In Nome, Alaska, a cadre of tinkerers and partisans keeps aiding Ukraine

NOME, Alaska - Along the remote western edge of Alaska, just before it hits the narrow strait dividing America from the Russian Far East, Rolland Trowbridge is holding a contraption he designed and assembled. It’s a bank of metal rectangles soldered together with some cooling fans and dangling blue wires.

“Basically a high-frequency radio,” he says, pacing the floor of a lead-lined room. “This will snow a drone out.”

The device is bound for the front lines of Ukraine. Its purpose? To protect Ukrainian forces from drone attacks and help defeat the Russians.

For decades, this town has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the country that lies just 160 miles west as the crow flies. But ever since the start of the war in Ukraine, those ties have been superseded by the anger and activism of a cadre of volunteers - tinkerers, professionals and partisans who are aiding the Ukrainian military cause in surprising ways.

As the war slogs into its fourth year, they have no intention of stopping.

Trowbridge honed his drone jammer after going to Europe in the summer so he could drive two refurbished ambulances from Britain to eastern Ukraine. He went, in part, to see how he could be useful. After a month there, he found an answer.

“Really, what I can help with is I can get stuff from China,” Trowbridge said, pointing at $53,000 worth of stacked equipment set to be turned into more jammers to shield Ukrainians.

Even by Alaska standards, Nome is remote, with no roads connecting it to the state’s population hubs hundreds of miles away. Supplies for its 3,600 residents have to be flown in or brought up by boat during months free of sea ice.

As a consequence, the people who thrive in Nome are the resourceful ones who can repurpose materials to suit their immediate needs. Trowbridge operates an auto mechanic shop run out of a rambling building that was once the town’s hospital. The room where he tests his homemade drone blockers used to be the X-ray suite, hence the lead in the walls. Otherwise, it’s where he repairs tires.

Trowbridge didn’t jump into Ukrainian relief efforts when the war broke out on Feb. 24, 2022. He was sucked in by the gravitational passion of another Nomeite, Mark Hayward, a former Army medic who moved to Nome with his wife in 2018 to work at the regional hospital.

Hayward traveled to Ukraine at the start of the war after applying to join its foreign legion. There he found “an entire country full of bush Alaskans just jury-rigging the s—- out of everything, making stuff work,” as the 56-year-old veteran recounted this month.

He spent a couple of months in Ukraine on that trip, helping train front-line troops on how to use Javelin missile launchers to hunt tanks, and troubleshooting a workaround for the platform’s finicky power system that involved rigging together 12-volt motorcycle batteries.

When Hayward returned to Alaska, he set up something of a command center for improvised relief efforts. He cajoled anyone who might be sympathetic into supporting the Ukrainian cause with money, specialty skills, labor - whatever they had to offer.

“Anytime anybody shows the slightest interest, we’re like, ‘Well, what do you do? You fix cars? Okay, well, maybe could you fix up an ambulance and send it over?’” Hayward explained while picking over a double cheeseburger at Nome’s Polar Cafe, which overlooks the frozen Bering Sea.

These days he is coordinating several military and civilian aid projects, often by enlisting fellow Nomeites.

A local dentist, for instance, is helping to figure out how to retrofit a diesel van into a mobile dental clinic to fix front-line troops’ teeth. A pancake dinner fundraiser at the local VFW hall brought in thousands of dollars for an ambulance, which Hayward bought in Poland, loaded with medical supplies and drove to Ukraine.

“What’s that?” the cafe waitress walks by and asks.

“A drone jammer,” Hayward replies, holding up one of his prototypes. He’d brought it to lunch to check with the guy who runs the local UPS operation - from a folding table in the cafe - on how best to package it to ship to Ukraine.

The device effectively creates a shield, blasting radio signals across a huge spectrum that blot out signals directing a drone to attack a target. This do-it-yourself version costs about $2,000. A similar commercial jammer would be about a fifth as powerful and several times more expensive, according to Trowbridge.

He and Hayward have also started experimenting with body armor. Trowbridge, who arrived from the Lower 48 by sailboat 16 years ago, used his sail-making sewing machine to stitch together layers of Kevlar fabric. When the pair shot it point-blank with a .44 magnum handgun, the finished material proved more protective than they’d expected. The bullet’s only trace was a black dimple in the beige Kevlar sheaf.

