Ignaty Ivlev-York is a 27-year-old volunteer who has helped save thousands of Ukrainians over the past year. Photo: Ignatius Ivlev-York. to save a grandmother stuck in the besieged city of Bakhmut.
Her neighborhood is under constant shelling and her grandson is already dead. As the car drives past burned-out tanks and bombed-out residential buildings, a rocket explodes on the road just a hundred meters ahead. “F*** me three seconds later and we'd be dead,” the voice says in English.
This particular tug of mercy, however, lacks a Hollywood ending. When they finally get to Grandma's bomb-destroyed apartment, she refuses to leave. Do you understand that you will die here? the voice speaks in Russian. “Thank you, but I won't go,” she replies politely.
Both voices in the video belong to Ignatius Ivlev-York, 27, a British freelance volunteer who has helped rescue thousands of Ukrainians over the past year, mostly from places where conventional humanitarian organizations would not have reached. Videos on his Twitter feed show him ferrying grandparents, families, the wounded and sometimes the occasional corpse, often under fire.
Our last evacuation from Bakhmut. The night before, we carried out the charred remains of Sergei, whose family refused to evacuate without his body. On our way to them, we luckily avoided the approaching S-300s at Chasovoy Yar. Not much else, but in war you really feel the scale… pic.twitter.com/x8Ehx39FMG
— Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke (@IvlevYorke) April 18, 2023
The dangers in Ukraine's front-line cities are very clear. In January, two Britons, Chris Parry and Andrew Bagshaw, again freelance volunteers, were killed during an evacuation. However, despite this, some of the people whom Ivlev-York risks his life to help, such as the grandmother from Bakhmut, are not interested in saving.
Andrew Bagshaw, a British volunteer who died during the evacuation. Bryce Wilson/Reuters
“Yesterday we were in Chasovoy Yar (a town near Bakhmut) and there was quite a lot of shelling before we got there,” he tells me when we meet in nearby Slavyansk, further from the front line. “Locals said: “Oh yes, the guy was killed and his head was torn off.” But when I asked them if they wanted to evacuate, none of them did.”
This stubborn disregard for danger was a constant theme in the Ukrainian war, whether it was peasants towing Russian tanks on their tractors or pensioners clearing anti-tank mines with their bare hands. However, while this may have cemented the country's reputation as a brave nation, it could also lead to tragedy.
While at Clock Yar, Ivlev-York also learned of the fate of a woman pregnant with twins, whom he tried to convince to leave.
“She was gardening and she got hit by shrapnel. She survived but lost two children,” he said. “I thought: “Did we have to try harder to convince her?” But once people have decided, there is little that can be done.”
So what drives the hardened “leftovers” who refuse to leave their homes? Some argue that this is a legacy of the Stalin era, when the threat of deportation made people psychologically wary of people knocking on their doors and asking them to leave. Ivlev-York, however, says that more often than not, people simply have nowhere else to go.
“Of course, if you are young, educated and have job prospects, you are not going to sit idle in a war zone like this. But many of these people led extremely dysfunctional lives. They worked all their lives just to get a house and possibly retire. Then, when war suddenly breaks out, they find the idea of starting a new life elsewhere rather difficult.”
Ivlev-York himself had to face the difficult choice of where to build his own house after the war. He was born in Windsor to an English father and a Russian mother. He moved to Russia as a child and then returned to the UK to study philosophy at King's College London. He then worked in the communications department of the Red Cross. His mother is Victoria Ivleva, a Russian journalist and photographer who has long been a critic of the Kremlin's aggression against Kyiv.
In 2016, mother and son spent time in Ukraine delivering humanitarian aid to front-line cities, having moved there from Moscow when the invasion began last year. None of them know if it will be safe for them to return to Russia.
“I know several people who are already in prison, and some time ago, one of my mom’s friends was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence just for reposting one of her articles,” says Ivlev-York. “I also did enough evacuation work in support of the Ukrainian military that I would probably get jail time if I went back to Russia.”
Ivlev-York began covering the invasion as a freelance photographer and then went into freelance humanitarian work, organizing aid buses from Poland, which also began to bring in evacuees.
Chris Parry, British aid worker who died in Ukraine Photo: Chris Parry
“People in front-line cities sometimes lose touch with reality,” he says. “They think that death is always something that happens to 'someone else', even when you explain that 'someone else' thought so too.”
Some may even criticize volunteers like him, especially after the deaths of 28-year-old Parry and 47-year-old Bagshaw, for whom he organized a memorial service in Kiev a few weeks after their death.
The two are believed to have been killed by Russian artillery during the evacuation near the town of Soledar, 10 miles from Bakhmut. Ivlev-York says the circumstances remain unclear, but both men were seasoned volunteers who were “fully aware” of the dangers.
“In particular, it was not a revelation, it’s just a reality,” he says. “Many people die here every day, whether they be volunteers, civilians or soldiers.” Like Ivlev-York, the majority of foreigners on frontline evacuation missions are freelancers who fund themselves through online donations. They work without insurance, minimizing the risks as much as possible.
Ivlev-York, for example, is trained in first aid, and his SUV has a steel coating that provides little protection from fragments. His fluency in Russian also helps him gain a basic knowledge of dangers. “The other day I got a call to pick up a wounded civilian from a street known to have Russian snipers, and I just thought, ‘No, that’s above my level of risk.’”
His fluency also helps him convince those who resist evacuation. A typical excuse: “I need to look after the bees” (beekeeping is popular in Ukraine). Another example: “I built this house from nothing,” to which Ivlev-York usually replies: “You also built your family from nothing.”
“You are trying to find something that will speak to them,” he adds. “Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes you don't.”
One thing that particularly daunts the evacuees is the prospect of living in state-organized housing in other parts of Ukraine, which can vary in quality. Some may receive private rooms with all modern conveniences; others can get shared dorms in a public building. Where he can, Ivlev-York and his fellow volunteers secure private accommodation arrangements offered by well-wishers, some of whom are homeowners and hoteliers who have followed his work. “If you advise people to leave their homes, you have an obligation to take care of what happens next,” he says.
However, some requests to evacuate are beyond the call of duty. Among the clips that have gone viral on Ivlev-York's Twitter feed is the evacuation of two pet wolves who are to be drugged for the duration of the trip. One wolf then wakes up and escapes from its cage, giving the rescuers a few unsettling moments as it wanders unsteadily around the back of their car.
However, unlike the grandmother from Bakhmut, he seems happy to leave the house, sticking his head between the front seats of the car to watch the journey.
As a triumphant Ivlev-York says in the video: “Wolf evacuation on the front lines – you know who to call ”.
I Gnathius Ivlev-York’s rescue work can be seen on his Twitter and Instagram feeds, as well as on his donation link
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