Ruslan Shpakovich, a former rental-car company worker, trains a soldier whose unit relies partly on privately purchased equipment, in Mykolaivka Druha, Ukraine.
Photographer: Brendan Hoffman for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe Art of Crowdfunding War
Yuri Deychakiwsky thinks he was home in North Potomac, Md., when he saw the video. He can’t recall exactly. After writing so many checks to support the war effort overseas, even watching bombs rain down on strangers doesn’t quite register in his memory.
Born in Cleveland to Ukrainian immigrants, Deychakiwsky is a 61-year-old cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians in Bethesda. Around Christmastime in 2017, he wired $3,000 to a Ukrainian émigré in Syracuse, N.Y., for what his contact cryptically codenamed “our grasshopper”—a drone whose specs Deychakiwsky declines to share—which was to be used by the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, a battalion fighting Russian-backed separatists.