Mark Hamill's Voice Guides Ukrainians to Shelter Through Air-Raid App

When air raid sirens begin to wail across Ukraine, a phone app of the same name as the alert, Air Alert, speaks up too. In its English-language setting, the voice is a grave, steadying baritone that says, "Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter." It belongs to Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. He now delivers the warnings whenever Russian missiles, bombs or explosive drones may be on their way.

The app is linked to Ukraine's air defense system. Hamill recorded the English version, and he brought some of his Star Wars manner with him. One line of advice reads, "Don't be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness." When the danger passes, he announces that the air alert is over and signs off with "May the Force be with you."

Hamill, speaking to The Associated Press from California, said he has watched Ukraine from afar and admired how it has shown such resilience under terrible circumstances. The invasion is now in its second year, and he sees an echo of the Star Wars story in it: scrappy rebels standing against a vast and murderous empire. A fairy tale of good against evil, he said, resonates with what is happening there. Lending his voice was his way of helping.

He is also raising money to buy reconnaissance drones for Ukrainian forces on the front lines. He has autographed Star Wars-themed posters that are being raffled to fund the purchase. "Here I sit in the comfort of my own home when in Ukraine there are power outages and food shortages and people are really suffering," he said. "It motivates me to do as much as I can."

The app also has a Ukrainian-language setting, voiced by a woman, but some users choose Hamill. On the worst days, sirens and the app go off every few hours, day and night. Some alarms prove false, but many are real and often deadly. Bohdan Zvonyk, 24, lives in Lviv, a western city that has been struck repeatedly. He picked the English version to practice the language, and he is a Star Wars fan. "We could use a little bit of the power that Hamill wishes us," he said. After one alert, he was on a trolley bus when Hamill's voice came out of his phone. The man in front of him turned, smiling, and said, "Oh, those damn Sith," using the name of the saga's villains for Russian forces.

Olena Yeremina, a 38-year-old business manager in Kyiv, said the sign-off first made her laugh. Now she draws strength from it. She does not claim to feel like a Ukrainian Jedi, she said, but the phrase sometimes reminds her to straighten her shoulders and keep working. She also learned a lesson about leaving the app on. During a trip to Berlin she forgot to turn it off, and it shrieked at 6 a.m. and again when she rode the subway. Another passenger in the car had the app too, and theirs went off as well. They both cursed at first, she recalled, but then it made both of them smile.

Ajax Systems, a Ukrainian security systems maker that co-developed the app, hopes Hamill's fame will draw downloads from outside Ukraine, so that people elsewhere get a taste of the strain the alarms put on Ukrainians. Valentine Hrytsenko, Ajax's chief marketing officer, said Hamill's approach makes the experience less terrifying, but people will still understand the context somehow. In the invasion's first year, he said, air-raid alarms sounded more than 19,000 times nationwide, so people are understandably tired. The app has been downloaded more than 14 million times. Hrytsenko himself uses the English setting. Finding humor in bad situations, he said, is something of a Ukrainian mentality.

Hamill said he is glad the saga can still carry people off to its galaxy far, far away, even briefly. "Everyone flashes back to being 6 years old again," he said. "And if the movie can help people get through hard times, so much the better." The raffle for the drone fund and Ajax's push for international downloads are the next things to watch.