(Bloomberg Opinion) -- For the past three weeks Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine, has been witnessing the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine firsthand -- working from within a war zone to bring desperately needed medical supplies to the country. Mylovanov, an economics professor and former minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture for the Ukrainian government, is directing fundraising and other aid efforts from his base in Lviv in western Ukraine. Below are the lightly edited highlights of his Twitter Spaces conversation with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Scott Duke Kominers, where he discusses the economic and humanitarian disaster unfolding in his home country and shares his personal experiences of the shock of war.
Scott Duke Kominers: First, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing and how your job has evolved in the context of war.
Tymofiy Mylovanov: The way to understand it is that the first two weeks is a sprint and after that it’s like a marathon. In the beginning you really put in all your energy and you feel you need more oxygen. You have plans and you execute them a little bit like a machine. And after a couple of weeks, you start reconsidering your new status quo. It’s not as intense, it’s just very difficult to make a next step. And the challenge now is not to fall down. It’s amazing how fast it has become normal -- not a good normal, but a new normal.
Kominers: So talk us through what a “new normal” day is like.
Mylovanov: I wake up in the morning and check the news and I post on Facebook and Twitter to let people see that I’m okay. I check news to see who got bombed. I use my connections in the government to figure out what has really happened — is it a big deal or not a big deal? The day before yesterday, for example, there was a missile attack on the training center [near Lviv]. I was driving to Lviv and I see paramedics coming towards me one after another. So then I know it was big. And so you try to make sense out of it and to understand whether it is dangerous where you are, whether you need to move your people who run the operations. I still run the Kyiv School of Economics, which is a university, so we are doing checkups daily.
So you know, the usual war stuff. Then at 10 a.m. we have a management team meeting. We have checkups with everyone, we discuss strategy and tactics and projects, and make sure that all students are accounted for. Sometimes there are horror stories coming from students who are trying to get out of Russian-occupied territories, but so far, we don’t have any students killed. It is very difficult circumstances, but everyone is alive so far. So that’s good news. And then you have lunch.
And then in the evening the U.S. and Canada wake up. And so you do some media stuff and do some fundraising. Basically it’s coordinating orders and supplies in the morning and fundraising and communications in the evening, with another checkup around 7 p.m. And then I do all cryptocurrency after 7 p.m. because we’re raising a lot through crypto and NFTs so we do this technical stuff, coding and payment issues. I write another [social media] post in the evening trying to make sense of what happened over the day. And then it’s 11 p.m. and I go to bed. So it’s a little bit like that.
Kominers: I’m really glad to hear that the students have remained safe so far. All the things you’re doing to keep them protected and to keep the university operational in the middle of this is just extraordinary.
Mylovanov: Within the first couple of days, you see how people respond differently. Some people get traumatized; some become dysfunctional; others become almost super-efficient, like me and my team. But you have to figure out how to function in war or you die. Your loved ones will die. And we had a plan — war-time protocols at the university. We even had a war committee, and everyone was responsible for specific tasks, and they have to start executing them. Otherwise we collapse.
If someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, that doesn’t matter. Decisions are made without them. No wavering, no trembling hand. You either do it or you don’t do it and you accept the consequences. So we managed to shut down our facilities and put security in our buildings and the people there had food and water, and they’ve been staying there for two weeks.
And so we had all of that executed. It took us two days to get out of Kyiv to safe areas. Some people stayed and became operational in the new conditions. And we started our fundraising campaign on the second day. While people were moving, they were working. And on Thursday I wrote to the chief of staff [of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy] that our analysts were ready to go, and they start giving us tasks.
One thing that still gets to me is talking to our students. Some of our students got stuck in the areas controlled by Russians. I had this 16-year-old student, a freshman, and [the Russians] put her family and a couple other families in a basement and kept them there for two weeks without water. They wouldn’t give them water. That’s all you need to know about what we are facing here. I get really upset when I talk about this. She’s just a kid. So they call you and say, “Please get us out.” But how can you get them out? You don’t have a car. It’s a war zone. You can only talk to them and say, “If you get out, we can give you money. Do you need money?” And they say, “I don’t need money. I need a car to get me out.” But there’s no cars. And Russians are shooting at people who try to move.
And, you know, with all the bombings and shootings, [the Russians] just do it because they can. And so this is really awful. This should be stopped. It’s… it’s really, truly evil. And it’s spreading, from 2008 in Georgia to 2014 to 2016 in Syria. Now, again, Ukraine is getting war. Whoever is running this show just has to be stopped. Anyway. So these are the stories we hear. And of course they devastate us and we get a little bit emotional, but we have to go on. We continue to push. That’s the emotional rollercoaster you get here.
