KYIV -- This time, the drone buzzing above a crowd in Kyiv was a source of merriment, not menace.
It hovered over about 130 people -- adults and children; civilians, veterans, and soldiers -- gathered in a cavernous arena for a "drone-pong" tournament on a Friday afternoon in mid-December. Table-tennis balls clacked back and forth as spectators looked on, chatting and sometimes bursting with laughter.
They came to shake off the stress of life amid daily air alarms and bleak news from the front lines. And to do something that's akin to a new national sport in wartime Ukraine: donate to the military.
At the onset of the second winter holiday season since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the war's end seems distant, and the fate of millions of Ukrainians whose lives were torn apart or turned upside down is uncertain. Worries about Western support dwindling due to political turbulence in Washington and Brussels add to the sense of unease.
"Everybody may be tired after all these months of war -- but just like in sport, being tired doesn't mean you are about to give up," Mykhaylo Hluhovsky, 41, told RFE/RL as he got ready for a match. "It's always better to do something rather than nothing."
Olena Nekrashevych, 37, lost her first game but won the second. She is not a big ping-pong player, she said, but she is an experienced donor. Like millions of Ukrainians, she has family members and friends serving in the armed forces and supports them avidly.
"It's so nice to forget yourself for a couple of hours and stay useful at the same time," she told RFE/RL.
The "drone-pong" tournament was the last in a series of sports events held by the Hurkit Charity Foundation to raise money for the war effort, its head, Vladyslav Samoylenko, told RFE/RL. Running, cycling, and swimming competitions had been held earlier.
"Once the COVID pandemic ended the full-scale invasion started and thus people are hungry for contact and seek new connections," Samoylenko said.
The money raised during the table-tennis tournament, which also involved a charity fair and a military memorabilia auction, was used to buy two Mavic 3T drones for a battalion fighting Russian forces in southern Ukraine.
The Home Front
For millions of Ukrainians who are not fighting, donating is a way to display unity and support the soldiers as the war grinds on almost two years after Russia's full-scale invasion.
Whether it's children singing patriotic songs in provincial town markets, online personas selling candid content on OnlyFans, or hip cafes holding neighborhood garage sales, a growing culture of fundraising marries determination to win the war with a search for meaning, a sense of community -- and in some cases, simply having fun.
More than two-thirds of Ukrainians have donated money to the military over the past year and more than half have joined the volunteer movement, helping out in ways that go beyond donations, according to a survey conducted by Engage, a civic development program supported by USAID, and published on October 23.
The trend applies to nondisplaced adults living in Ukraine (70 percent donate to the army and 63 percent volunteer), internally displaced adults (67 percent and 53 percent), and adults who have left the country as a result of the war (71 percent and 55 percent), the study says.
From Wallets To Orbit
Some of the fundraising campaigns have exceeded the expectations of Ukrainians themselves. That was certainly the case when Serhiy Prytula, a former comedian and TV star some view as a future political competitor for President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, managed to collect money for a satellite that is beaming high-resolution radar imagery down to the army from orbit.
"Several of our projects engaged more than a million people," Prytula told RFE/RL at his organization's office in Kyiv. With over 50 employees and more than 150 volunteers, the foundation has raised $165 million dollars since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Prytula's team holds fundraising drives for specific items and develops media campaigns around them. After the first massive Russian attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure last autumn, it announced a "revenge" crowdfunding that brought in $9 million in one day. This summer, Prytula convinced the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, whose popularity was soaring at the time, to auction his famous map showing Russia split up into several parts.
The foundation is not short of ideas, but economic hardship has made it more difficult to raise money, Prytula said. For the sake of its internal planning, his foundation assumed the war will last through 2024 and 2025. "Some people have gotten tired, some are disappointed, but we simply have no choice," he said.
According to an analysis by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, nongovernmental organizations have continued to collect significant amounts of money for the army, but there has been a moderate decline compared to 2022.
One of the most popular charities supporting the Ukrainian military, Come Back Alive, reported that from March to December of 2022 it received about $125 million, with donations dropping to about $81 million in the same period in this year.
