LVIV, UKRAINE- Our coverage of Stories from Ukraine continues. Our crew came across a group of people from all over the world volunteering in Ukraine. Their mission? To provide food for the soldiers fighting at the front.
Pulling out bags and bags of food, people with the Lviv Volunteer Kitchen are eager to show us what they’ve prepared. Soups, snacks and cakes, all of this will be sent to the Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the front lines.
“It’s the largest morale boost for them knowing there are loads of people here often in Lviv, cooking all this homemade food just so they don’t have to eat MRE meals,” said volunteer Richard Woodruff. “They can feel slightly at home with warm borsch in their stomach.”
Some of these volunteers are from other parts of Ukraine and some traveled from other parts of the world.
“This is the end product, this is beautiful,” said one volunteer showing us a soup. “It’s tasty, pumpkin and rice soup with dill in it and it tastes delicious.”
“It just felt like it was the right place to be right now,” said volunteer Jeremy Pryslak. “Being home was difficult just hearing stuff on the news and reading stuff on your phone. You spend all night scrolling through your phone. In a state of anxiety, coming here and helping, doing what you can. Chopping vegetables in the snow feels better than doing nothing.”
The Lviv Volunteer Kitchen has been up and running since the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2014. With this current conflict, volunteers said they couldn’t just sit at home and wait for the war to end.
“I go home with a feeling that I did my job,” said co-founder Oksana. “We understand we cannot feed everyone on the front lines but we know that we do something and it helps for our boys and girls who are fighting there for our freedom.”
