The Crowdsourcing Effort to Get Body Armor, Drones and Helmets to Ukraine

“Our guys are working, burning enemy vehicles,” said Mr. Prytula in the March 8

Facebook

post. “If you have an off-road pickup truck, please give it to us or let us buy it off you.”

Mr. Prytula said his initiative, dubbed “Hell Rides,” has since provided more than 50 vehicles to Ukraine’s military.

The 40-year-old comedian and TV host is a leading figure in the grass-roots effort to equip Ukraine’s armed forces to fight Russia.

The U.S. and its allies are providing Ukraine with weapons such as missiles to target tanks and aircraft. The likes of Mr. Prytula, who says his organization has raised the equivalent of around $8.5 million in the month since the conflict started, are trying to quickly fill gaps in nonlethal equipment, from body armor to drones with thermal imaging.

The effort has helped Ukraine halt the advance of Russia’s better-equipped invading force in many parts of the country. In Ukraine’s war of skirmishes and ambushes, where small, nimble teams are inflicting costly damage on Russian troops, basic gear can make a big difference.

The Ukrainian resistance, ranging from the thousands of volunteers who joined the military to those staffing the ad hoc supply network, suggests the defensive effort is durable.

Mr. Prytula started his fund in 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula and invaded eastern Ukraine. He trucked body armor, drones and other equipment to the front lines, posting videos on social media and winning the trust of soldiers and donors.

With an online following of more than one million, donations poured in when the war started last month. On the second day of the war, Mr. Prytula posted a photo of 100 drones bought for the equivalent of $250,000.

From a new headquarters in central Kyiv, Mr. Prytula has put out a call for supplies from medications to tourniquets and winter boots.

At first, they were buying whatever they could as fast as possible. “We need radios,” he posted on Feb. 27. “At any price!”

Mr. Prytula’s connections with the military soon helped him focus his efforts. Artillery units need drones with thermal imaging so they can target enemy supply trucks at night. He has sent dozens of pickup trucks to mobile groups that ambush enemy vehicles. Special-forces snipers have received thermal-imaging scopes.

Mr. Prytula has received funds from more than 30 foreign countries, including the U.S. and Europe, but also China and Africa. He recently added a

PayPal

account. Orders are often delivered to towns in Poland on the border with Ukraine, where they are trucked to a logistics center in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. On Saturday, Russian strikes targeted the city.

Other grass-roots efforts have emerged.

Daniel Bilak, a Canadian-Ukrainian lawyer, has helped raise funds to buy body armor and helmets for hundreds of civilian soldiers serving in the territorial defense force where he lives on the outskirts of Kyiv. The force, which he also serves in, received weapons from the government, but lacked protective equipment.

Bureaucratic hurdles often slow down efforts, he said, as some foreign governments require export licenses for military-grade helmets and body armor. Some governments have been prepared to speed up paperwork for supplies for Ukraine, he said. Mr. Bilak is working with a U.S.-Ukrainian nongovernmental organization to source quality fabric and armored steel for plates to manufacture body armor within Ukraine.

Artem Popyk, a Ukrainian resident of Warsaw, started receiving food, medical supplies and military gear from friends across Europe early in the war. Five vans arrived from Prague. Bulletproof vests soon piled up on the floor in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend. They filled friends’ garages with boxes.

Mr. Popyk, 31 years old, on Facebook found Viktor Baginskyi, a fellow Ukrainian who coordinates shipments of goods to Ukraine. Mr. Baginskyi, who works at a bakery in Warsaw, estimates he has shipped 15 tons of supplies into Ukraine, from night-vision goggles to antibiotics to boots.

Three or four times a week, Mr. Popyk uses his old Mercedes sedan to transport boxes of goods to a train yard in the Polish capital. One recent evening, Mr. Baginskyi and roughly a dozen others loaded boxes labeled in a mix of English, Polish and Ukrainian from two vans onto a train. Mr. Baginskyi said he doesn’t always know exactly what’s in the boxes, some tagged “syringes,” others “military.”

“Every day, I get a lot of calls from people I don’t know offering goods,” he said.

Lida Koval, a Ukrainian Railways staff member, has become a vital cog in the informal system moving supplies into Ukraine.

On one of the first days of the war, she called Mr. Baginskyi and asked him to pack “two or three boxes” to send to Ukraine. Since then, Ms. Koval, 36, has spent all but four days of the war aboard a passenger train packed with materiel for the war effort—some boxes destined for Kyiv, others for Lviv—that has shuttled constantly between Ukraine and Poland.

The trip takes a full day in each direction. On the way out of Ukraine, the train is filled to double its capacity, packed with women and children, Ms. Koval said. She keeps snacks for the children, who sometimes ask her for food. Once, she slept in the outdoor smoking area between train cars, so that six children could stay in the cabin that is usually hers.

Normally, her job involves collecting tickets and giving passengers food or coffee. Now, she doesn’t always collect payment for tickets anymore.

At the end of the line, she has an hour to rest. She showers using a bucket in the bathroom at the end of the train car. Then she heads back to Ukraine, her carriage full of medical and military supplies. “The only difference is we’re going with people one way and we’re going with the help the other way,” she said. “We’re helping people in both directions.”

A colleague on the train had bought a flat in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine that has been surrounded by Russian troops and heavily damaged. She now lives on the train full-time.

“She has no place to go outside of the train,” Ms. Koval said. “She can’t go home.”

Once, in Chernihiv, the train was waiting for a group of 12 people to arrive. They never made it—their bus was hit on the way.

In the train car’s corridor, a sign in Ukrainian advises what people are allowed to take through a Green Corridor, the safe passage routes for civilians out of certain areas of Ukraine.

Ms. Koval entered Kyiv while fighting was going on in the city. She has put a piece of metal covering the window where she sleeps, to protect against bullets. But she said, “Why should I be scared? We are doing a good thing…I’ll keep going as long as necessary.”

“I help people,” she said. “Every person has to do what he or she has to do.”

Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com and Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com