Supporting Ukraine has become deeply personal. Hayward says he has cashed out retirement accounts, sold off most of his personal firearms and diverted huge chunks of his paycheck. He estimates he’s spent $180,000 of his own money, with another $80,000 in donations passing through his hands, much of it raised from neighbors and kin.

The money has bought first-aid kits, vehicles, art supplies for refugees’ therapy, generators and the lesser miscellanea of an ad hoc war effort cobbled together with good will and duct tape. It represents another rupture in the bonds Nome has had with its closest foreign neighbor.

During World War II, when the United States and Soviet Union were allies, the town played a critical role in the U.S. military’s lend-lease program. About 8,000 planes were flown here so they could be turned over to Soviet pilots to take across Siberia to the eastern front.

At the time, the border between the Russian Far East and the American territory was still relatively porous. Indigenous families with members on both sides of the Bering Strait would occasionally go back and forth. Subsistence hunters harvested the same stocks of marine mammals: seals, walrus, bowhead whales.

That travel ended when the “ice curtain” came down in 1948, cutting off relatives for decades. Not until the late 1980s did the curtain begin to lift, with diplomatic and cultural exchanges like the 1988 “Friendship Flight” between Nome and Provideniya, Russia. A local airline eventually offered regular routes between the two communities.

Vera Metcalf, who is Siberian Yupik, grew up just a few dozen nautical miles from the Chukchi Peninsula on St. Lawrence Island. She traveled to Provideniya in 1991 when her son was part of a Boy Scouts troop that met with Russian Young Pioneers.

“I stayed with an elder woman … and she took good care of us,” said Metcalf, 73, director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission. “They remember some of the songs we used to sing.”

Over the past 15 years, though, relations again froze up. The last Friendship Flight was in 2013. The next year, Russia illegally annexed Crimea. Then came its full-on invasion of Ukraine.

By now, Hayward estimates, dozens of Nomeites have chipped in to help the underdog in that conflict, be it volunteering labor, proffering supplies or simply buying a plate of food at a fundraiser. From casual to committed, the aid has come from a “total cross-section of Nome,” he says: hospital staff, hunters, the guy at the NAPA auto parts shop, gold miners, postal workers and city employees.

For a few in Nome, the stakes of the conflict are not abstract. One is pastor Scott Sobie, an Ohio native who married a Ukrainian woman and moved to her village in the Zaporizhzhia region 20 years ago. The couple raised six children there while ministering to Ukrainians.

They fled several months after the war started, after Russian soldiers took over the area and detained officials including the neighboring town’s mayor. Sobie says the man’s body, showing signs of torture, was only recently returned to his relatives.

Eight months ago, the Sobies came to Nome to join a son already living here. In their new community, the 46-year-old pastor has given personal testimony about the family’s experience escaping. Yet he and his wife are focused on rebuilding their lives and giving their two youngest children a semblance of normality.

Even if a ceasefire ends fighting in eastern Ukraine, a deal that leaves peoples’ homes and land in Russian hands will feel to Sobie like a betrayal.

“Any kind of peace deal that says, ‘Okay, just freeze things where they’re at right now’ - in the Ukrainian people’s mind, this is just a pause that benefits Russia,” he said. “If they’re not defeated, they’re going to do this again.”

Hayward is of the same mind. He has watched the waning support from Congress and is “so angry I can’t see straight” about the Trump administration’s deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s terms for an end to the fighting. That’s part of why he believes the next phase of the conflict will need an even greater degree of crowdfunding, resourcefulness and volunteerism from committed individuals.

“Can people of goodwill sustain Ukraine in its fight against Russia even if the U.S. government quits and goes home? The short answer is yes,” Hayward said.

He and others in Nome speak about the situation as a looming third world war, drawing on a vocabulary forged in the second - appeasement, dictator, moral abdication. Not long ago, he and his wife were finalizing plans for retirement in New Mexico. Those are off now.

Hayward pulls out his cellphone to show a list of group chats he’s on with volunteers from around the world, each cluttered with messages about equipment the Ukrainian forces need and the logistics of getting it there. Soon there will be a new cache of supplies to send over. He’s already making plans for his next trip.

GRAPHIC

https://washingtonpost.com/documents/1f83aa29-cca6-4984-80af-49cabaf01c16.pdf