'A Business Of Sorts'
"At this point donating money to the army is itself a business of sorts, Oleh Horokhovskiy, a co-founder of Monobank, one of Ukraine's largest online banks, told RFE/RL. Fundraisers are competing against each other for the attention and money of donors, offering them various bonuses and employing marketing tools, he said.
On December 12, Monobank was targeted by Russian hackers along Ukraine's largest mobile operator, Kyivstar. It had successfully repelled a massive denial-of-service (DDoS) attack aimed at its "jar" donation system -- a fundraising feature developed by Horokhovskiy and his team, which he proudly calls a "genuinely national instrument" for supporting the army.
The "jar" is a tool based on virtual piggy-bank feature introduced by several innovative banks in the past that Monobank adapted for public crowdfunding, Horokhovskiy said. Both fundraisers and donors using it can observe the incoming money in real-time, use novel features based on gamification logic such as auctions and lotteries, and share the collections on social media during live translations of events.
"We made the process of donating effortless, quick and exciting, even a bit like gambling," Horokhovskiy said, adding that about $1 billion has been donated to the army through the "jars." His bank has not benefited financially from running the system but contributed over $2.5 million to secure its operations.
Financial Uncertainty
While Ukraine's new donating culture reinstates a sense of agency and eases feeling of guilt shared by many civilians as soldiers endure horrific fighting, injury, and death, its economic impact remains limited.
In September, then-Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said volunteer organizations supplied only 3 percent of all the equipment that has reached the front lines since the beginning of the full-scale war. Overall, the country's war effort consumes around $100 million in state funds per day according to Ukraine's Defense Ministry.
"This is a total war where everything -- tanks, armed vehicles, drones, cars, etc. -- is expendable materiel," Prytula said. "We are doing all we can so that people are not just another one of those [expendable items]."
During his end-of-the-year conference this week, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he is confident that the United States would not "betray" his country by withholding crucial wartime funding. But so far, the U.S. Congress has not approved a $61 billion request from the White House, and the European Union failed to agree on its own 50-billion-euro aid package for Ukraine, after Hungary objected.
Ukraine's state budget for 2024 foresees a deficit of $43 billion, which the country hopes to fill with international financial assistance. With money to survive 2024 hanging in the balance, many Ukrainians called the authorities to cut nonwar-related spending and focus on sustaining the fight against Russian aggression.
'Drones Not Parks'
On December 14, several hundred people gathered outside Kyiv City Hall to protest spending plans agreed by municipal officials and demand sending more money from the city's budget for military needs.
On the night preceding the protest, Russia attacked the capital with 10 ballistic missiles. All of them were downed by air defense, according to Ukraine's air force, but the falling debris injured at least 53 people and damaged apartments and a children's hospital.
The protesters, most of them in their 20s and 30s, were not satisfied by Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko's pledge to allocate an additional 600 million hryvnyas ($16 million) for the army. Many returned for another protest two days later with slogans such as "600 million is a disgrace," "Drones not parks," and "Your ignorance kills better than the Russians."
Anastasia Paskovska, 23, a student present at the December 16 protest, told RFE/RL that she believes municipal authorities keep financing construction and restoration projects despite the ongoing war because "this is how they and their friends make money." Her friend, Vladyslava Muzyka, 25, said she will keep protesting "until everybody in Kyiv reminds themselves that the war hasn't stopped."
According to one of the protest organizers, Iryna Ihnatovych, 37, protests in Kyiv as well as similar protests in Odesa and Lviv have already proved partly efficient and will continue. "People across the country want to cut nonessential spending to support those who are dying to keep us safe and free," she said.
In conversations with RFE/RL, Prytula said he sympathizes with the protests, which he said "attest to the emergence of a new generation of civil society in Ukraine." Horokhovskiy, similarly, called the demands of the protests "justified."
"We are fighting a powerful enemy," he said. "We need more money than our economy can generate. This is why we need the help of our partners and friends."
