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Why One Canadian Traded Saskatchewan for War-Torn Ukraine
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Published 6:30, FEBRUARY 24, 2026 Brett Drozd, an independent, volunteer aid worker in Ukraine.
It was still dark when Brett Drozd walked out to his cargo van, only to find it and the city of Dnipro dusted with snow overnight. Having grown up on the Canadian prairies, it was a scene he was familiar with, but one he had not seen much of in Ukraine, despite having first arrived more than two years earlier.
As the third anniversary of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine approached, the situation on the ground had become so unpredictable that Drozd, an independent, volunteer aid worker, eventually had to pause some of his work near the front lines. The risk was too great. Just before he did, he had come to Dnipro on a self-organized mission to deliver supplies to a surgeon. The plan was to only stay a few days, but then his phone had rung.
It was a friend asking if he had heard what happened to Eddy Scott, a fellow volunteer in Ukraine and Drozd’s best friend. “My heart stopped,” recalled Drozd. The two weeks that followed the call had been an emotional blur, culminating on a snowy February morning last year: it was time to return home, not to Canada but to a house he, Scott, and another volunteer had been sharing in Kramatorsk, a 250-kilometre drive east towards the Russian border, closer to some of the most war-torn regions of Ukraine.
Knowing that the forecast called for more than a dozen centimetres of snow, Drozd wasted no time and hit highway E50 just as light began to fill the sky.
Drozd walks down a snowy road in Ukraine.Drozd was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.
At thirty, Drozd was a straight-A university student working on the prerequisites required to enter a doctor of pharmacy program. He was less than a year from starting when news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Watching columns of tanks roll toward Kyiv was a distraction too hard to ignore. “It became obvious very quickly that this isn’t good for me,” he recalled while navigating the highway, “to try to churn through the motions back at home when my mind and my heart were with Ukraine.” He needed to do something.
The decision, in the end, was easy. Drozd finished the semester, and on Mother’s Day 2022, he and his family gathered on his grandmother’s front lawn and said their goodbyes. In a short time, the diligent student with no experience in war zones found himself in Ukraine with one goal: to be useful. What he lacked in hard, related skills, he either learned by watching YouTube videos or made up for in determination and resourcefulness.
The ragtag nature of volunteering in Ukraine often runs counter to the commonly held belief that aid organizations are giant, well-oiled machines that go into the most dangerous areas, ensuring critical supplies reach those who need them most. The reality is that, although there are big organizations like the United Nations on the ground, they’re understandably doing their best to minimize the risks they take, says Drozd. As a result, smaller villages closer to the front lines are often inaccessible for aid deliveries and evacuations. So, a relatively small number of independent volunteers, alongside smaller non-governmental organizations (NGOs), put themselves in harm’s way to connect the critical dots that the bigger organizations can’t—or won’t. Drozd became one of them.
As he would learn, navigating the risks that come with that work is never clear-cut. On one side, a volunteer who is injured, or worse, is unable to continue helping; on the other side are those who need help. “Somebody will say ‘I’ll be ready next week to evacuate, will you come and get me?’ and when you say ‘yes,’ that’s the last thing that you want to go back on because they’re counting on that, and that could mean their lives,” he said. “It’s a delicate balancing act.”
Aside from the physical risks, it’s a job that comes with a considerable financial cost. At first, Drozd, like many volunteers and organizations, did his best to be active on social media, sharing his work and seeking donations. But the longer the war went on, the more difficult that became. News fatigue at home eventually translated into a barren PayPal account, and Drozd resorted to his savings, which he had diligently put away for years to buy a piece of the Canadian dream: a home. It’s a dream that has since evaporated.
His social media also drew the attention of those wanting to know how they could become a volunteer, a request that continues to ebb and flow with the international news cycle. One of those was Scott, a twenty-five-year-old from Dorset in the United Kingdom, whose eventual house in the front-line-adjacent city of Kramatorsk would become a hub in the volunteer community.
