Founded by Yaro Hnatusko, a Ukrainian living in the U.S., and his brother, an executive with a Kharkiv-based corporation, Restore Ukraine needs $1,000-$2,000 to rebuild one house for the victims of the war.

Tennessee—For Americans, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is painful to watch from afar. For Yaroslav (Yaro) Hnatusko, a young Ukrainian living in Johnston City, Tenn., it’s much worse than that. It’s a matter of life and death for the people—and the country—he loves, including his own family members and closest friends.

Unlike many Americans, though, Yaro is in a position to make a very real difference as the founder of Restore Ukraine, a new dual-country nonprofit providing shelter and aid to the victims of the war. He and his brother, Stan, the Deputy Director of Atlant, Ukraine’s largest wholesale distributor building materials, have founded Restore Ukraine to feed and protect Ukrainian civilians in Kharkiv as Vladimir Putin’s bloody war rages on. Yaro has set a goal to raise $1 million in the U.S., letting Americans play their own role by donating to an organization that has boots on the ground in Ukraine every day—hundreds of locals who are working to help each other in their ravaged but defiant country.

It’s an extraordinary nonprofit for extraordinary times. Restore Ukraine launched in Kharkiv when Atlant, under Stan’s leadership, converted its warehouses into shelters and food banks for the city’s homeless and displaced civilians shortly after the invasion began. In the U.S., Restore Ukraine, led by Yaro, is a fiscally sponsored project of Humanitarian Social Innovations, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with federal tax-exempt status headquartered in Bethlehem, Penn.

That means Americans who donate to Restore Ukraine can receive the same tax benefit that comes with supporting any U.S.-based charity. Importantly, it also means that Restore Ukraine can keep its administrative expenses low and applies 90% of donated funds directly to crisis relief in Ukraine. And as a Kharkiv-based nonprofit, Restore Ukraine has the flexibility to act quickly to tackle residents’ immediate needs without depending on larger outside nonprofits with higher administrative costs.

Not long before the invasion began, Yaro, a Graduate Assistant and MBA student at East Tennessee State University, had been visiting family and friends in Kharkiv. Everything was peaceful at the time. “Now it’s a war zone in my back yard,” he said.

Yaro had peacefully returned to the U.S. right before Putin’s troops began attacking military and civilian targets in Ukraine. “My first call was to my family to say, ‘Hey, are you alright, are you OK?’ It’s chaos. Where do they go? What do they do? How long can they stay?” he told WJHL in Johnson City, Tenn. “The family sent me videos of missiles flying over my house and hitting some military target. So the house was shaking. The ground was shaking.”

Since then, reports of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians have multiplied, from the bombing of schools and hospitals to mass executions, abductions and forced deportations, and gang rapes of women and young girls. Yaro is rallying American support for the countless Ukrainian families—including mothers with newborn babies, people with disabilities, medical professionals and others—who either have no money to evacuate or are determined to stay and help.

While Atlant has set commercial concerns aside and deployed its facilities and employees to save lives, Yaro works around the clock from Tennessee, raising funds to keep Restore Ukraine’s main shelter operating and to rebuild the damaged homes so that Ukrainian families can find a refuge.

At $4.00 for three nutritious meals, it currently costs $2,000 to feed 500 people a day in Restore Ukraine’s shelter. Restore Ukraine has also set up a distribution center for food and vital materials to help other shelters, meaning the nonprofit is serving thousands more people. Yaro said the volunteers focus on scrounging up the basic necessities to keep the shelter’s residents alive and healthy: meat, wheat, grains, rice, pasta, flour, vegetables, canned food, water, and medicines. Restore Ukraine’s website lists the minimum financial needs for Ukrainian families. Click here to learn how your donation will be used to help Ukrainians in need. 

Altogether, with Restore Ukraine’s vision is to restore tens of cities and hundreds of communities for the displaced Ukrainian families, the organization needs at least $2,000 to rebuild one house, Yaro said. To raise awareness and meet his goal to raise $1 million, Yaro has been giving interviews to American journalists in an ongoing media outreach campaign and has created an Instagram page to illustrate how the raised money reflect on his crisis relief effort to secure the prosperity of Ukrainian families.

He has also been using the Restore Ukraine’s webpage to share the stories of the shelter and its construction projects. In one article, Hnatusko described the work going on at the headquarters. “Now, we are expanding to rebuilding homes, neighborhoods, and city infrastructure. With the two new restoration programs, Restore Ukraine will offer temporary and permanent living accommodations for small and large families. The two programs are constructing a refugee center for returning families, and restoration of family homes that came under direct fire from bombshells.”

“Our work doesn’t stop here,” he added. “We are also taking care of having enough food for the people outside of our shelter who can’t come—policemen, firefighters, doctors and soldiers.”

Yaro noted, “We do it for people because our families are what we have left. We will never have another family.” To learn more and donate to Restore Ukraine, visit their website at https://restore-ukraine.org. To arrange an interview with Yaro Hnatusko, contact him by phone at 612-438-8113 or email him at hnatuskoyaroslav@gmail.com.

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