Kominers: You’ve been managing a lot of different aid distribution efforts, both fundraising and distribution on the ground and some crypto fundraising work. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what’s needed most right now?
Mylovanov: If you want to get something done during war, it must be project-based. A lot of people are just completely lost. People have all kinds of ideas that the government has to do something, or someone else has to do something, and so they don’t do anything. You really have to focus on a specific project and the entire logistical supply project chain. We rely a lot on trust. And this trust was developed over the last eight years. I started working with Ukraine in 2014. I was at [the University of Pittsburgh] when the invasion of Crimea happened and I felt I had to get engaged with Ukraine. And I developed some expertise on how things work in extreme circumstances. So that helps me a little bit now. For example, we knew what to do with finances. In 2014, I raised $50,000, and a lot of academics were giving me checks of $1,000, $2,000 just to help Ukrainians in 2014. And none of it was wasted.
We don’t need food or paper towels. What the army needs is munitions and people need medical supplies, specific medical supplies. Most people die from blood loss after a cluster bomb or after some kind of ballistic missile falls. There may be 20 or 200 people wounded. It’s a little bit like when an airplane cabin loses pressure, the masks fall down — and what you need to do is to put the mask on yourself and then help others. So in this case, the mask analogy is a medical kit, which allows you to stop bleeding. So you really have to ensure that you are not bleeding, and then that people next to you are not bleeding.
So you have to have a lot of these medical kits, and they usually cost 10 or 20 bucks. But now of course they cost 100 bucks because it’s surge pricing and no one can deliver. So we are trying to focus on this specifically. Civilian authorities need them and even railroads are asking for these medical kits because evacuation trains get shelled and people die without this specific kit. We will deliver them. We have connections, there’ll be no [extra overhead charges]. It doesn’t get stolen on the way. And [your donation] is also tax deductible in the U.S. So for $100, you’ll save a life and get your taxes back.
So that’s what we are doing. But the first thing is to make sure we can pay [for supplies]. Because it’s wartime, there are capital controls and no one can make payments [in the usual way]. So you have to figure out how we’re going to pay. Then you need to figure out how you’re going to collect [fundraising] money. You need to figure out how to do crypto. So I am [talking to] European currency exchanges and charitable foundations and [universities] in the U.S. and Ukraine and the central bank of Ukraine and other banks and CEOs to ensure that the financial monitoring [for sanctions] doesn’t stop me because it’s all automatically blocking everything.
And you need to get suppliers. In war, there are so many intermediaries and fees. So you have to establish a procurement department to figure out who is serious. Once you have suppliers, you have to figure out all the [wartime] export licenses, all these government regulations. And of course things get stolen on the way. For example, one large, well-known American charity sends 95 pallets of medical supplies to Ukraine. When it arrives, it’s only two pallets because 93 of them got stolen somewhere. Not in Ukraine — either in Poland or even in New Jersey. So you have to watch for this. You actually have to put your own people in Warsaw or in New Jersey, in Israel, in Sweden, to check what has been loaded at every point so that it doesn’t get stolen. It’s a logistical nightmare. And when you finally get it to Ukraine, people are shooting at you at checkpoints.
Kominers: It’s astounding to me that you’re managing to hold together all of those logistics in a war zone. What can people do to help? I want to do more, and I’m sure many of our other listeners and readers do as well.
Mylovanov: One specific thing: We need 307,000 medical kits. I have the specification. Let’s say Israel can only supply 30,000 and Canada probably can supply 20 or 30,000. But we have suppliers who can provide the medical kits. We give this specification to [Ukraine’s] Ministry of Health, and our charitable foundation will pay. So tag me or email me or ping me on Twitter — and then donate, please donate.
All the fundraising goes directly to logistics. I have a website at the university of the charitable foundation [Kyiv School of Economics Humanitarian Relief Fund], and there is a Twitter post at my account. If I get a hundred dollars on that charitable foundation, it goes towards medical kits and it’s likely going to save a life.
Kominers: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I am so impressed and honored to be your colleague and friend. I’ll be thinking of you and hoping you’re able to stay safe and keep doing this extraordinary work.
More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
- Positioning for Peace? It May Be Europe's Moment: John Authers
- Ukraine War Makes Supply Problems Seem Quaint: Brooke Sutherland
- Can EU's Refugee Success Lead to More Cooperation?: Editorial
- The West Needs an Off-Ramp From Sanctions, Too: John Authers
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.
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