Even before Drozd moved in, the run-down house was a second home for many, with a revolving door of like-minded volunteers from around the world. At the centre of it all was Scott. “[He] embodied the spirit of that place, always wanting to welcome friends there and have it be a place where all the things that we see and experience around here can be discussed in a safe environment; where we’re all on the same page and all kind of going through more or less the same things,” Drozd said. “It’s just kind of a testament as to how even the shittiest of places can become something that you think of with warmth and fondness.”
Arm patch worn by Canadian volunteers in Ukraine. An FPV drone caught in netting.By the time Drozd’s van passed through the city of Pavlohrad, roughly seventy-five kilometres east of Dnipro, the snow had turned to rain. His focus could shift away from the weather. “Alive or dead,” he said, “was the thing that I was hanging on in that moment.” He was recalling the phone conversation asking if he had heard what had happened to Scott.
Scott was supposed to have been taking a break after running daily evacuation missions into the increasingly treacherous city of Pokrovsk, directly in the crosshairs of the approaching Russians. He just had one more mission before he was planning on flying home to the UK to see his family. It was with a small NGO to refill a generator that powered a cell tower, allowing the city’s remaining residents to connect with the outside world. With communications restored, Scott and the other volunteers received a handful of evacuation requests, which went smoothly until their white van emblazoned with the word evacuation approached a bottleneck between two sets of railroad tracks on the way out of the city.
As they were forced to slow down, an FPV drone struck the driver’s side of the van, a war crime under International Humanitarian Law. The passengers were okay, but Scott, who had been driving, was not. Had it not been for a companion’s quick actions, he would’ve quickly bled out.
When Drozd heard that Scott was going to be transferred to the hospital in Dnipro, he followed up with the surgeon to whom he had just delivered supplies. Shortly after, Drozd walked into Scott’s hospital room.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” Scott said, reflecting both an unbreakable spirit and the seriousness of his injuries: the loss of his left arm and left leg.
In the weeks that followed, Drozd and a handful of Scott’s other friends effectively lived out of the hospitals in Dnipro and then Kyiv, organizing everything from medical care to media interviews. Drozd knew his friend wouldn’t be returning to the house in Kramatorsk.
He also knew that the full reality of that situation would only hit him as soon as he got back home, where his higher-risk volunteer work was also waiting.
A snow-covered field in Ukraine.A stone’s throw from the sign welcoming drivers to Donetsk Oblast was a checkpoint that effectively marks the end of the E50 highway. From there, the straight, smooth, four-lane highway was replaced by a two-lane country road, which, like so much else in Ukraine, has, for years, been serving a more significant role. The presumably once-quiet route had transformed into a high-traffic thoroughfare riddled with potholes. “Driving in the Ukrainian countryside is a lot like driving in rural Saskatchewan. You know, we’ve got shit roads back there too,” Drozd said.
The route meandered through a predictable pattern of small forests, farm fields, and settlements, punctuated by ubiquitous Soviet-era bus stops and well-worn signs denoting each town along the way.
The grumble of the van’s engine was interrupted by a sharp crack. After a few expletives, Drozd calmly proclaimed, “Well, I don’t have a mirror anymore.” The vehicle’s side mirror had been knocked off by another vehicle, likely trying to dodge a pothole. “I’ll say that’s kind of typical of the type of adrenaline that you get here in Ukraine,” he said. “You know, from one moment to another, you’ve got just a regular old car ride, and all of a sudden, then you’ve got ‘Just, wait a second, that was really close.’”
It made Drozd think back to August 10, 2022, the first summer after Russia’s invasion, and his first civilian evacuation mission. He had been behind the wheel of a car more adept at taking a group of kids to soccer practice than navigating a warzone—a white Volvo V70 station wagon. Alongside him that day was Andrew Bagshaw, a British-born New Zealander in his late forties who had left behind his life as a geneticist to volunteer as an aid worker. By that point, Bagshaw had been working in hot spots for a few months. The only reason he happened to be joining Drozd was because his beloved vehicle, also a station wagon, had broken down and was eventually destroyed by the Russians.
That day, their evacuation mission was in the grey zone, the area between the Ukrainian and Russian front lines that neither controlled, no-man’s land. Despite coming under Russian mortar fire, the pair managed to collect six evacuees. As they began to leave the area, an explosion went off next to the vehicle, claiming the driver’s side mirror and pounding Drozd’s eardrum. Luckily, that was the extent of the damage, and all of the evacuees made it to safety.
