The wartime musings of Mr. Vyshebaba, who has written poetry since childhood, have proved popular. He has collected enough money so far for his brigade to buy drones, radios, Starlink communications devices and anti-drone weapons, among other supplies, he said.
“When large batches of drones, Starlinks, pickups began to arrive — the guys from those units were coming to thank me or the commanders wrote to me,” he said of earlier funding drives.
Now, though, in the back of the pickup truck of a supply sergeant, who withheld his name for security reasons, were the usual military armaments: an antitank guided missile launcher, rocket launchers and ammunition boxes.
But the weapons no longer worked and the boxes were empty. This once-lethal matériel, the sergeant explained, had a different purpose, headed not to the front lines but to the Salvador Dalí Academy of Contemporary Arts in downtown Kyiv. There, it would be decorated and auctioned off to raise money for his embattled brigade. He said he hoped that a celebrity like Bon Jovi would buy the missile launcher for an exorbitant fee.
“Most people are just tired of this war already,” said Ruslan Zubariev, a soldier from the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, who became a one-man fund-raiser after he used a helmet camera to film himself stopping a Russian advance nearly alone. “Civilians don’t realize that if they’re tired and stop donating, it doesn’t mean the war is over.”
Mr. Zubariev, 21, was in a unique position in February after his video, which showed him killing several Russian soldiers and stopping an armored vehicle with a rocket launcher near the Russian-held town of Svatove, went viral. His unit, up to that point, had relied mostly on outside volunteers bringing in equipment. After uploading his video he gained thousands of Telegram and Instagram followers practically overnight.
