The Cost of Kindness — Ukrainian Stories
Series: The Anatomy of a Post-Bravery Society — How a nation built on courage must learn to live beyond it.
Part 1: The Great Ukrainian Displacement // Part 2: A Nation Held Together by Women // Part 3: The Architecture of Aftermath // Part 4: The Reckoning of Continuity // Part 5: The Cost of Kindness
I’ve spent more than three years volunteering in Ukraine, working on urbanism and recovery projects across the country. I’m deeply invested in the Ukrainian narrative. The bravado of defending a nation is loud and necessary, but what preoccupies me now are the quieter, longer struggles ahead — the social and psychological challenges Ukraine will face long after the sirens fall silent.
The volunteer republic
Ukraine’s greatest strength isn’t just its leadership since the war started; it’s its volunteers. When Russia invaded, Ukraine’s government went to war. And its citizens went to work. They filled all the gaps: cooking, delivering, repairing, designing, building, fundraising, spreadsheeting. A volunteer nation appeared — walking towards us in slow motion out of the fog like a Hollywood film trailer. It was spectacular.
Let’s not forget the fact that hundreds of thousands volunteered for the Armed Forces and Territorial Defence in the weeks and months after the full invasion, contributing to this massive and impressive flash-mobilization.
On the civilian level, a decentralised, self-organising network of drivers, cooks, coders, medics, teachers, and pensioners turned chaos into coordination in just weeks. It became the most extraordinary civic mobilisation in modern European history. People didn’t wait for orders; they improvised them. Farmers hauled refugees in grain trucks. Designers built hedgehogs (anti-tank obstacles) out of scrap metal and dragged them out into the streets. Grandmothers cooked and packaged military rations. The logistics of survival became collective art.
Personally, I have had easily 1500 volunteers help me on my urbanism projects in Ukraine. This volunteer spirit is like nothing I have ever witnessed. It is the most rewarding experience in my professional life. Nothing less.
It’s heroic, yes. But heroism has a half-life. For three years, the country has run on unpaid labour and unmeasured compassion. The longer the war drags on, the more that volunteer energy begins to look less like virtue and more like a system failure that people are too decent to abandon. What began as solidarity has become infrastructure. And the people powering it are burning out.
The volunteer republic
The numbers are staggering. Surveys by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology show 82 % of Ukrainians have donated money, time, or goods to the war effort since 2022. 33% of adults have volunteered in some capacity, running soup kitchens, driving supplies, crowdfunding drones, rebuilding houses. 18% were involved in organised volunteer groups.
There are roughly 50,000 registered volunteer initiatives, from large NGOs to tiny Telegram collectives. Many are run by women, teachers, IT workers, and students who now manage logistics chains that rival military procurement.
They’ve become a parallel state: delivering aid faster than ministries, more transparently than charities, and with more trust than politicians. It’s a civic miracle, but one that can’t last forever.
The burnout nobody budgets for
By late 2024, surveys by the Ukrainian Volunteer Service showed over 60 % of active volunteers reporting exhaustion, and 40 % considering quitting. The symptoms mirror front-line fatigue: sleeplessness, guilt, emotional collapse. You can’t build policy on adrenaline indefinitely.
The problem is structural. Volunteers handle tasks like housing refugees, feeding the displaced, transporting the wounded. The more they succeed, the less pressure there is to reform the institutions that failed in the first place. It’s essentially an entire shadow ministry of compassion. Volunteer networks performing the duties of a missing welfare state.
I have noticed this myself. The number of volunteers I get on my projects has fallen. I have personally packed rations, sewed camouflage nets, driven to the far end of the country with humanitarian aid but now, in 2025, there are far fewer calls for volunteers to come and help.
I have volunteers, mostly foreigners, signing up on my website. They all report the same pattern now. They email many NGOs offering their help and hardly any reply. NGOs have scaled back or disappeared altogether.
The kindness trap
In the early stages of the invasion, volunteerism was euphoric. It was a national high of purpose. Now it risks being an obligation. People donate not because they want to, but because they’re terrified of what will happen if they stop. That’s not altruism; it’s moral hostage-taking.
Economists at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy estimates that the “volunteer economy” now equals around 5 % of GDP when you calculate goods, services, and time. It’s astonishing but it’s also unsustainable. You can’t replace taxes with charity forever.
The paradox is cruel: the same compassion that saved the country risks exhausting it. Ukraine’s civic fabric is strong because people never stopped helping. It’s also fraying because they never got to rest.
The disappearing donations
In 2022, foreign donations flooded in. Over $2 billion in crowdfunding and small-donor aid, most channelled through NGOs and private initiatives. By 2025, that number had halved. The world moved on. The algorithm got bored.
Domestic giving has also declined as inflation and fatigue set in. For many families, charity has become a luxury. Even symbolic acts like free meals or local collections have shrunk. You can’t endlessly volunteer inside a struggling economy.
The moral economy that sustained the first phase of war is starting to run on fumes.
The shadow state
Volunteers now handle duties that governments in peacetime would call public service. They coordinate transport for the disabled, distribute prosthetics, run mental-health hotlines, and rebuild homes.
International donors often prefer them to ministries. They’re faster, cleaner, less bureaucratic. But that bypass weakens the very institutions Ukraine will need when the war ends. When donors leave and volunteers collapse, who replaces them?
The country has built a functioning emergency system out of goodwill. Turning that back into a professional one will take more than money; it will take trust.
The emotional debt
Volunteers rarely call it trauma, but that’s what it is. They’ve witnessed death, displacement, and desperation up close for years without the buffers of salary or hierarchy.
Psychologists describe it as “secondary trauma.” Helpers internalise the suffering they absorb. They can’t stop scrolling, can’t stop collecting, can’t stop caring. The guilt of rest becomes its own pathology.
When kindness becomes coercion
The risk ahead isn’t apathy — it’s resentment. If the government doesn’t step in to formalise and support the volunteer sector, a backlash is inevitable. People will begin to feel used. And that moral exhaustion can turn political very fast.
The same citizen networks that now deliver aid could, in a different mood, deliver outrage. A country that relies on endless unpaid care is gambling with the patience of its best people.
The price of virtue
Kindness has kept Ukraine alive. It’s also masking the absence of a functioning welfare state. Every homemade meal for soldiers, every fundraiser for medical supplies, is a reminder that citizens are doing the government’s job. They are doing it with love, but still doing it.
There’s no shame in that, only risk. When the war finally ends, Ukraine will need to rebuild not only its bridges and hospitals but also its social contract. It will have to convince people that compassion can be a choice again, not a duty.
Because a country that survives on heroism might eventually run out of heroes.
