For twelve years – since 2014 – Russia has been destroying more than Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. It has also been destroying rivers, soils, aquifers, ecosystems: damage that will outlast the war and shape life in the affected regions for decades.

In Sloviansk, in the Donetsk region, a laboratory of the Siverskyi Donets Basin Water Resources Authority has spent years documenting exactly that. Thousands of water samples a month, tested for heavy metals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and the chemical traces of shelling. Their data is what allows communities to know whether water is safe to drink, what allows authorities to identify environmental damage in time to act, and what will eventually allow Ukraine to hold Russia accountable for what it has done to the land itself.

Earlier this year, the team had to leave. The front line had come too close; the attacks on critical infrastructure had become constant. The laboratory relocated to Poltava and tried to keep working – which, when Russia is systematically attacking Ukraine’s energy grid and the lights go out for hours at a time, is its own quiet form of resistance.

Last winter we asked our Austausch community to help our friends at the lab. The original goal was a generator to keep the equipment running through the outages. We raised about €2,750 EUR, which wouldn’t cover a generator, so we changed our approach: instead of one large fixed unit, we bought three EcoFlow power stations. Portable, modular, well suited to a team that is no longer in one place. We ordered them ourselves and sent them to Poltava, where they also helped power the evacuation of people and equipment.

The laboratory now has reliable backup power: enough to keep equipment running through outages, to detect dangerous changes in real time, and to keep producing environmental data exactly when it is hardest to produce.

“Reliable alternative power sources are essential for our uninterrupted operation of laboratory equipment and office technology. Portable power stations make it possible to continuously measure pollutants and specific indicators even during outages. The EcoFlow stations allow timely water sampling and on-site measurements using modern equipment, both in the mobile laboratory and in the Eastern Region Water Monitoring Laboratory. The laboratory carries out surface water quality monitoring in eastern Ukraine within the national monitoring programme and conducts rapid-response studies during emergencies, including the impact of military action.” – Anna Baranova, leading chemist for spectrometry and specific research, Eastern Region Water Monitoring Laboratory.

This kind of work is less visible. Few people film water samples being tested for heavy metals. But it is what makes recovery possible, and what keeps the documentation of war damage in the hands of the people who will need it most.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. Every euro is now in Poltava, powering equipment that powers what comes next.