At the rendezvous point outside the city of Kupiansk, the vehicles park under whatever tree cover is available. The brilliant, cloudless blue sky means Russian reconnaissance drones can easily spot the approaching small convoy, containing 11 residents who have agreed to leave this part of Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region.
“They watch everything,” Denis Stoyanov, a volunteer with a charity evacuating people from the front lines, tells me. In the distance, artillery can be heard, and small arms fire and explosions routinely disturb the birdsong. We are well within range of Russian artillery and first-person view drones, or FPVs. The group of evacuees is mostly elderly; the young, those with more to live for, were among the first to leave.
Dodging Russian bombs is nothing new for Ukraine’s evacuators. But the financial bombshell dropped by Elon Musk’s chainsawing of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year was impossible to avoid — and has been even more destructive to their work. The slashing of organizations and programs jeopardizes the lifesaving support they offer to Ukrainian civilians. These teams of volunteers crisscross the country and help others escape the approaching front line, fleeing death or Russian occupation. “We’ve lost a significant amount of our funding,” Stoyanov says, as we drive toward an evacuation effort in a donated German ambulance.
The longer the evacuation teams linger in any one location, the more likely they are to be targeted by Russian fire. The evacuees bring as much as they can carry with them; anything that cannot be stowed in the vehicles must be left behind. With such limited space, everything they choose to bring must be carefully considered. One Ukrainian man brings with him a shiny bicycle. A husband and wife bring their aging family dog, who has to be helped into the minibus. An unexpectedly jovial middle-aged woman brings multiple heavy bags of clothes. An 85-year-old woman, born at the height of World War II, carries a bag of vegetables, the last harvest from a garden she will probably never be able to return to.
Stoyanov’s I Am Saved charity doesn’t want to leave anyone behind who has chosen to go, whatever their condition. This means that a barely conscious middle-aged man, who has drunk himself into a stupor, is the last to be pulled from the armored car. He is half helped, half dragged into the ambulance, where he promptly passes out. “We will take him to a rehabilitation center in Kharkiv,” Stoyanov says, shaking his head. The rest are taken to a processing center, staffed by various organizations, including smaller Ukrainian efforts like Helping to Leave, as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After registering, they are given a small aid package and helped to find new accommodation in safer parts of Ukraine.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Kupiansk was home to 26,000 people. Now a heavily shelled and bombed shadow of its former self, the city’s few thousand remaining civilians survive among the ruins. Kharkiv is routinely bombed and attacked by Russian drones, but despite the danger, many of the evacuees will most likely remain in eastern Ukraine, close to the homes they were forced to abandon and whatever friends and family remain in the area. Those who can afford it might try to relocate to safer parts of the country, including the capital Kyiv, which is protected by the best air defense network in the country. But even there, danger is not far away. As we drive across eastern Ukraine, the news breaks of a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Kyiv, killing 28 people. “Fucking Russians,” Stoyanov says loudly as we watch a video from the scene.
Stoyanov’s organization has lost up to a third of its funding, money which disappeared overnight after Musk’s cuts; the exact figure is still being determined. USAID was the charity’s main international support; now, in the agency’s absence, I Am Saved is stepping up crowdfunding and reaching out to global donors. But with many organizations in the same boat, competition is fierce.
As the Russian summer offensive continues its grinding advance and the front line steadily moves forward, more and more people need to be evacuated. “The more the front moves, the more requests we receive,” Stoyanov explains. “And we are catastrophically short of vehicles, armored vehicles, and funding for repairs.” A catastrophe is an apt description for the end of USAID, which is an extinction-level event for many Ukrainian civil society organizations. This year, the country was expecting $1.4 billion in grants from USAID, meaning Ukraine is the biggest loser from the dismantling of the agency in absolute terms. (Programs across the African continent, including Ethiopia, Congo and Somalia, which relied on the funding to support maternal health and combat HIV/AIDS and malaria, have also been hit especially hard.)
According to a survey by Open Space Works Ukraine, a private social change enterprise, 10% of all organizations in the country have shut down and a further 12% were forced to shutter certain programs. A quarter of all surveyed organizations had to lay off staff members, while almost 1 in 5 had to place employees on unpaid leave.
“USAID funding allowed us to cushion the blow of leaving everything behind,” says Daria Rabinovitsch, the chief executive of Helping to Leave, an organization that works alongside I Am Saved. “One of the biggest reasons some refuse to leave is the fear they’ll be left in poverty in their new homes.”
