John Marone (Image: -)
Nothing gets through like a letter – except perhaps a Russian missile or drone launched against a front-line Ukrainian town whose only lifeline is often a modest but stubbornly reliable Ukrainian post office. And Maksym Sutkovyi, regional director for eastern Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions at Ukrainian national postal service Ukrposhta during Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine, should know.
He said: “Imagine a place where the banks have all closed up, the cash-in-transit cars have stopped arriving because it is too dangerous, and the ATMs do not work, so people have no access to cash.” In comes Ukrposhta – to the string of fortress towns now synonymous with the ravages of 21st-century war: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, as well as other countless Ukrainian towns and villages exposed to constant Russian attacks.
People living there depend on Ukrainian mail service not only for cash but to receive pensions, social-service payments, aid packages of food and medicine, he explained. Ukrposhta itself stocks its post offices in conflict zones with emergency consumers goods.
Read more: Ukraine’s heartbreaking new normal – impromptu military funerals held in traffic
Read more: UK should send British troops to Ukraine now, demands Boris Johnson
Sutkovyi said: “There are no supermarket chains in these places, just small shops where the prices can be punishingly high, but our stuff costs the same in every post office across the country.” For some people, he added, the local post office is also the only place for them to pay for their cell phone services, on which so much of life now depends.
The life of border-town Ukrainian mail carriers is no less precarious. “We are probably the only postal service in the world that makes deliveries in armoured vehicles,” Sutkovyi said.
Each of its postal workers is supplied with a helmet and a flak jacket. “We strongly recommend them to wear these,” Sutkovyi emphasised.
Nevertheless, he said, last June, a 35-year-old employee named Olha Bodunova was killed while doing her rounds on a rural route near Kramatorsk, when a Russian attack drone hit her mail truck. “She died before we could get her to hospital,” he recalled.
The regional director said he has had his own close calls with Russian drones: “We were driving along, spotted a drone, took cover and waited for it explode a little further ahead.” In response to such dangers, the postal service has begun installing drone jamming equipment in its vehicles, he said. The post offices themselves regularly come under attack and often are protected by sand bags or have their windows boarded up.
“It happens all the time – drones, shell and missiles – thankfully usually at night,” he said, adding, “Our orders are to patch things up and reopen our doors within 24 hours.”
Customers are also killed in such attacks, he said: “There was one attack in Yarovaya, Donetsk Region, that was particularly bloody.” But as with other postal service, Ukrposhta is proud and determined to keep the mail service operating – no matter the circumstances. Sutkoviy said: “We have a job, a mission. We work in places where others refuse to.”
