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Posted by Felicity Spector

https://fspector.substack.com/p/where-theres-hope-theres-life

Ruslan Omarov is one of Ukraine’s unsung heroes - evacuating people and their animals from the combat zone in Ukraine’s embattled eastern city Kupyansk. He drives there from Kharkiv down impossibly hazardous roads, which frequently come under fire, several times a week. On the way out there, he takes a full load of freshly baked bread.

Ruslan is a volunteer with the NGO X-traverse, and has been helping his fellow citizens since the full-scale invasion broke out. Back then he had begun helping elderly people and young families to escape the intense bombardment in Kharkiv, then got together with friends to create more organised support.

Together with another volunteer, Vasilysa Gaidenko, they built a shelter for people in the town of Chuhuiv and took a food truck to de-occupied regions in 2023, funded by an Indian charity. The food came from local Kharkiv restaurants Yaposhka and Gaga. They told Lyuk magazine that the truck was a “celebration on wheels”, something for people to look forward to when all around them was fearful and bleak. When people start to smile, they said, this is what gives them life back.

He’s now turned his focus to his home city of Kupyansk, scene of some of the fiercest fighting of 2025. In December, Vladimir Putin claimed Russia had captured the city: days later President Zelenskyy posted a video of himself outside the city sign, proving rather spectacularly that Russians were not in control. It was a bold move - the video was filmed just a few miles from Russian lines.

Ruslan was born and grew up in Kupyansk, and knows the terrain - it has become so dangerous that X-traverse is the only organisation which still manages to evacuate people there. I went to meet him in Kharkiv, where bakers who had arrived there in April were busy baking bread. Together with another volunteer, Albina, they told me they had built the space from scratch after the bakery where they had worked in Kupyansk had been completely destroyed. They work through the night to make sure the bread Ruslan delivers is perfectly fresh. Sometimes they also make cookies and pastries for children.

They plan to scale up production to six or seven days a week, and showed me a room at the back which they wanted to turn into a shop selling fresh bread and other baked goods. That would enable them to make some money to cover the charitable work, as well as an exhibition space to remember their home city, which has largely been reduced to ruins. “You will be able to look at photos of Kupyansk before the war, because we want to show that cities should not die, that we should live and strive for peace. So we will show the history of what was, for people who come from there to remember their familiar places, and for others to see the history as it was.” They even want to have some furry marmots known as ‘baybak’ - which is considered a symbol of the city. “A lot of people move here from the combat zone, and they have no work, nothing - but we want to attract them all to visit us and help them to find work”.

I went back into the main space to watch the bakers, with decades of experience between them, starting the bread making process: one lady was getting a batch of dark rye ‘Borodinsky’ bread going, already fragrant with caraway, honey and malted rye. She added water and some sunflower oil, and watched carefully as the mixer pummeled the craggy mass into a glossy, treacle-brown dough. I asked what equipment they still needed. Top of the list was an oven that could run on solid fuel pellets, for the frequent periods of blackout. “We need an oven that can work without electricity, because the power is often turned off, and the weather is only getting colder. The building we are in now works autonomously from large boilers that run on these pellets, and we would like to have everything working on the same system.”

At the moment they make around 600 loaves of ‘social bread’ a week but they want to scale up, if they can raise the necessary funds - “this is never enough, and production is expensive”. They want to supply people in three frontline villages around Derhachi, north of Kharkiv - and they’ve been asked if they could help displaced people from Kupyansk who now live in dormitories. “But we have to focus our efforts on places where there is nothing, where people live in the most difficult conditions. If we have this bigger pellet oven we will be able to bake more bread, and more quickly. It would simplify everything and increase our production capacity.”

Ruslan says his mission is simple - to help ordinary civilians who find themselves in traumatic circumstances, with no military support. “We believe it is necessary not to solve problems with the help of weapons. Nothing can be solved. And we hope that weapons will avoid us in the same way”. Looking at the videos which Ruslan posts each week of his evacuation trips, it looks utterly impossible that he makes it there and back. In winter the road is turned into a nightmarish assault course of huge, ice filled crevasses and banks of slippery mud. There are net tunnels, built over front line roads to protect against fibre-optic drones, and others which drop explosives on any passing cars. The nets do not cover everywhere, and they cannot offer total protection. But Ruslan somehow makes it there, gives out the bread to the few hundred people who remain, and brings back those who are most vulnerable, or whose relatives finally persuaded them to leave.

“I take bread, somehow support them, give them important medicine. I bring back the sick, people with limited mobility, and injured people. I take them to a safe location. Because no volunteers can come here. There are no military to take them out.” He describes the precarious journey in more detail: the broken bridge, driving on water - and under fire. “You have seen the videos. There is a difficult sector there, one of the most difficult in Ukraine, along the front line. It’s not just a question of going there, unloading a few boxes and picking people up. It’s dangerous everywhere. You can’t get there all the time.”

But without Ruslan and his astounding courage - for these Kupyansk residents who still cling to their homes for whatever reason, amid all the horror and violence and loss - there would be no other means of escape.

https://fspector.substack.com/p/where-theres-hope-theres-life