In the backyard of a spacious, upscale home tucked away in Portland’s rolling West Hills, an outfitted soldier showed a small gathering of local Slavs snapshots of army life in war-ravaged regions of their homeland.
“At the time, I was in Kiev working for a very big company,” Leonid Maslov told his audience as he flipped through the slides. A photo of himself in full military garb cast across the projection screen. “I finished work at 6 o’clock, took off my suit, my tie, and put on all this. So did many of my colleagues.”
Before he was dismissed in September, Maslov was a member of the Ukrainian Army’s 92nd brigade, which became known for its capture of two Russian officers who were later exchanged in May for jailed Ukrainian pilot, Nadiya Savchenko.
The officers, it was reported, were Russian servicemen fighting alongside separatists. Maslov had uploaded a cellphone video of one prisoner’s interrogation. Posted in May 2015, the video has been viewed on his YouTube page 1.4 million times.
He and his colleagues were all volunteers – many in their 40s and 50s, he said. Initially they were told they were too old to join the army, so instead they donated blood to support the effort.
Later, as the war escalated, former Soviet Army soldiers such as Maslov and his comrades were welcomed despite their age, he said.
“The uniforms lacked the proper everything,” he continued, as he showed a photo of a soldier wearing a 12-pound 1960s-era combat helmet. “Almost like guerilla fighters. Terrible, terrible ammunition, clothes, they use the running shoes.”
As Street Roots first reported in April 2015, members of Portland and Vancouver, Washington’s Slavic community banded together after the war began to send shipping containers full of medical and military supplies to Ukrainian soldiers fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine.
The barebones Ukrainian Army depended largely on the donated supplies.
The Ukrainian Association of Washington had flown Leonid Maslov, along with volunteer medic Victoria Milutina, from Ukraine to the U.S. to share their stories from the front lines with donors and members of the Ukrainian community who have been supporting the resistance against Russian separatists from afar.
Maslov visited Portland, Seattle and the San Francisco area in recent weeks, attending local Ukrainian gatherings as the guest of honor along the way.
That evening in the west hills, Maslov presented military-issued civilian medals to Portlanders Michael Zaslavsky and Mikhail Mitkov-Baklanovsky for their role in supplying his brigade with equipment and medical items.
Street Roots first met Mitkov-Baklanovsky last year when he showed us his extra room filled with a stockpile of supplies he was getting ready to ship to Ukraine.
Although the war has stagnated as it enters its third year, the ceasefire is largely ignored each night after European ceasefire observers leave for the day and the death toll continues to rise each week, The New York Times reported in late July.
According to the U.N., the Ukraine conflict has taken the lives of nearly 10,000 people since it began.
Whereas before battle involved heavy artillery, machine guns and tanks, Maslov said now it’s limited mostly to rifle fire. “Shells and rifles are different,” he said, “but journalists give the same news.”
“The need for other medical supplies is still enormous,” said Mitkov-Baklanovsky. He continues to ship dressings for open chest wounds, bandages, tourniquets and other first aid items.
“Due to inflation, the Ukrainian people is very impoverished and has less ability to help,” he said. “People have no money. They are tired of war. But they are faced with deaths and injuries every day. It is very hard.”
Maslov’s visit to the U.S. was very important to the Ukrainian community here, said Eduard Dudar, Ukrainian Association of Washington board member. About 70 Ukrainians and friends attended Maslov’s presentation in Seattle on Aug. 1, three days after his evening in Portland.
“The longer you stay away from Ukraine,” he said, “it fades with time. So when people describe the war, and that it’s still going on and people still need help, they feel more connected and willing to help.”
During Maslov’s presentation in Seattle, he also awarded Pavlo Pylypenko with a civilian medal for his contributions to the war effort, said Dudar.
American media coverage of Ukraine’s conflict, like most conflicts, had become less frequent as the war continued, said Dudar.
“It went up again with Trump – everyone is talking about it again, but it will fade. It’s obviously very sad for Ukraine. It’s a great tragedy, and we must try to help them,” he said.
He said his organization plans to continue working with politicians, seeking help from Congress and reminding people of the crisis in Ukraine.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, served as a consultant for ousted Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovich. Slate recently described Manafort as a man who’s “made a career out of stealthily reinventing the world’s nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom.”
When crowds of Ukrainian protesters seized control of Yanukovich’s property in 2014, it was revealed the corrupt politician was living in the lap of luxury in his opulent palace. According to The Telegraph, a logbook showed that for every day he was in office, he paid an average of $1.4 million in bribes. He successfully sought asylum in Russia.
U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has called into question the Republican platform’s alluded-to position that the U.S. should not provide military assistance to Ukraine.
“There is broad, bipartisan support for standing steadfast with Ukraine through political, economic and military support after Russia’s invasion two years ago. Russia’s aggression violated international law, robbed Ukraine of its sovereign territory, and killed and wounded thousands of people,” he wrote in a letter he penned for The New York Times.
Locally, Mitkov-Baklanovsky said the Russian-speaking community is split politically by the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. He is a Russian descendent himself, but native to Ukraine.
“People who support Ukraine in this conflict will vote against Donald Trump,” he said.
As Maslov flipped through his slide show that evening, he showed pictures of buildings that had been reduced to rubble, while sharing humorous stories from the battlefield. He told his audience about a close call by one of his fellow soldiers – he was nearly bombed when drunkenly making coffee in an attempt to sober up. And he laughed as he told them about the time he was “sofa fighting” at 4 a.m. with a pro-Russian man in Odessa through Facebook. He was threatening to kill him through online messages, but at the same time he was on night shift, listening to radio chatter with bullets flying all around him.
But right before ending his backyard presentation, Maslov’s mood turned.
“I have to do necessary speeches,” he said. He continued in Ukrainian, and Zaslavsky translated.
“Several of my friends perished in the war. Military friends. Some of them were very close friends. I had to put together parts of the bodies of some of them. I had to collect them and put into garbage bags,” he said. Then he paused and turned away, taking a sip of his beer as he futilely attempted to hold back his tears.
“I hope they died for good purpose,” he said.