How To Help Ukrainians From Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, CA — Images emerged this month of mass graves, murdered civilians, and children killed among dozens at a train station bombing in Ukraine, shocking the world and prompting many Angelenos to wonder how to could help from 6,400 miles away.

Several humanitarian efforts are underway through organizations such as the Ukrainian Culture Center Los Angeles and St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox Pro-Cathedral. This month, donors and volunteers at St. Vladimir's loaded up several trucks of field-ready medical kits that were shipped out to Ukraine. More will go out as soon as donors step up with urgently needed items such as triple antibiotic ointment and Bleed Stop powder.

"Medicine is in short supply throughout Europe because of the war. Medicine is one of the things worth buying in the U.S. We take bulk medical supplies and turn them into waterproofed vacuum-sealed medical kits that soldiers need in the field," explained Leon Kaspersky a volunteer organizer St. Vladimir's. "We desperately need Bleed Stop powder. It basically replaces a tourniquet because you can't put a tourniquet on a neck wound or chest wound. It instantly clots the blood."

In many besieged villages, it's the Ukrainian Home Guard, that helps wounded civilians, said Kaspersky, who created an Amazon registry where donors can order the triple antibiotic ointment and Bleed Stop powder to be sent to the church's collection site. Volunteers able to help assemble medical kits and box up shipments can volunteer by texting 323-497-2360. To donate medical supplies to the St. Vladimir's volunteers through Kaspersky's Ukraine Med Kits Amazon registry, click here. Choose the items you wish to donate, then click ship to "Ukraine Med Kits."

"We do need volunteers," said. "We are in the process of collecting donations for the next big push.

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The church works with the fire department, nonprofits, and private donors to get the medical supplies shipped to Ukraine. It's one of several local efforts to help.

The Los Angeles Police Commission Tuesday approved the donation of surplus ballistic helmets and vests from the Los Angeles Police Department to a foundation that will deliver the equipment to Ukraine for its army to use in defense against Russia.

The 526 helmets and 378 vests will be donated to the First-In Fire Foundation, which will be responsible for the shipment and delivery to Ukraine. The department said the items are prepared in pallets and ready for immediate shipping.

"The equipment has no value to the LAPD," the department's chief Michel Moore said in a letter to the commission. The equipment was going to be destroyed after exceeding the manufacturer's five-year warranty.

Moore added that Mayor Eric Garcetti "is aware of this donation and fully supports the transfer of the equipment to aid the Ukrainian people."

The commission unanimously passed the motion without a discussion.

Russia has been accused of "apparent war crimes" against Ukrainian civilians by Human Rights Watch, and President Joe Biden on Monday called Russian killings of civilians in Bucha a "war crime."

Ukrainian officials said earlier this week that the bodies of 410 civilians were found in towns around the capital city. Volunteers have spent days collecting the corpses, and more were picked up Thursday in Bucha.

Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said investigators have found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians during the Russian occupation. Most victims died from gunshots, not from shelling, he said, and corpses with their hands tied were “dumped like firewood” into recently discovered mass graves, including one at a children’s camp.

The mayor said the count of dead civilians stood at 320 as of Wednesday, but he expected the number to rise as more bodies are found in his city, which once had a population of 50,000. Only 3,700 now remain, he said.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested that the horrors of Bucha could just be the beginning. In the northern city of Borodianka, just 30 kilometers northwest of Bucha, Zelenskyy warned of even more casualties, saying “there it is much scarier.”

The world should brace itself, he said, for what might soon be found in the seaport city of Mariupol, saying that on “on every street is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region after the departure of the Russian troops. The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”

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He pledged that an international war crimes investigation already underway will identify “each of the executioners” and “all those who committed rape or looting.”

A missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine where thousands had gathered Friday, killing at least 52 and wounding dozens more in an attack on a crowd of mostly women and children trying to flee a new, looming Russian offensive, Ukrainian authorities said.

The attack, denounced by some as yet another war crime in the 6-week-old conflict, came as workers unearthed bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, a town near Ukraine's capital where dozens of killings have been documented after a Russian pullout.

Photos from the station in Kramatorsk showed the dead covered with tarps, and the remnants of a rocket painted with the words “For the children,” which in Russian implied that children were being avenged by the strike, though the exact reason remained unclear. About 4,000 civilians had been in and around the station, heeding calls to leave before fighting intensifies in the Donbas region, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said.

City News Service, Patch Staffer Paige Austin and Adam Schreck and Cara Anna of the Associated Press contributed to this report.