Rabinovitsch says people call or message them through the Telegram app, asking for help. They also get direct requests from the local Ukrainian authorities, despite being independent and receiving no state funding. “The busiest we’ve been was the surge of requests in 2024, when Russia launched its offensive into Kharkiv.” That offensive was eventually stopped by the Ukrainian military, but not before the border city of Vovchansk, previously home to over 17,000 people, was razed to the ground. Currently, Rabinovitsch’s organization gets around 70 requests per month in the Kharkiv region, and 150 per month in the southern Kherson area on the Black and Azov seas.
The city of Kherson is particularly dangerous for civilians; Russian drone operators deliberately target any civilian activity as part of what Kherson residents have labeled the “human safari,” a campaign that the United Nations Human Rights Council has described as a “crime against humanity.” Paradoxically, Rabinovitsch explains, Ukrainian military success has seen people return to areas that they later have to flee again. When swaths of Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts were liberated in late 2022, many formerly displaced Ukrainians returned to their homes, only to have to leave again as Russia regained the offensive initiative. It’s common for people to wait until the last possible moment to leave, Rabinovitsch says. “They’re hoping for a miracle,” she says, with a sigh. “And people also get used to living in these horrible conditions. When you have lived under constant shelling and bombing for the last three years, it becomes your new normal.”
It can be difficult to persuade remaining civilians to evacuate, Stoyanov explains. “The money USAID provided was crucial in helping to persuade people to leave,” Rabinovitsch says, explaining that many of those they help were already internally displaced. “Others were elderly and their homes were all they had,” she says. As well as their homes being their only material wealth, many elderly Ukrainians would supplement their meager government pensions with whatever they could grow in their gardens.
As a result of the cuts, which have seen Helping to Leave lose 75% of its funding for the first half of 2025, a program aiming to evacuate 3,680 people from frontline areas in Kherson and Kharkiv this year has been put on hold.
Many of Helping to Leave’s paid employees are internally displaced people themselves. As well as employment and direct financial support, helping other Ukrainians in similar situations gave these staff members a sense of purpose. “These cuts deepen the hardship for Ukrainian communities as a whole,” Rabinovitsch says. The rest of her organization’s funding comes from big institutional donors, which in turn receive it from other governments, including the Czech Republic, Norway and the United Kingdom. Sometimes the source of the funding is relatively opaque, meaning that the full impact of the USAID cuts has yet to be entirely understood. Beyond its institutional donors, half of Helping to Leave’s annual budget was based on crowdfunding. Individuals, nongovernmental organizations and military units constantly run such campaigns, raising money for everything from humanitarian aid to the long-range strike drones that hit targets deep within Russia.
USAID also helped cover more mundane expenses, such as fuel and vehicle repairs. The potholed roads of eastern Ukraine, not great at the best of times, have certainly not been improved by Russian shelling and heavy military traffic and take a heavy toll on vehicles. Stoyanov sighs: “We have an armored Mercedes van, a six-seater fully armored, but it got into a serious accident and is in for repairs.” They also have an 11-seater minibus, which they mainly used to evacuate families with children, but it needs a new engine, a repair that costs $6,000. Funding, as ever, is the limiting factor here. Volunteers work for free; mechanics do not, and parts cost money.
In its absence, they are using a number of donated, secondhand soft-skinned vehicles. But these offer little protection from Russian fire. “Anything will go through this,” Stoyanov says, knocking on the side of a donated German ambulance. As a result, the final and most dangerous stage of the evacuation from Kupiansk that day — which brought the volunteers the closest to the Russian lines — was carried out in conjunction with another volunteer group, using an old Italian, cash-in-transit armored car. Stoyanov and his team of evacuators try to carry out their work as early as possible, to minimize the threat from FPV drones and glide bombs, which routinely pummel what is left of Kupiansk. “FPVs are very dangerous,” he says, drawing his finger across his neck illustratively. At a fuel stop, two brand-new sparkling white armored Land Cruisers park next to us. The Ukrainian evacuators look over at the shiny vehicles, half enviously and half scornfully. “You don’t see the U.N. in Pokrovsk or Kupiansk,” Stoyanov says.
A Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jew (he sports a prominent Star of David tattoo on the side of his neck) from Sloviansk, Stoyanov is the archetypal resident of the historically Russian-speaking Donbas region, which Putin claimed to be launching his invasion to protect from the “neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv.” He has experienced life under Russian occupation: He lived in the city in 2014 when it was occupied by the Russian-backed “separatists” of the Donetsk People’s Republic. “They forced me to my knees and held a Kalashnikov to the back of my head,” he says, one of the many acts of random violence inflicted upon the residents of Sloviansk by the first group of people who claimed to be “liberating” them. He now lives in Kharkiv with his wife and his 2-year-old son, but he still loves Sloviansk and hopes to be able to return there one day. For now, it’s just too dangerous. His experience of Russian occupation partly explains why he is willing to take such risks to help his fellow Ukrainians avoid the prospect of experiencing it themselves.
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