‘Project Independence Day’
After two days of driving from Budapest, Andrei Molchynsky, a student at Stanford University’s Graduate Student of Business, had finally made it to the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih when he encountered a group of soldiers. They talked for nearly two hours, as the troops shared stories from the front lines, less than 20 miles away.
“Seeing the look in their eyes, their faces, that was very cleansing,” Molchynsky said. “It gave energy and motivation, and cleared any fatigue I may have had. It was inspiring.”
Molchynsky had lived in Ukraine until moving to Canada with his family at age 13. Now he was back in his homeland — in his hometown — as part of a humanitarian mission organized with a Stanford classmate, Alex Clark, a former infantry officer in the U.S. Army and a graduate of West Point.
The pair had met, in Clark’s words, “over stiff drinks and cigars,” and had found common cause in their desire, and perhaps inability, to not sit idly by as the Russian invasion of Ukraine dominated the news during their first year of business school. Molchynsky had helped other Ukrainian students at Stanford organize an airlift of insulin and other humanitarian supplies, and now he and Clark were looking for other ways they could help.
Access to health care was an obvious need that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had emphasized when he spoke to Stanford students via Zoom. What if Molchynsky and Clark could purchase and deliver ambulances to a battered community? They were able to track down three decommissioned emergency vehicles in neighboring Hungary — but they needed $100,000 to buy them.
The pair set to raising funds, with Molchynsky turning to Ukrainian sources and Clark to his fellow veterans. Within two months, they had surpassed their goal, collecting $125,000, enough to also purchase radios and encrypted-communications equipment.
In August they set out for Budapest, joined by several other graduate-student volunteers, from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Michigan. They dubbed their mission Project Independence Day because they hoped to deliver the supplies in time for Ukraine’s Independence Day, on August 24.
They found two of the ambulances in good working condition, but the third had to be left behind in Budapest for additional repairs. The drive to Kryvyi Rih involved multiple checkpoints and roadblocks. They saw soldiers and trenches that had been dug. Helicopters flew overhead, and sometimes they could hear the sounds of artillery fire. It was not the homecoming Molchynsky had imagined: “It felt like an unfamiliar place yet so familiar.”
The pair are now back at Stanford for the fall term, after a second roundtrip to Budapest to retrieve and deliver the final ambulance.
Molchynsky is now working on a project to help provide telehealth services to Ukrainians. He and Clark said that even if college students can’t run an on-the-ground humanitarian mission, they could do other things to support Ukraine, such as organizing teach-ins or lobbying their members of Congress on its behalf.
Clark said the experience in Ukraine is likely to affect his career path after he graduates next spring, although he isn’t precisely sure how. Like Molchynsky, he keeps returning to the conversations he had in Kryvyi Rih, with people who were living their lives, sometimes joyfully, yet with a constant threat just miles south. “Those are realities of life,” he said, “that should never be forgotten.”
