What this Swiss experienced on the Ukrainian front Absolutely deadly at 1500 meters

Does he have a death wish? He laughs for a moment, then falls silent and takes another drag from his Lucky Strike. “Maybe,” replies Kai Strub*, now 19. It wasn’t until he was in the truck full of relief supplies on his way to Ukraine that he really understood where he was going.

A month after the invasion of Russia, the Basler Strub went to Lviv. The Christian aid organization for which he worked rented several apartments for its helpers in the western Ukrainian city. He works in the society’s warehouse, sorting canned goods, blankets, candles and medicines. “I had neither military nor medical experience.” For this reason he was not assigned to operations at the front.

Still, it didn’t keep him in the warehouse for more than three weeks. When a cameraman was filming his workplace, Strub approached him. He made an image film to generate donations. The next location was an orphanage that had to be evacuated. Since the filmmaker was older, Strub offered to help him. And so he ended his first evacuation mission. Many should follow, including at the front.

Better to fear death than a living dead

As Strub tells these things, he doesn’t seem like someone who just took a wrong turn on the road to self-discovery. Who he is and what he does are one and the same for the 19-year-old. And he has concrete ideas about who he is: “I don’t fit into this society.” Stronger than the fear of death is his fear of becoming a walking dead. Strub’s nightmare in four stations:

This desire suppresses everything, including the fear of death. For real death lies in insignificance. Only meaning guarantees life. Strub finds them where he can help people and change lives. And when meaning and tension come together, every experience becomes an existential experience: “War is like medicine.”

A young man in questionable company

Strub met countless addicts in Ukraine. His then superior, formerly an AfD member, sold his properties and devoted himself entirely to humanitarian aid in the war zone. “A Bad Conscience I Think”Strub says.

An American businessman who left the aid organization overnight in an attempt to snatch a box full of coveted painkillers. To sell them on the black market, Strub suspects. In the meantime he passed away. «He deserved a penalty, but he didn’t.”

Foreign mercenaries who boasted of acts of violence from their time in Afghanistan. A Ukrainian soldier showing Strub his assault rifle and telling him how many Russians he had shot with it.

An odyssey between the fronts

A war seems to attract people from all over the world. What the characters have in common are their whimsical biographies and often their doubtfulness. And in the middle of it all, an 18-year-old from Basel with a backpack full of syringes, bandages and a can of ravioli.

‘When we went to the front, we often only had crackers with us’Strub says. The leaders of the operations had military experience and found their way to the Christian aid organization through the Christian faith. From them he learned how to bandage wounds, restore injured people, give infusions. On the way to the front supplies and medicines were in the back of the van, on the way back there were often civilians. The operations were largely similar. Except this one time.

‘We heard of an elderly couple who had not been evacuated’Strub says. Although Russian units quickly penetrated the village, the chief of operations, Strub and an interpreter dared to try. Initially everything went according to plan. But on the way back the navigation system failed. “The Russian jammers got too close to us.”

Jumped off the shovel of death

The group got lost and wandered along country roads. When they stopped at a street sign, a Ukrainian soldier appeared. He informed the group that they were trapped between the fronts and directed them in a different direction. At dusk, they saw Russian artillery fire, says Strub. Other images burned themselves into his memory: “Evening mood, an empty carriage with a shot through the windshield, the inside of the glass full of splashes.”

The experience is immortalized on Strub’s upper left arm. A tattoo of an ace of spades, the great of spades consists only of the outline so far. “Another skull comes in.” During the hours they drove without reception between the fronts, they had been pronounced dead. “They called us ‘Death Squad’ after that.”

Strub owes the fact that he never came closer to death to sheer luck in many ways: “If it had not been forbidden to us Swiss, I would have made myself available for the Ukrainian army.” The law is also why Strub wishes to remain anonymous. The four months in Ukraine convinced him that an army is needed. Because of his commitment he fears that he will be declared unfit. He would like to prove his service to the paramedics.

“Maybe I had something like a death wish at the time.”says Kai Strub. But that’s over. He is now looking for an internship as a nurse and later wants to become a paramedic. Too many strangers have risked their lives for him, too many friends have died.

(e.g. Basel)