Neither shells raining down nor the heat of war can keep these couriers from their appointed rounds.
More than 50,000 Ukrainian postal workers, mostly women, are risking their lives to deliver letters, packages and, most importantly, pensions to people across the country, picking their way through bombed-out streets and battered apartment buildings to reach the most vulnerable residents of their communities, The Times of London reported.
“Some of the pensioners don’t have anyone except for me,” said Natalia Kuhta, 58, a postie in the capital Kyiv. “That’s the only support they have sometimes.”
In the five weeks since the war began, more than four million people fled Ukraine and another 6.5 million are displaced. But three-quarters of the country’s population, including many poor and elderly, remains behind.
Igor Smilyansky, general director of state postal service Ukrposhta, told The Times its offices closed only the first day of the war and since then, pensions, food and humanitarian aid have been delivered to millions. “We understood that if we don’t deliver the pensions, these people will be without means to survive,” he said.
A man walks past a the central post office building damaged by night shelling in Chernihiv, Ukraine on March 30, 2022.AP Photo
Since fighting began, Smilyansky said, Ukrposhta has delivered 85 percent of the country’s pensions. Some had to be smuggled to territories occupied by Russia via secret paths through forests.
“If people see that the post is working, they can order packages on the internet,” Smilyansky said. “I think it’s important to maintain that: even small pieces of normal life.”
That means posties often don bulletproof vests and helmets to go to towns on the front lines. At least two were killed when Russians attacked their delivery van in the eastern Zaporizhzhia region.
Some areas, like the besieged and nearly leveled Mariupol, cannot be reached.
Ukrposhta has also re-routed the nation’s exports from a logistics hub in Kyiv to Lviv in the west, where they are then shipped to Poland, in an effort for Ukrainian businesses to survive.
