“Your Helmet Saved My Life”
Voices of the Fight No. 13: Jeffrey Hartman, the Peace Corps volunteer who joined Ukraine's war effort
The Ukrainian Action Heroes program rehabilitates wounded veterans and their families in the Carpathian Mountains.
It’s part of a larger NGO led by London-based American JEFFREY HARTMAN, who first traveled to Ukraine years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer—and now returns frequently to help his friends in their resistance to the Russian war machine.
Welcome to Voices of the Fight—a Saturday Q&A series featuring the warriors, innovators, advocates, and volunteers standing under fire for free people.
1 | Who are you, and what’s your mission?
My name is Jeff Hartman. I am the co-founder and CEO of Ukrainian Action, which is a British American Ukrainian NGO. My mission is to support my friends in Ukraine and that has not changed from day one and I’m grateful to have a team of friends and supporters who are also engaged in supporting and helping our Ukrainian friends.
We teach Ukrainian veterans and their families to ski and snowboard in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains, but it’s much more than that.
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We are engaged in four primary areas in Ukraine. We provide emergency support, humanitarian aid, as well as recovery and reconstruction projects.
We organize volunteers to drive humanitarian aid convoys of vehicles from the UK. We donate the vehicles such as pickups and ambulances to Ukrainian charities and other frontline users, and we donate medical supplies to hospitals, generators, to schools, etc.
In terms of recovery, we have a flagship rehabilitation program for Ukrainian veterans and their families. We teach them to ski and snowboard in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains, but it’s much more than that. Our program is called Ukrainian Action Heroes and it is a comprehensive multidisciplinary program combining psychological support, physical activity, adaptive sports, family work, and social integration for the brave men and women who four years ago were civilians and took the initiative to defend their country and suffered physically and mentally because of that.
I ended up driving to Ukraine from London every weekend in a row for three months.
I started that program because I had personal friends who became soldiers overnight and became injured veterans and there was a lack of support by the Ukrainian state, which admittedly is working very hard and committing most of its resources to eliminating the invaders in the country. We have been very focused on building a very unique program in the Carpathians to support veteran families.
“And he told me that he had gotten shot in the head, but that the bullet glanced off his helmet and he was not injured. And he looked at me at that point and he said—”
2 | Tell us one powerful story from your experience in war, as you would tell someone over a drink.
So I was in a bar in Dnipro. That day we had driven to the front lines to deliver some equipment and we returned to Dnipro, and we were having dinner with our team. The son of my friend’s former colleague came to meet us.
We had previously assisted him in the early days with some equipment. I think we gave him some tourniquets. He was a member of the Territorial Defense Force. We gave him some helmets and some other tactical supplies.
Over drinks in this bar in Dnipro, he and his commander who had come to visit with us were telling us stories of their period on the front lines and he told us a story about a time when they had come under attack and the commander had managed to outrun a Russian tank.
So this was 2022, 2023 maybe. And the other guy had taken fire in the trench. And he told me that he had gotten shot in the head, but that the bullet glanced off his helmet and he was not injured. And he looked at me at that point and he said to me, “Your helmet saved my life.” And he shook out his hand and I will never fucking forget that moment.
And that was when I realized that we have to do everything we can to help Ukraine.
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3 | What decision, habit, or principle has mattered the most for you for surviving or staying effective under pressure?
We have a ‘no stress’ policy. … We can only be effective if we are not burned out.
So when we first began our work in late February of ‘22, like probably most volunteers and groups, it was a frantic sprint to get as much assistance to Ukraine as possible. And we literally spent every spare minute acquiring resources and organizing ourselves, buying vehicles.
I ended up driving to Ukraine from London every weekend in a row for three months. And over time, I think probably by the second year we realized that the war was not going to end anytime soon and we had to take a slightly more marathon approach to it and not so much a sprint.
I realized then that we needed to embrace two principles. One, that we were a people-first organization, and, two, we needed to have a no stress policy because our volunteers were literally working all hours of the night compromising their own mental health and thus physical health to support our friends who were in Ukraine or on the front lines and over time that’s just not sustainable.
So number one, we take good care of our people and, number two, we have a no stress policy which means that if we don’t get something done in time for the upcoming humanitarian aid convoy, we just accept that it’s going to have to go in the next one because it’s a long war and we can only be effective if we are not burned out.
4 | How can people support your work?
So we are regularly organizing these humanitarian aid convoys from the UK to Ukraine, which are driven by volunteers. We depart the UK every two weeks, and we’ve been driving every two weeks for four years.
So for any interested people who would like to drive a vehicle from the UK to either Poland where we have a team or all the way to Ukraine, you can submit your interest on our website. For those who are interested to support our work remotely, we also have a pathway on our website for donations.
