novokuybyshevsk, has made the 1,600-kilometer drive to the Ukrainian border twice, ferrying a total of three tons of aid, she said. Recently, she posted a list of needed items on VKontakte, the Russian social network.
Ms. Abiyeva said she started crowdsourcing aid after her husband, a captain, was deployed to Ukraine. She visited the hospital attached to her husband’s base and got the contact information for surgeons deployed to the war. Ever since, they have sent requests to her directly and passed her contacts along to colleagues.
When a surgeon at a field hospital asked for arterial embolectomy catheters, for treating clogs in arteries, Ms. Abiyeva found a volunteer in St. Petersburg to make the 1,125-kilometer trip to deliver 10 immediately. Ms. Abiyeva said that when she met the surgeon a week later, he told her that six of the catheters had already been used.
“It’s possible that we saved six lives,” she said.
The Russian military’s apparently urgent need for equipment has led some Russians to wonder how the Kremlin has been spending its military budget. On the VKontakte page of Zhanna Slobozhan, a coordinator of donations in the border city of Belgorod, a woman wrote that talk of raising money for drones and gun sights “makes me think that the army is totally being abandoned to the mercy of fate.”
“Let’s make sure that at least we won’t abandon our guys,” Ms. Slobozhan wrote back.