That first mission remains the closest call Drozd has had. For those in the volunteer community, narrow escapes like these become what they call second birthdays—“because you have a new lease on life after experiencing something like that,” he says. Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky.
In early January 2023, six months after Drozd’s close call, he had heard that Bagshaw and Chris Parry, a twenty-eight-year-old British volunteer, hadn’t been heard from after going on a mission. Eventually, the news broke: it was the first time that volunteers within Drozd’s immediate circle had been killed. “It was a heavy realization about what we were doing,” he said. “We all knew that that was a very realistic possibility. You know, it was always sort of just a question of when and how.” While their deaths stand out for Drozd, loss in the volunteer community has continued, and it takes a toll. “Getting numb to it is one thing, but you never get used to it.”
Drozd sitting alone in a dark house. The rubble of a building destroyed in the Russia–Ukraine war.More than halfway through the drive, the snow had returned, and Drozd reflected on advice he had given another volunteer a day earlier: “As shitty as it is driving on Donbas roads in fourteen centimetres of snow . . . you look out there right now, it’s much less hospitable for drone flights today, and that might be the sweet spot where you take the risk with the weather to go in and avoid some of the risk from being targeted.”
The question he mulled over was whether he would take on such a risk, given how fast things were changing. Missions like the one he ran with Bagshaw are now “absolute suicide” on account of the drones that have so influenced the war since the end of 2023. Although Drozd acknowledges that his current pause on missions won’t be forever, navigating that limbo is difficult for someone who came to Ukraine to be useful.
Eventually, the van entered the small city of Bilozers’ke. “[It] oddly reminds me a little bit of Canora, Saskatchewan, where my dad’s side of the family comes from,” he said. “You know, just a small, quaint town with a few domed churches.”
It has been a while since Drozd was back in Canada. He was missing his grandmother, his baba, the most. As the first male born to her side of the family, Drozd always had a close relationship with her as a kind of “golden boy,” but when the pandemic struck and he eventually moved in with her, that bond deepened. When Drozd first contemplated going to Ukraine, she expressed concern, as did most, but her support ultimately didn’t waver. Had she asked him not to go, Drozd says that he would have been less sure. She was the only person who had that kind of sway, and leaving her was the only part of his decision that tore at him.
During one visit home, he told her that he’d be back, that he’d see her again, but before he returned, she passed away.
For Drozd, going home or even talking with people back in Canada presents challenges. “I know they love me. They care about me. They want nothing but my safety,” he said. “But after almost three years now of doing this . . . it can wear them out emotionally and make it more difficult for them to really be tuned in.” At the same time, Drozd recognizes that his experiences have changed him. It’s one of the reasons he hasn’t been able to bring himself to talk with his family about what happened to Scott or how he’s feeling about it. “They really can’t understand.”
But back in Ukraine, things are different. There, Drozd is just one of roughly 40 million people who experience death, destruction, and sacrifice on a daily basis in a country that has been fighting for its very existence for almost four years. “Living under this reality, as terrible as the experiences are,” he said, “being with other people who have been through similar things is comforting.”
It was midday when Drozd arrived in Kramatorsk. His thoughts turned to whether anyone was at the house or if the once buzzing hub would simply greet him with silence.
The final stretch of the journey was on foot, walking up a slick hill that his van couldn’t have managed. The snow that continued to fall dampened all sounds except for the occasional rumble from a distant artillery training range and Drozd’s footsteps as he passed by the snow-covered bricks of a fire pit. He approached the tired house and swung open the door.
Inside was his roommate and another volunteer. Drozd was relieved.
After a short exchange, the conversation between the roommates shifted.
“You’re still doing tomorrow?” asked Drozd, referring to an evacuation mission in a nearby town where volunteers had recently been attacked.
“Yeah . . . wanna come?” his roommate asked.
“We’ll see,” replied Drozd. “If it makes a difference.”
The post Why One Canadian Traded Saskatchewan for War-Torn Ukraine first appeared on The Walrus.
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