Добрий день усім!
We are currently working the frontline in our PPO (Air Defence) role in the ZSU. Our job is to find, intercept, and destroy Molniya, Shaheed, Recon, and FPV drones that the Russians are using to terrorise and attack Ukrianan service members, infrastructure, and civilians.
A big part of any team is its vehicles. At the moment we are limited on a vehicle capacity to two privately owned cars. One I own myself, a 1986 Lada Niva, and one by another member of the team, a 2007 Skoda Octavia. Both of these vehicles are used on a daily basis for work and recreation. There is a constant need to drive to training, to collect mission equipment, for shopping for food, and the essential travel out to our mission area.
The Skoda came originally from Finland with some problems. The biggest being that the suspension was completely worn out, and it has remained that way since it arrived here due to lack of funds to repair it. In cities and towns, this is not a problem, but the further east we drive, the roads become impassable for such a car with this type of wear.
The Niva has therefore become our transport out to mission areas as it can handle the road conditions. However on the last journey to our position I was forced to hit a pothole (1m wide and maybe 15-20cm deep) that caused damage to the front right wheel bearing. The car is not inoperable, but the damage will soon compound and it will be.
The team is therefore looking to raise some money to fix both vehicles.
Pay in the army is not the best, especially for a foreign team that had to wait many months before they could work. We also need to buy a lot of mission essential equipment. Monitors, laptops, cables, power banks, tablet, food, accommodation off the frontline, as well as any fuel we use, even for missions.
Thefore we are looking for some funds to help repair our vehicles. All donations from today onwards will go towards a vehicle fund that will be used to repair, refuel, and refit our vehicles. We suspect the repairs to be between 1200-1600 euros.
In future the unit has told us they will supply us with a pick-up style truck for work, but that could be many months away. Any remaining money will continue to go towards the maintenance of that vehicles later on as the unit will expect us to maintain it ourselves.