We are a registered UK charity and a US 501 so there are tax advantages for residents of both countries and all that is found at ukrainianaction.com.
5 | Where can people follow you?
We post as often as we can. Actually we post almost every day on Instagram and you can see all of our activities. So you can see the convoys we drive every two weeks. You can see the deliveries of humanitarian aid every week during the winter and the summer; and you can see our veterans rehabilitation program.
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Donate here: Ukrainian Action charity
UFN Daily Notebook
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Battlefield Proof Gets Nordic Capital—Swedish investment firm Front Ventures has raised €5 million to invest in Ukrainian and Swedish defense-tech startups, with ticket sizes ranging from €200,000 to €2.5 million per company. The firm says the money will let it take larger stakes and support portfolio companies not only with capital, but with production scaling and follow-on fundraising.
Its Ukrainian bets already include Aeromotors, which makes electric motors for drones; Black Forest Systems, a Ukrainian-Estonian UAV developer; and Sky Hunter, which builds an interceptor-drone guidance app. Front Ventures is also tied to Scandinavian X, a Ukrainian-Swedish joint venture producing interceptor drones, and is now looking at payload manufacturing in Sweden for Ukrainian interceptor and strike drones.
Tehran Still Has Launchers—U.S. intelligence reportedly believes Iran has regained access to a majority of its missile launch sites, complicating Washington’s public claims that Tehran’s arsenal was “depleted and decimated.”
The worrying numbers are blunt: Iran may still have around 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, roughly 70 percent of its mobile launchers, and partially operational access to about 90 percent of its underground missile facilities. Even non-operational sites may still matter if missiles can be moved and fired from mobile launchers, while around 30 active missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz remain a direct threat to U.S. naval forces.
Ukraine’s Drone Tech Comes to America—Ukraine and the U.S. have drafted a memorandum for a potential new defense agreement that would let Ukrainian military technology be exported to America and open the door for joint drone production with U.S. companies.
The deal is still a first step, not a signed alliance-industrial revolution, but the direction is important: Washington is beginning to treat Ukraine not only as a weapons recipient, but as a source of battlefield-tested systems the U.S. military wants to study, test and potentially buy. The focus is unmanned systems across air, land and sea, with Ukrainian drones feeding into America’s Drone Dominance push, a roughly $1.1 billion effort to find and scale systems for future U.S. military use.
Students for the Front, Not the Future—Russia’s attempt to recruit university students into its new drone forces has produced its first confirmed dead student: 23-year-old Valery Averin from Buryatia, who signed a Defense Ministry contract in January, trained as a UAV operator, and was killed near Luhansk in early April, only weeks after finishing his training.
The pitch to students was obvious enough: drone units sound cleaner, smarter and safer than trench assaults, a way to serve the war with a controller rather than a shovel. Reality has now answered. In the drone war of the 21st century, operators are valuable targets, and the line between “technical specialist” and disposable manpower is much thinner than Russian recruiters suggest.
Xi’s Missile Boom—China’s missile buildup is no longer just a Pentagon warning or a parade-day spectacle, it is becoming an industrial ecosystem. Bloomberg identified 81 mainland-listed companies feeding Beijing’s missile program, producing everything from infrared sensors and embedded computers to stealth coatings and 3D-printed metals.
The Pentagon estimates China had at least 3,150 ballistic missiles and 300 ground-launched cruise missiles as of 2024, up 147 percent and 50 percent respectively since 2015, while supplier revenues rose sharply last year, with around 40 percent of the identified firms posting their best year since 2013.
Interceptor Drones Learn the Last Mile—Brave1 has tested an autonomous terminal-guidance system from Dutch company FDCL on Ukraine’s Wovkulaka Spitfire interceptor drone, pushing one of the hardest parts of drone-on-drone warfare closer to automation. The system uses computer vision to detect, track and guide the interceptor into aerial targets during the final phase of engagement, where human pilots face the worst mix of speed, stress, tiny silhouettes and milliseconds of decision time.
The tests took place under the Test in Ukraine program with Ukrainian manufacturers, military units and counter-UAS specialists present, and FDCL says the system is meant to reduce pilot workload while keeping operators responsible for critical decisions.
Germany Wants AI, Fears the Server Room—Alex Karp is pushing back against Germany’s suspicion of Palantir, arguing that Berlin’s distrust of battlefield software is badly misplaced at exactly the moment modern war is becoming a contest of data, AI and decision speed.
The Bundeswehr has so far kept Palantir at arm’s length, with its cyber chief saying it is currently “inconceivable” to let outside industry personnel near Germany’s national military database — a classic German concern.
But Ukraine has made the counterargument under fire: Palantir-linked systems are already being used there for air-strike analysis, intelligence management, demining, war-crimes documentation and AI tools aimed at Russian drone threats.
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