Sitting in an apartment north of Toronto, Adam Oak calmly explains how he’s had to adjust his mind’s response to the sound of sudden loud noises since returning from the front lines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“When you’re at home, a car door slams or some loud noise, it’s a split-second reaction, but immediately you think, ‘What is that?’ Because if I was in Ukraine and I heard something like that, I would assume that is an explosion,” admits the 34-year-old man.
CTV National News first spoke with Oak in August after he left his life in Toronto to volunteer with an NGO in Ukraine. At the time, Oak shared that he “couldn’t sit on the couch knowing there was something I could do to make a difference.”
A devoted, lifelong fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he decided to liquidate his vast collection of Leafs memorabilia in an attempt to raise money so he could travel to the war zone. His plan was to join the foreign legion, but when he arrived in Poland, he was assigned as a volunteer with a Norwegian crisis response organization called Paracrew. For the past five months, he has been risking his life driving food and aid to an area where most organizations no longer go – the hot zones, near the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Oak notes that as the war turns one year old and continues to escalate, smaller NGOs have pulled their teams out of Ukraine “because a lot of people are unwilling or unable to go to the places that need help.” This has forced organizations like his to travel dangerous routes to deliver supplies to the worst-hit areas, leading to numerous close calls.
One such close call happened recently when he was in the city of Dnipro. Oak was fast asleep in a hotel room when he was suddenly thrown from his bed as “a large missile hit the city just blocks away” from his hotel. Dnipro is the same city where a Russian missile struck a residential building on January 14, killing dozens of civilians.
“I saw the lightning outside my window,” says Oak, who also admits there have been times over the past nine months when he’s wondered if he’d wake up to a ceiling collapsing on him in an attack.
During one mission, north of the hostile city of Kupiansk, the four-wheeled ambulance he was in got stuck in the mud. Under artillery fire nearby, a Ukrainian tank used a downed power line to pull him and his vehicle out of the mud.
Oak smiles as he reflects on the unique experience, while acknowledging how dangerous the situation was.
“The whole time you’re there, you’re a sitting duck, and obviously now you’re pulled from a tank, which is an even bigger target,” says the Canadian aid worker.
A contractor by trade when CTV National News first spoke with Oak, he was also helping damaged Ukrainian homes in need of repair. This is no longer the case.
“The further east or south you go towards the front lines, you really see the war grow over time,” he says.
Oak goes on to detail the destruction he witnessed.
“Almost nothing exists, most small villages, all the bigger cities are gone. They are almost wiped off the face of the earth.
The Russian military’s attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has resulted in constant blackouts, meaning limited power and sometimes no heat.
“Almost every morning at some point we woke up freezing with no heat,” says Oak.
He and Paracrew volunteers built a fireplace out of two buckets. They gathered around it to make a pot of coffee and find respite from the Ukrainian winter.
A makeshift fireplace made by Adam Oak and other Paracrew volunteers. (Delivered)
Oak himself no longer has a home to call his own. He currently lives in his nephew’s apartment in the Toronto area. Near the dining room table, his life before the war is lined up against the wall, packed in half a dozen boxes. He admits that not having his own home weighs on him, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make to help those in need in Ukraine.
When we first spoke to Oak, he defended his volunteer work, saying: “There are a lot of families who are in dire need and don’t know where to turn. Put yourself in their place, imagine that your home is destroyed and you are placed in a bomb shelter with continuous bombs.
Now, he says, “Being able to meet and live among Ukrainians for almost nine months really opens your eyes to how amazing and how resilient Ukrainians can be.”
Oak also shared that “now I know people that I can call good friends from Ukraine, I would really like to go back there and help their country as much as possible.”
And that’s where his focus remains today. Asked if he feared he might not be able to make it home after a second trip to Ukraine if he returned to the front line, Oak admitted that “it’s possible” but that it was “a reasonable risk worth taking undertake”.
He goes on to ask, “If people like me aren’t willing to go out there and help, then who is going to go and help these people in need?”
Oak plans to return to Ukraine on March 13. The length of his stay will depend on public and private donations, which he says have cooled as the winter and war drag on.
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