He’s currently renting a $200 per-month apartment in the middle of Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city located less than 20 miles from the Russian border.
The Bedford, N.H., native is living inside a country at war with Russia, and there’s no place he’d rather be.
“The more I learn about this area, the more I find out that it serves as a great launching pad to help the communities we want to help most, which are the formerly occupied communities located southeast of here,” Brian Nolen told NHJournal via videoconference on Monday.
Nolen is currently in the midst of his seventh humanitarian trip to the war-ravaged nation. Now retired from his personal ceiling refinishing business, he and the rest of the world saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold in February 2022.
A history buff, he said he felt the urge to do something. The parallels between the current invasion and Nazi Germany’s storming into Poland in 1939 were too obvious for him. Nolen would soon link up with another Bedford local, U.S. Navy veteran John Fitzgerald, to launch NH4Ukraine, aimed at providing humanitarian relief to Ukrainians caught in the midst of the siege.
Nolen quickly joined several Polish-based Facebook groups to get a grasp on the situation and read first-hand reports about the mass-exodus of Ukrainians fleeing into Europe. He learned there was a need for more transit, so he booked a flight for March 23, 2022.
The demand for vans and other vehicles in Poland had dramatically outstripped supply. So Nolen found an Avis rental available in Berlin, more than 600 miles from his destination at the Ukraine border where he planned to help transport those fleeing the invasion to safety.
“Avis wouldn’t let any of their vans go across the border,” he explained.
Nolen would eventually pay out of pocket for his own van. Gradually, he worked his way eastward, deep into Ukraine and closer to Russia, with each trip. Early on during the siege it was all about providing people with food.
Now?
“Right at the moment the need for food is much less. It’s more about hygiene – soap, shampoo, disinfectant, toilet paper,” he said. “A lot of the villages we visit nowadays in the front are inhabited by elderly people. They desperately need things like adult diapers. It’s not a pleasant topic, but they’re desperate.
“And I have heard from experienced people that the need for food will increase in the fall.”
The villages dotting the countryside outside of Kharkiv, a city of roughly 3.5 million, are now mostly inhabited by the elderly. According to Nolen, younger people and families with children have largely abandoned their hometowns. With his knowledge from having successfully run his own business, Nolen is good at finding wholesale deals for goods in Kharkiv. Through the generosity of NH4Ukraine donors, Nolen is able to buy essentials for Ukrainians in need and make personal deliveries with his van.
“Most people we meet out there have never met an American before,” he said. “Theoretically, I could pay someone a few bucks to run deliveries, but it’s huge for these people when they meet an American. They’re thrilled.
“I always tell them that we can only buy these products because of the generosity of those from where I live in New Hampshire.”
Nolen said the threat of bombardment in cities like Kharkiv is low and added that areas with combat are extremely localized.
“People just carry on,” he said. “When the sirens go off, they don’t interrupt their basketball game or soccer game, they just keep going on.”
Asked if he ever fears for his safety, Nolen modestly brushed the question aside.
“Statistically, the odds in Kharkiv are low,” he said. “But I have had instances where pretty large missiles hit close to me. It wakes you up.”
He acknowledged criticisms from Americans regarding the high cost of tax dollars flowing into the region in the form of foreign aid and said President Joe Biden’s administration “could have done a lot better on messaging.”
“A lot of people have a misconception of where the money is going,” Nolen said. “Some people think we’re sending pallets of cash, but that’s not the way it is.
“The vast majority – 70 or 80 percent – is spent in the U.S. to refurbish and modernize our own weapons system. We’re not sending Ukraine our best weapons. We’re sending them 30-year-old missiles.”
Data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office supports Nolen’s assessment.
Asked what some of the biggest reasons why Granite Staters and Americans should support Ukraine’s ongoing defense against Russia’s efforts to take over the region, Nolen cited the country’s geographical importance.
Ukraine, he pointed out, is situated between Russia and Poland. To the north lie several key countries, including Belarus and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
“(Russian President Vladimir) Putin has made no secret of his desire to go back to the good old days of the Soviet Union and he has his eyes specifically set on the Baltic,” Nolen said. “These countries have very small populations and very small militaries, but they are part of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
“If Ukraine falls and Russia decides to invade, then that means the U.S. is obligated to get into a hot war and then we start losing soldiers of our own. So far, we haven’t lost a single member of our military. But that will change if Russia captures Ukraine.”
Currently, Russia occupies roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. Its military actions have prompted the largest refugee crisis in the region since World War II, as more than 8.2 million out of a Ukrainian population of 41 million have fled the country. Nolen fears occupied areas such as Crimea and Donbas, seized by Russia in 2014, will never again be part of Ukraine as Russia’s government has spent the last decade engaging in a propaganda campaign.
Yet according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Ukrainian forces are pushing back — and then some. The country’s recent successful incursions into the Russian cities of Kursk and Belgorod have been an embarrassment for Putin, the organization notes, as Ukraine is starting to turn-the-tables on its foe.
Yet for Nolen, the mission remains humanitarian. Granite Staters who are looking to help fund deliveries of household goods to affected Ukrainians can donate by visiting https://www.nh4ukraine.org/donate. There are also detailed instructions available on the website for those who wish to donate by check.
Meanwhile, everything Nolen does individually — from purchasing his own van, to traveling in-and-out of Ukraine, to paying for an apartment — comes out of his own pocket.
“It’s in our national interest to help Ukraine, and not just morally, this is an underdog country,” Nobel said. “What Russia has done is simply brutal.”
