KHARKIV, Ukraine -- A year ago, Grazyna Slawinska was helping to deliver humanitarian supplies to people remaining in Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city that later fell to Russian forces after a brutal, monthslong assault.
A resident of the southern Polish city of Krakow, the 33-year-old was hit by shrapnel from a Russian artillery round in January 2023, evacuated, and eventually had her right leg amputated.
After five months of recovery and physical therapy, and now fitted with a prosthetic leg, Slawinska returned to Ukraine. She now lives in its second-largest city, Kharkiv, where she logs long days and nights, helping people -- the elderly, the disabled, the poor -- who remain there despite the constant threats of Russian bombardment.
"After seeing all this tragedy, you cannot just go back to your previous life," she said in a December interview at her apartment in the city's Saltivka district.
Slawinska's ordeal, and her continued efforts, is a small window into the community of Polish volunteers who have dedicated themselves to trying to help the plight of Ukrainians.
After Russia's invasion in February 2022, Poland took in millions of Ukrainians, and Polish society saw an outpouring of charitable donations. The Polish government has been one of the most stalwart allies of Ukraine, and supplied millions of dollars of weaponry and other military equipment.
That enthusiasm has waned in recent months, a reflection of wider impatience in the West amid the realization that the Russian war on Ukraine does not appear to be ending anytime soon.
Still, scores, hundreds, possibly thousands of Poles continue to dedicate themselves to helping Ukrainians, in and out of the country.
Slawinska is just one of them.
'Something Tangible'
For months, Polish truck drivers and farmers have been blocking the Polish-Ukrainian border, claiming unfair competition from their Ukrainian counterparts. The blockade, which heightened tensions at the border crossings, has become a thorny political issue that has tarnished the otherwise close support that Warsaw has provided to Kyiv.
Among those frustrated by the border issue is Mateusz Wodzinski, 37, who crossed into Ukraine in late December to deliver four cars to four Ukrainian military units. He's made 70 similar trips over the months, delivering more than 200 cars to Ukrainian soldiers, braving sometimes a dangerous journey to help.
"I hate the border, but I couldn't care less about politics," he told RFE/RL during his December journey. "All I care about are the cars. There's always pressure to get more of them and more quickly."
In June 2022, four months after the Russian invasion, Wodzinski, a businessman who lives in Poland's northeast, donated his own car to a Belarusian volunteer unit. He then opened a crowdfunding campaign that lets people donate money to him to buy cars, refurbish them, and drive them to the soldiers.
"It's a zero-bullshit approach, I personally give each car to a specific unit," he said. "It's something tangible anybody can do to make the likelihood of Ukrainian soldiers surviving higher."
The effort has grown, as has his reputation within Poland. Frequently, other Poles -- often donors -- make the trip with him, to escort the cars to the Ukrainian units. Some of his companions have included people such as Radoslaw Sikorski, the new Polish foreign minister.
"On some level, it's like a tourist agency that offers a chance to see the war with your own eyes in exchange for the support of the military," Wodzinski said.
On one of his trips, soldiers to whom he gave a car let him fire a Polish-made howitzer at a Russian artillery position. "It's highly likely I hit the target," he claimed.
Months of life on the road has taken a toll on his personal life; his relationship with his former partner with whom he has a young daughter fell apart, he says.
Just two weeks after the trip in December, during which he brought four cars to soldiers in the town of Slovyansk and three other locations, Wodzinski learned that one of the soldiers who received the car died. Another one was wounded and was hospitalized.
"Do you remember him?" he asked, showing the picture of a young soldier smiling as he received the car in Slovyansk. "He is no longer alive."
'Atamansha'
Before she started spending roughly half of her time in war-torn Ukraine, Olga Solarz, 48, lived in Przemysl, close to the Ukrainian border, and was a published scholar, with academic works on Ukrainian folklore and culture.
But she had a history with Ukrainian activists even before that: She participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution that blocked Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian presidential candidate, from winning a dubious election. Ten years later, she was in Kyiv for the Euromaidan protests that ultimately resulted in the ouster of Yanukovch, then the president, in February 2014.
She says that over the year in 2023 she brought to Ukraine humanitarian aid and medicine worth $260,000, as well as 10 cars for soldiers. All this was mostly bought with money donated by Polish citizens, much of it coming from the Ukrainian minority in Poland, she says.
For months now, she's been adopted as an informal member of a territorial-defense brigade fighting in the southern part of the Donetsk region. She spends half of her time living with soldiers in huts about 10 kilometers away from Russian positions. The soldiers have nicknamed her "Atamansha," a Ukrainian word for a Cossack military leader.
Her academic background has also led her to a more unusual form of charitable work: preserving cultural heritage endangered by warfare.
Shortly before she met with RFE/RL in early November at the brigade's base, she took a statue she estimated was 1,000 years old out of the war zone. The large figure of a woman, she says, was created by a Turkic nomadic ethnic group called the Cumans, or Polovtsy, who lived in southern Ukraine.
Solarz says she was taking it to Lviv, in western Ukraine, to be renovated. "To me this war is a universal fight between civilization and barbarism," she said as she drove on a bumpy road in an old Toyota Land Cruiser.
Lost Purpose
Slawinska's prosthetic leg slows her down as she delivers groceries to elderly people in Kharkiv, such as Zoya Karlova, a 91-year-old woman who had to relocate from the city of Luhansk and is now housebound in a Kharkiv apartment.
On the day that Slawinska visits, Karlova says Slawinska is the only person that makes her calm.
Before she moved to Ukraine, Slawinska worked in a special education department at a university in Krakow. Her humanitarian efforts are supported mainly from online crowdfunding coming from sympathetic Poles.
"The ultimate problem among the people affected by war is loss of purpose in life," she said. "It usually comes with loneliness."
Recalling the moment in Bakhmut on January 6, 2023, when she was caught in a mortar attack that ultimately led to her leg being amputated, she says she stayed unafraid.
"When I was lying on the street in Bakhmut convinced I was about to die, all I had in my mind were those I loved," she said.
