A 21-year-old volunteer delivers food and medicine to frontline towns in Ukraine

Maria Shtern, 21, has been volunteering on the frontlines of Ukraine’s struggle with Russia for more than five years, first with Russia’s proxies in the Donbas region and now with its military.

She’s bringing food and medicine to households in the village of Mykolaivka on this lovely spring Monday, dressed in camouflage cargo trousers and a hemp leaf bucket hat.

She told CNN, “Many people just do not understand that what was in 2014 in Slovyansk and what can happen now are two very different scenarios.”

She tells her patrons to evacuate every day.

“I am asking people a specific question: Are you ready to hear your children crying and saying, ‘Mom, I’m scared to die?'” she said.

As the commercial supplies stop, she delivers food and medicine that are the only lifeline for many people there.

Shtern is enthusiastic to help her people. “There is the expression, ‘Who else but us?’ It all comes from the heart. When you realize that your own home could be taken away from you and you could be killed, or your friends and your family could be killed, you simply have no choice but to do it.”

Each civilian faces the same decision, to stay or to leave.

She narrates, “My sister woke up this morning and said we had to leave. We didn’t want to leave until the last minute, but then something made her want to. So we had to.”