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

Boston Globe

24-02-2025

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
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those ties have been superseded by the anger and activism of a cadre of volunteers — tinkerers, professionals, and partisans who are aiding the Ukrainian military cause in surprising ways.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.
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Trowbridge honed his drone jammer after going to Europe last summer so he could drive two refurbished ambulances from
the United Kingdom 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 Nome resident
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Mark Hayward, a former Army medic who moved to Nome with his wife in 2018 to work at the regional hospital.
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Mark Hayward, who leads a small group of Nome residents trying to aid the Ukrainian cause, showsed an attack drone he brought back from his most recent visit to that country.
Photo by Zachariah Hughes/FTWP
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 [expletive] out of everything, making stuff work,' as the 56-year-old veteran recounted this month
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He spent a couple months in Ukraine on that trip, helping train front-line troops on how to use the 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 he 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? OK, well, maybe could you fix up an ambulance and send it over?'' Hayward explained while picking over a double cheeseburger at Nome's Polar Café, 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 fund-raiser 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.
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Trowbridge's 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.
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 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.
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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 cease-fire 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, 'OK, 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.'
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