Meet the chefs braving Russian drones and gunfire to feed troops on Ukraine’s frontline

In a shuttered cafe in the city of Mykolaiv, southeastern Ukraine, two soldiers are cooking lunch of grilled chicken and fermented cabbage salad, buckwheat and slices of dark Ukrainian bread. It’s the kind of comforting meal designed to keep men sustained after hard days and stressful nights at their frontline positions. 

Dmytro and Artem were both cooks before they volunteered for the army, motivated by the traumatic impact of Russian occupation on their home town. Dmytro had worked as a chef for high-end restaurants in Kherson and Kyiv, while 19-year-old Artem had only just qualified. Now they cook together for the 79th detachment of the State Border Guards, preparing hundreds of meals a day for their unit.

They often pack food into large thermos containers which are delivered to forward positions – while food packages can even be dropped by drone, right up to the zero line.

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Keeping their field kitchen supplied with fresh produce is a huge logistical challenge, but Ukrainians are incredibly resourceful: “Here in Kherson there is a lot of shelling, and drone attacks, but sometimes I think we manage to have a better supply system than my restaurant had before the war,” Dmytro says. “Back then, I always had to hunt for someone who could deliver what we needed. But now, we can get everything we need directly to our positions.”

Military life could hardly be more different from their old jobs. “The biggest challenge, of course, is working in dangerous conditions. In Kherson it is very difficult because Russian drones can operate in any corner of the city.”

In their makeshift army kitchens, the pair do their best to prepare the best food they can. “We make main dishes, salads, always something fresh. At Christmas or New Year we collect extra money so we can make something special. And we can often get some gifts from our families, usually sweets or cookies sent by post, which really helps to raise morale.”

For millions of people in Ukraine, the full-scale war has turned their lives upside down. Many have lost their homes to Russian occupation or bombs. Hundreds of thousands have joined the armed forces, while civilian volunteers have dropped everything to help.

I travel to a village north of Kharkiv to meet one of those volunteers. Before the war, chef Oleg Bibikov ran a couple of successful restaurants and a bakery in the northeastern city of Chernihiv. Now he drives around frontline regions in a huge food truck which he has equipped with top-quality kitchen equipment, where he cooks thousands of hot meals every day for anyone who needs it.

We meet at the truck, parked outside a bomb-damaged building which had once been the local cultural centre. Oleg and his team have been up since six in the morning, preparing hundreds of portions of roast chicken in a spicy apricot sauce, rice porridge and fresh cabbage salad. They are slicing up homemade bread, and packing everything into containers, ready for the lunchtime rush.

Oleg proudly shows me a Jamie Oliver cookbook which he takes everywhere with him, translated into Ukrainian. “Jamie is my inspiration!” he says, as he lifts a huge 45kg pan of rice onto the stove. 

Outside, the temperature is well below zero, but a queue is already forming, people clutching tickets with the number of meals they have been allocated for family members, neighbours and friends. “We try to celebrate Ukraine food culture,” Oleg says. “We find old recipes which were banned during Soviet times, because it is part of our history and our culture.” 

Cooking for such large numbers, day after day, requires a Herculean feat of organisation, and relentless fundraising for his Iskra Dobra charity organisation, to pay for it all. He shows me some photos on his phone: he has cooked for children in a cancer hospital, for an orphanage, for injured soldiers. He flicks past pictures from his restaurants, of elaborate desserts and banquet tables. It all seems a million miles away from this wartime life. 

A few weeks later, Oleg messages me from a new location in the city of Sumy. There has just been a huge missile strike on the city centre, which hit blocks of flats, a children’s medical clinic and a school, injuring more than a hundred people. Oleg had been recording a video when the explosion went off. He immediately drove his food truck to the bomb site so that he could cook for the first responders and the local residents who had just lost their homes. 

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I ask how they are all managing. “Everything is fine with us, the team is all here, we are working now to prepare our meals and others are eliminating the consequences of terror,” he says.

For the cooks who’ve swapped their chef jackets for a military uniform, as well as the tireless volunteers, there is no other life, not until the Ukraine war is over. “We will work like this until our victory,” Dmytro tells me – while Oleg says that cooking for hundreds of people every day is like bringing them together around the family table.

It was the end of another long day, in a village shattered by shelling and drones, but he still hangs on to hope. “A hot meal is an opportunity to show love and care for our people, especially during such difficult times.” 

Bread and War by Felicity Spector is out now (Duckworth Books, £20).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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