
When President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ivan Chenin left his comfortable life as a student in Moscow to deliver aid as a volunteer to the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics of eastern Ukraine, which Russia now claims as its “new territories”.
After returning from a trip to the occupied areas of Ukraine last year, Chenin jumped further into the fray, enlisting in the Thunder Cascade volunteer unit.