He currently rents an apartment for $200 a month in the center of Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city less than 20 miles from the Russian border.
The Bedford, New Hampshire native lives in a country at war with Russia, and there is no place he would rather be.
“The more I learn about this area, the more I realize it’s a great launching pad to help the communities we want to help the most, which are the formerly inhabited communities southeast of here,” Brian Nolen told NHJournal via video conference on Monday.
Nolen is currently on his seventh humanitarian trip to the war-torn country. He has since retired from his private ceiling restoration business and, along with the rest of the world, experienced the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
A history buff, he said he felt the urge to do something. The parallels between the current invasion and Nazi Germany’s assault on Poland in 1939 were too obvious for him. Nolen would soon team up with another Bedford native, U.S. Navy veteran John Fitzgerald, to NH4Ukraineaimed at providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians trapped amid the siege.
Nolen quickly joined several Polish Facebook groups to get an overview of the situation and read first-hand accounts of the mass exodus of Ukrainians to Europe. He learned that more transits were needed and booked a flight for March 23, 2022.
Demand for vans and other vehicles in Poland dramatically outstripped supply, so Nolen looked for an Avis rental car in Berlin, more than 600 miles from his destination at the Ukrainian border, where he wanted to help bring people fleeing the invasion to safety.
“Avis did not allow any of its vans to cross the border,” he explained.
Nolen ended up paying for his delivery truck out of his own pocket. With each trip he worked his way east, deep into Ukraine and closer to Russia. At the beginning of the siege, the main concern was to supply the people with food.
Now?
“Right now, the need for food is much lower. It’s more about hygiene – soap, shampoo, disinfectant, toilet paper,” he said. “Many of the villages we’re visiting on the front lines today are inhabited by elderly people. They desperately need things like adult diapers. It’s not a pleasant topic, but they’re desperate.”
“And I have heard from experienced people that the need for food will increase in the fall.”
The villages outside Kharkiv, a city of around 3.5 million people, are now mostly inhabited by older people. According to Nolen, younger people and families with children have largely left their hometowns. With his knowledge from successfully running his own business, Nolen is good at finding wholesale outlets for goods in Kharkiv. Thanks to the generosity of NH4Ukraine Thanks to donors, Nolen is able to purchase essential items for Ukrainians in need and make personal deliveries with his van.
“Most of the people we meet there have never met an American,” he said. “Theoretically, I could pay someone a few dollars to make deliveries, but for these people, when they meet an American, it’s a big deal. They’re excited.”
“I always tell them that we are only able to purchase these products thanks to the generosity of the people in my area of New Hampshire.”
Nolen said the risk of bombings in cities like Kharkiv was low, adding that fighting was taking place only in very limited areas.
“People just keep going,” he said. “When the sirens go off, they don’t stop playing basketball or football, they just keep going.”
When asked if he ever feared for his safety, Nolen modestly brushed the question aside.
“Statistically, the probability in Kharkiv is low,” he said. “But I have experienced cases where fairly large rockets have hit near me. That wakes you up.”
He acknowledged American criticism of the high cost of taxpayer money flowing into the region in the form of development aid and said President Joe Biden’s administration “could have done a much better job of getting its messages across.”
“A lot of people have the wrong idea about where the money is going,” Nolen said. “Some people think we’re sending pallets full of cash, but that’s not the case.”
“The vast majority – 70 or 80 percent – is spent in the United States to renew and modernize our own weapons system. We are not sending Ukraine our best weapons. We are sending them 30-year-old missiles.”
Data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office supports Nolen’s assessment.
When asked what the main reasons are why Granite State citizens and Americans should support Ukraine’s continued defense against Russian efforts to take over the region, Nolen pointed to the country’s geographic importance.
He pointed out that Ukraine lies between Russia and Poland. To the north there are several important countries, including Belarus and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
“(Russian President Vladimir) Putin has made no secret of his desire to revive the good old days of the Soviet Union, and he has his eye on the Baltics in particular,” Nolen said. “These countries have very small populations and very small military power, but they are part of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
“If Ukraine falls and Russia decides to invade, it means the US will be forced to start an open war, and then we ourselves will start losing soldiers. So far we have not lost a single soldier. But that will change if Russia takes Ukraine.”
Currently, Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine. Its military actions have triggered the largest refugee crisis in the region since World War II. More than 8.2 million of Ukraine’s 41 million people have fled the country. Nolen fears that occupied territories such as Crimea and Donbass, which Russia seized in 2014, will never be part of Ukraine again, as the Russian government has been waging a propaganda campaign against them for a decade.
But according to the Foundation for the Defense of DemocraciesUkrainian forces are fighting back – and then some. The country’s recent successful incursions into the Russian cities of Kursk and Belgorod were an embarrassment for Putin, the organization notes, as Ukraine now begins to turn the tables.
For Nolen, however, the mission is still a humanitarian one. Granite Staters who wish to fund the delivery of household goods to affected Ukrainians can donate by https://www.nh4ukraine.org/donate. For those who wish to donate by check, detailed instructions are also available on the website.
Now, Nolen has to pay for everything he does privately – from buying his own van to traveling to and from Ukraine to paying for an apartment – out of his own pocket.
“It is in our national interest to help Ukraine, and not just morally, because this is a disadvantaged country,” Nobel said. “What Russia has done is simply brutal.”
