Wheels of Victory, founded by Yaroslav Kolodiy with others in his town, receives modest funding from the Ukraine Crisis Appeal, an Australian charity supporting efforts ranging from housing to medical supplies. He imports about 40 vehicles every month.

Fetsitsa delivered a defibrillator sent by Australia on a recent journey. One of her next jobs, she says, will be to take an ambulance to a military hospital. She used to work for the local business chamber but now intends to be an army officer.

“Our way is the opposite to Russia,” she says, through a translator. “We will fight and we will fight until the end and we will win, even if it costs us our lives and the last drop of our blood.”

Later, she emphasises the point in English: “We are doing what we can do, what we must do.”

Like many others, the volunteers at Wheels of Victory were galvanised by the Maidan protests of 2013-2014 against corruption, Russian undue influence and the then-president, Viktor Yanukovich, who now lives in Russia.

Kolodiy was in Maidan Square in February 2014 when he witnessed protesters being shot dead by police; he helped at a medical station. Fetsitsa travelled to the protests several times from Ternopil.

About 6 million people have fled Ukraine since Russian troops began their assault on February 24, according to the United Nations, but about 38 million remain.

Life in Kyiv continues in bars and restaurants until the 11pm curfew but the war economy is forcing change. Men and women are volunteering for the army or finding jobs that help defend the country, like delivering military and humanitarian aid.

While many Ukrainians insist that victory is certain, they also know that some of their compatriots are working against them. President Volodymyr Zelensky removed the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Ivan Bakanov, on July 18 because, he said, agents within the SSU had transferred secrets to the enemy.

Asked about their plans, young people talk of building a better country after defeating Russia.

“We can improve our country. We will construct a new Ukraine,” says Daryana Kolmyk, 20, a student at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv who moved west with her mother after they had to leave the eastern city of Kharkiv, the target of some of the heaviest Russian bombardments.

Kolmyk has given up her ideas of a master’s degree in sociology in France or the United States and now volunteers at a centre on campus that distributes foreign aid. Her father remained in Kharkiv and her younger brother is in Norway with grandparents and an uncle.

The Maidan protests, known as the Revolution of Dignity to many Ukrainians, also shaped Kolmyk and her family. While their community in Kharkiv mostly speaks Russian given its proximity to the eastern border, this changed in her household.

“We started to speak Ukrainian. We started to buy Ukrainian clothes. We started to donate to Ukrainian projects,” she says.

“Our family was changed by the Revolution of Dignity. I think we found our Ukrainian dignity inside of us.”

This may be a powerful force in Ukrainian society if, as some military observers expect, the current conflict turns into a long war of attrition.

“It’s like a new nation is being born,” says Alona Shevchenko, the key figure behind Ukraine DAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation that has raised money through cryptocurrencies for Come Back Alive, which buys supplies for the Ukrainian defence forces.

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For Shevchenko and others, Ukraine emerged from the protests nearly a decade ago with a stronger society and a path to a more open democracy. Now, in wartime, the country’s fate depends in part on a generation of volunteers who still believe in that goal.

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