Den is helping the Deerslayer battalion

The photo picturing Artur Stepanenko has a great history of its own. It began when our editor decided to publish this photo, taken by Serhii Kharchenko, on the front page of The Day on June 17. It was selected then for Den’s Photo Competition-2014, and we found the picture’s subject just before he was to go to the ATO area for the second time as a tank commander (see Maria Prokopenko’s article “Callsign Sokil” in The Day’s No. 64, October 21). A success story followed for the picture: photo Callsign Sokil (Artur Stepanenko) won the Award of the Awards at this year’s photo exhibition. Moreover, this newspaper held a cha­ri­ty sale, where the photo was bought by director of Aquavita Ltd. Tetiana Yurkova for 15,000 hryvnias! The proceeds of the sale will be transferred to Starobilsk-based Freedom NGO for the needs of Ukrainian soldiers and directly to Artur Stepanenko.

Meanwhile, volunteer Olena Shar­hovska visited our office in person on October 28 to fulfill a request of the soldiers of the 3rd Separate Armor Battalion “Deerslayer,” who asked for a few copies of Den with the article about the photo’s subject, as well as a fresh issue of the newspaper. “We have learned first-hand that it is important for our boys that we are on the same page with them. They feel the importance of what we are doing for them, of being remembered and even written about,” Sharhovska stressed when relating the soldiers’ request.

“I am even ashamed to be called a volunteer,” she admitted, “because there are other people of this name who are doing some great things. However, ever since the Euromaidan, I have held that I have to do what I can, even if it is just a little. For instance, I and other girls have organized sew­ing of balaclavas – it is just one thing out of a lot of urgent needs, but we can do it, and are doing it now.”

The battalion’s support group emerged spontaneously. “As it often happens, when a friend is going off to war, the people start organizing, for they understand that ‘nobody but me’ would do it,” Sharhovska explained. She is both volunteering and doing her journalistic work. Stepanenko’s battalion has Kyivites serving in it alongside a lot of men from western Ukraine and a few from the east of the country. “Many soldiers come from the countryside, while some are businessmen who left their successful enterprises and became soldiers,” Sharhovska told us. New people join the support group all the time, many of them lacking any previous connection with each other. Recently, a retired Norwegian soldier volunteered to help the Deerslayer tankers.

Currently, the unmet basic needs of soldiers are linked to the cold season and include warm clothes, metal stoves, and so on. “The most pressing issue is medical care,” the volunteer emphasized.

There is armor battalion support group’s Facebook page (face­book. com/groups/tankbataljon). The Privat­bank card number for money transfer is 4149 4377 3129 0555 (Fedorak Zakhar Liubomyrovych).