John DePalatis used to teach music in Sitka. After Russia invaded Ukraine, his flight-attendant-turned-combat-medic friend Julia got in touch with a plea for help: her plate carrier was damaged, and she needed a new one before getting deployed to Bakhmut.
circulating in your social media feed. A man wearing a burgundy polo and baseball cap gestures to a woman on his left, wearing a periwinkle dress peppered with tiny white flowers. She fist bumps him after he introduces her, and he cringes, rubbing his knuckles pretending to be in pain from the force of her fist. She laughs. It’s clear, in that moment, they’re good friends.
“I just walk the earth,” DePalatis tells me in an interview over Zoom, earlier this month. “So I have been all over the world. Generally, my style of travel is to go find really interesting things, sort of, in places where angels fear to tread. I happened to be in Iran in 2009, during the disputed elections there. Trouble seems to find me one way or another.”
“Most of the Ukrainians I talked to in November would say something like, ‘Oh this, Russia, you know, nothing happened.’ And then as things kind of got more and more escalated, by January, they weren’t really saying that anymore, and there was some concern,” he said. “When the war started, I was just flabbergasted,” DePalatis says. “Everything I’d read told me this was a really bad mistake for Putin, by any metric. And so I couldn’t believe it was happening — people here couldn’t believe it was happening.”
“We were living in a rural farmhouse, together with three women and six children, and hilarity ensues,” DePalatis says. “But, you know, I couldn’t stop the war, I couldn’t protect the people, but I could — I could protect these few. I could get them to safety, I could look after their children.” Julia asked if DePalatis could find her a protective vest in Romania and mail it to her, but the mailing options were limited — none of the major carriers were operating in Ukraine due to the war — and the Romanian Post Office said it would take six weeks.
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