“I’m a refugee,” said Nataliya Toropova, by way of introduction.
Ukrainian by birth, Toropova explained she fled her home in Kyiv, along with her 10-year-old son, when Russia invaded in early 2022.
“We had our life set in Kyiv, and I did not have any intention of leaving my country,” said Toropova, on the phone the other day from Luxembourg, more than 1,000 miles to the west of her home, where she is now living. “I loved it, I served it.”
But when Russia started firing missiles into Kyiv, Toropova knew she and her son had to leave. Like the rest of the city, they were scared and traumatized.
“My son did not smile for two months after the beginning of the war,” she said. “That tells you all you really need to know.”
Even from afar, Toropova found a way to continue to serve her country: by acquiring old ambulances and new medical supplies to send home to help the cause.
Toropova became chief operating officer and director for European affairs for Ukraine Focus, a nonprofit founded an ocean away by an Augusta County resident, Brock Bierman, a former three-term representative in the Rhode Island General Assembly and former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development who now lives near Waynesboro. He has a professional — and also a very personal — connection to Toropova’s part of the world.
He worked in USAID’s Bureau for Europe and Eurasia during the Bush and Trump administrations, and, in 2019, led an initiative to help Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, withstand the influence of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. He also helped establish European Democracy Youth Network, an alliance of young people advancing the cause of freedom in European countries with totalitarian histories.
His personal link to the region is his grandfather, who came to the United States as a teen in 1906, having fled religious persecution in what is now Moldova — a next-door neighbor to Ukraine — during a pogrom against Jewish citizens. He became an American citizen, attended college, started his own company and joined the U.S. Army to fight in France during World War I. The details of his grandfather’s story, which Bierman did not come to know until he was an adult, has had a profound impact on how Bierman views the world.
His grandfather “gave my family … the gift of freedom, and I have a debt to pay,” Bierman said during an interview in early 2023. “I feel like he paved the road for me, and I have to pave the road for not only my kids but other generations to come. That’s why this is so important.”
“This” is Bierman’s work in Ukraine, which he began in 2022 when he made a number of trips after the Russian invasion to deliver humanitarian aid. He was struck, in particular, by the need for ambulances. In communities where ambulances had been sent to the front lines, physicians were often left to drive patients to hospitals. All the while, those ambulances at the front lines were being targeted and destroyed by Russian forces.
Bierman founded Volunteer Ambulance Corps (which later became Ukraine Focus), inspired by the story of Americans who volunteered as ambulance drivers in France before the United States entered World War I. A longtime Rotarian, he partnered with Rotary International and raised more than a half-million dollars to launch the effort to provide ambulances to Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, the nation’s military reserve. He scoured the American countryside for used ambulances — once even acquiring more than two dozen parked at an automotive repair shop off U.S. 11 near Harrisonburg — and shipping them to Ukraine. In recent times, to streamline the logistics and reduce costs, the focus has turned to acquiring ambulances from European countries.
When an upcoming delivery scheduled for November is completed, the number of ambulances sent to Ukraine will surpass 250, said Bierman, who lived in Northern Virginia for many years before settling almost a decade ago in Lyndhurst, a place he describes as “paradise.”
Ukraine Focus has also constructed playgrounds across Ukraine for displaced children. Besides ambulances, Ukraine Focus has provided first-aid kits, generators, solar-powered lamps and other supplies. Ventilators, left over from the COVID emergency, came from Precision Valve and Automation, a New York company that also has provided 3D printers to make prosthetics in a quick and relatively inexpensive manner for the thousands of war-related amputees. Recently, Bierman has partnered with U.S.-based AMC Healthcare to construct modular hospitals across Ukraine; the first is expected to open in November in Bucha, a city where Russian forces massacred hundreds of civilians in March 2022. Former New York Gov. George Pataki, through his foundation, has joined the hospital effort with a multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign.
“We can’t do anything by ourselves,” Bierman said recently. “We need partners.”
And donors.
“It’s all a matter of money,” he said. “There is a critical need and a lack of resources.”
Through energy, will and persuasiveness, Bierman has been successful in pulling together partners and money from a variety of sources — global, national and local. Rotarians have been a major source of support, providing not only funding but volunteers to drive the ambulances across Europe to Ukraine. People such as Michael Binns of the Rotary Club of Western Henrico, which has donated two ambulances to the cause.
Binns and his wife, Debbe, participated in a June mission that, for symbolic reasons, was tied to the 80th anniversary of the Allied Invasion at Normandy. Ukraine Focus volunteers gathered at Normandy for the D-Day ceremonies and then started driving more than 50 ambulances across Europe toward Ukraine.
Binns found himself behind the wheel of an ambulance from Spain with a manual transmission and an odometer showing about 400,000 kilometers (248,000 miles). Most of the aging ambulances in the convoy completed the journey to Ukraine — Binns’ included — though a few broke down along the way, requiring repairs that delayed their arrival until later in the summer.
“It was a good trip,” said Binns, who drove to Slovakia before handing the keys to another volunteer. “We enjoyed it, and we felt like we did a good thing.”
Binns is impressed by what Bierman has done to keep Ukraine Focus going.
“He makes things happen,” Binns said. “He’s gone after it and stuck with it, too.”
The development of Ukraine Focus has been organic, Bierman said. He had no plan when he visited Ukraine in 2022, as he was just trying to “figure out how to help.” He found vast needs but also the astonishing resolve of Ukrainians, which seemingly has never wavered.
“They are fighting such an incredible evil,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of fighting a war, it’s a matter of survival.”
Toropova, who, before the war, worked in public health advocacy, deeply feels the sense of urgency for her country, even working from afar in Luxembourg. Among her duties, she is tasked with finding ambulances, a never-ending quest as they typically survive only a few weeks on the front lines before they are destroyed by Russian forces. She regularly travels back to Ukraine among the volunteers delivering the ambulances, then hurries back to Luxembourg to start scouting around for more that some other locality no longer needs. It can be frustrating. When it comes to acquiring used ambulances from unfamiliar sellers, she said with a laugh, each vehicle is “like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to find.” Some work out, some don’t. But when she finds ambulances that work out, they save lives.
So, she presses on, racing against time and odds and weariness.
“As my friend recently told me, when you don’t have any options, life actually becomes easier,” Toropova said. “Because you have only one way to go and only one goal, you just have to figure out how to hit that goal and keep going. We just keep going.”
