It is late at night in a park in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, not far from where the latest Russian offensive is taking place. Chef Oleg Bibikov is sitting at a picnic table where his team has laid out an impromptu dinner for us. Over tinfoil boxes of kebabs and cucumber salad, he is working out the next day’s logistics for his charity food truck, which provides more than a thousand hot meals a day for people displaced by the fighting or otherwise in need. His phone rings incessantly while the sky lights up with incoming drones, red tracer bullets fired from air-defence systems and the thuds of explosions in the distance. “Your night’s entertainment,” he says. But this is not new. I travelled via Mykolaiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Kharkiv in search of how Ukraine receives its daily bread. Keeping bellies full after more than three years of war is just as much a logistical exercise as running ammo and troops to the front line.  

At dawn the next morning, Oleg and his team are already up: preparing hundreds of kilos of chicken wings in a special spice marinade; tending to huge vats of buckwheat and fresh cabbage salad mixed with herbs, vinegar and salt. Everything is portioned into boxes with a slice or two of bread, stacked up high into huge crates, ready to serve to the steadily forming queue. A truck turns up from one of Sumy’s front-line villages, which are pounded daily by Russian artillery and FPV drones. It leaves with a crate or two of meals for the residents determined to remain in their homes. It is exhausting, dangerous work – but Oleg says that he could not have simply stayed at home, running his restaurants: he is here to help and here to stay. 

Hundreds of miles to the south, in Mykolaiv, volunteers at a community hub called DOF are learning how to make sourdough aboard a 50-year-old Swiss Army mobile bakery provided by the not-for-profit Bake for Ukraine. They are baking loaves of traditional Ukrainian palyanytsya bread and Darnitsky rye, which are soft and plush, and will stay fresh and nutritious for days. 

Every other day, they load up vans and head into the regions of Mykolaiv and Kherson where de-occupied villages have been half-destroyed by Russian forces. Volodymyr Alekseev, who runs the centre, says that they choose the places that are hardest to reach, where few other volunteers go, bumping down jagged roads and across pontoon bridges, through countryside littered with mines. The women who take charge in these shattered villages are always happy to receive fresh bread. It is the centre of their table – a precious resource and a taste of normality.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, another vehicle is bringing food to those in need – but on a much bigger scale. With funding from The Howard G Buffett Foundation, Ukrainian Railways has created the world’s first “food train”, complete with a generator, hot and cold kitchens, water filtration and accommodation for staff who spend two-week rotations on board, preparing thousands of meals a day. 

All morning, vans line up alongside the train, loading up boxes of hot food to deliver to hospitals and charity hubs, as well as elderly people and families who have fled their homes and are starting again with nothing. Recently (they tell me), it travelled to Mykolaiv and Kherson, bringing Easter bread and other treats for local children. With Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure under repeated Russian assault, it has been vital to find new and creative ways to keep food and water supplies going through bombing and blackouts. 

And so it goes: a food truck feeds hundreds from a city-centre park; an old mobile bakery has been given a new lease of life; and an entire train has been turned into a self-contained kitchen. After more than three years of war, everyone is exhausted; there is loss and heartbreak everywhere you look. But life and community still thrive, not least in Ukraine’s new kitchens.  

Spector is a senior producer at Channel 4, currently travelling through Ukraine after the release of her book, ‘Bread & War: A Ukrainian Story of Food, Bravery and Hope’.