07/31/2026
Behind the Scenes of Leleka's Aid
Meet Liliia Bondarenko. Officially, her title at our Ukrainian office in Kyiv is office manager-administrator. In reality, she sets the queue of shipments, checks soldiers' paperwork, draws up handover documents, and untangles the "especially severe" requests by sheer volume. In a word, in our Ukrainian office she keeps the routine moving — so that the troops receive their medical supplies as quickly as possible.
"When I came to work at the foundation in August 2023, I was struck by how few people were doing such an enormous amount of work," Lilia says. "I'd heard plenty about the scale of the shipments before, since I come from the 'medical-adjacent' volunteer crowd myself, but I hadn't expected to see it done with zero showing off."
Lilia has been part of that "crowd" for a long time — since the very start of the Revolution of Dignity. She dove into the Maidan for her son's sake: she served as a medic at the House of Trade Unions in Kyiv, then at St. Michael's Cathedral. And from the outbreak of fighting in eastern Ukraine right up to the COVID era, she volunteered at the Main Military Clinical Hospital.
Her chosen direction was shaped by her training: by profession she is a cardiologist, though for many years she ran her own private business.
"Walking such a long road alongside human pain takes its toll. Sometimes it seems you're no longer vulnerable, that you've switched off your emotions in order to be effective — and then one of the medics is killed. Or you simply feel, sharply, that you can't help everyone, or can't help fast enough," she observes.
Still, not "falling apart" emotionally in the work of helping the army matters a great deal, Liliia believes. "We have a long way still to go, unfortunately, so we have to conserve our energy. I can barely move after a night of shelling, and the wind's at my back in the office because the windows are blown out — but you sit down and make a dozen calls in the most cheerful voice in the world," Bondarenko says. "And you feel the person on the other end smiling. Because you're hope — materially, and even morally."
With her colleagues, and with her fellow citizens more broadly, she shares a simple wartime life hack: "You wake up in the morning — go to the mirror and smile at yourself. We'll cry later; for now there's work to do, for our own sake and for the sake of those wonderful people who are no longer with us." 💛
