Ukraine's postal workers risk fire to deliver pensions and medicine to frontline villages

Every morning, Igor Smelyansky stands before a map of Ukraine and makes a calculation that no postal administrator should ever have to make. He weighs the operational necessity of delivering pensions and medicine against the likelihood that the van he sends out will be targeted by a Russian drone. Smelyansky runs Ukrposhta, Ukraine's state postal service, and in the second year of full-scale war, his job has become a daily negotiation between survival and service.

Ukrposhta is not merely a mail carrier. It delivers hard cash pensions to millions of poor and elderly Ukrainians scattered across remote villages where banks are distant and shops are sparse. It collects utility payments. It brings food and medicine to people for whom a trip to the city is expensive and now, dangerous. In a vast rural nation consumed by conflict, the postal service has become part of the infrastructure that keeps people alive in their homes. Russia has noticed. In recent months, the Kremlin has intensified strikes not just on postal workers but on sorting offices and logistics hubs. Moscow claims these attacks are retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian e-commerce platforms, though Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians. Since 2022, more than fifty Ukrposhta staff have been killed. Hundreds of branches and vehicles have been destroyed.

Smelyansky faces an impossible choice each day. If he sends a van to a village, a crowd may gather around it—a crowd becomes a target for a drone operator. If he calls ahead to warn people, information might leak to Russian sympathizers who can relay the truck's location. If he decides not to send a van, he receives messages from villagers accusing him of betrayal. If he does send it, he risks the life of the driver. "If we don't go, we don't have basic supply," he said from his Soviet-era office overlooking Kyiv's Maidan square. "We don't have food. We don't have medicine. People will struggle. If we do go, they may delay a decision to evacuate from the areas they probably should have evacuated." He described his approach as agility—if conditions are too dangerous on a given day, the service waits, or goes elsewhere. But waiting is a luxury many cannot afford.

Kateryna Marynych is thirty-eight years old and runs a mobile post office near Zaporizhzhia, in the south. She lost her home and her husband during the invasion. She came to this region to rebuild. For two years she operated a post office in the village of Lukasheve until March, when a Russian drone destroyed it while targeting soldiers nearby. Now she travels in a van with her partner Slava, who drives and handles parcels while she distributes cash from the passenger seat, window open. Both wear body armor when near the front. The van carries an antenna that tracks the small first-person-view drones that have made the front line so lethal. They have seen drones but have not yet been hit.

When Marynych arrives at a village, elderly people emerge. Nadiia, one regular customer, said the service was a mercy: the journey to Zaporizhzhia was long, and now attacks surrounded the region. Oleksandrivna, seventy-seven, arrived in a purple dressing gown, walking with a crutch. She had just left the hospital after a stroke. "Where could I go for my medicine?" she asked when told about the postal service. For Mykola, sixty-four, the post office offered something less tangible but equally vital—one of the few moments of human connection in a month. "It's one of the few joys of the month," he said. "You come out, have a chat with people, collect your pension, and go home."

Marynych speaks of her customers as family. "They love me, they need me," she said. "They are waiting for me. Sometimes they call me, especially after attacks on Zaporizhzhia and ask me how I am. We are like a big family. My attitude towards them is like a grandmother or grandfather." She accepted that her work was dangerous but said she would never abandon it. "It is my work," she said. "If I can't, who will do my job?" For many people in remote communities, she is their last link to the Ukrainian state—the person who brings cash, delivers medicine, and reminds them that someone, somewhere, still remembers they exist.

Smelyansky believes Russia targets Ukrposhta deliberately, not as an accident of war but as a strategy. By attacking the postal service, Russia applies pressure to a population already dependent on its arrival. As the invasion has stagnated on the eastern battlefield, analysts note that Russia has escalated attacks on civilian infrastructure—energy facilities, transport networks, border posts—searching for new ways to pressure Kyiv. Ukraine's defense, Smelyansky suggested, does not always come from the barrel of a gun. Sometimes it comes from a woman in a van, handing out pensions to people who have nowhere else to go.