The majority of our team members have extensive personal experience with the challenges of practicing medicine with very limited resources.  Not surprisingly, Alaska2Ukraine is especially committed to working with our Ukrainian partners in delivering optimal medical care to soldiers and civilians during wartime.

We’ve already delivered eight ambulances and field evacuation vehicles to our Ukrainian partners, and we continue to work with these partners to repair, replace, and upgrade those eval platforms.  For purely organizational purposes, we fund those vehicle deliveries and repairs through our “operational support” programs.  Our “medical support” programs fund everything else with medical applicability.

For example, the farthest-forward surgical teams in the 36th Marine Brigade met with us in 2024 to request “something better” to replace the flimsy NATO “field hospital beds” provided by Ukraine’s international donors.  In place of the “beds”, surgeons had to use robust but problematic wooden kitchen tables when doing damage-control surgery in the field.  They needed dedicated OR tables made of more medically-appropriate materials, with the ability to support the patient’s arms during surgery, and able to be rapidly taken down, transported in the rear of a small SUV, and set back up when the surgical team had to relocate away from russian drones and artillery.   Our field teams and volunteers worked with the surgeons to design, prototype, manufacture, and deliver rugged portable aluminum field operating tables, locally made by Ukrainian machinists.  The Ukrainian-made tables were so successful that we have been met with multiple requests for more tables from other medical units, but our financial resources haven’t allowed us to meet any of those requests.  These are the types of things we can do with your donations for medical support.

The Ukrainian communities who have financially supported these field medical teams have done extraordinary work.  For example, A2U works with a team of Ukrainian dentists who fully crowdfunded $12,000 USD to build a mobile dental clinic.  The wheeled dentists are now providing dental and in some cases emergency surgical care to soldiers and civilians all along the frontline in a key sector of southern Ukraine.  They have recruited another team of dentists who want to replicate their success by building a second mobile dental clinic, but they are struggling unsuccessfully to raise the vast majority of the needed funds.

Similarly, our field teams have met with combat medics to identify and address critical shortages of medications, field first-aid kits, hand-held ultrasounds, and other items that are outside the military medical supply system despite offering lifesaving capabilities at or adjacent to the front lines.  We can often meet the individual needs of one or two medics, surgeons, or medical instructors, but we haven’t been able to meet further requests because we and our Ukrainian partners have spent everything we have personally, and the Ukrainian communities where we typically conduct fundraisers are financially exhausted after three and a half years of continuous needs and ever-dwindling donations.