Minnesotan Mark Lindquist had plans to enter District 7 Congressional race before ultimately deciding to head to Ukraine and join in the fight against Russia.
Lindquist is an Air Force veteran and told his story to WCCO’s Paul and Jordana in March.
Lindquist, who has been in Ukraine over two weeks, joined Jordana Green again Thursday with an update on what he’s seen so far in that war-torn country. Lindquist says so far it’s been mostly logistical.
“To summarize it, the right things are not in the right hands of the right people at the right time,” Lindquist says. “So you send vans out to the eastern part of the country that are filled with supplies and you bring them back with people. So vans in, people out.”
The eastern part of Ukraine has seen the most fighting with the Russians, and many refugees have fled to the western part of the country. Lindquist says the western Ukrainian city of Lviv has almost doubled its population.
“Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, probably over seven figures, have moved to the Western part of the country,” says Lindquist who is from Ortonville, MN. “Just in the example of Lviv, it’s a city of about a 750,000 people, and last I checked about 650,000 people had moved into that city alone. There are pockets of people, 300,000 at a time out east, who are stranded. And local mayors are trying to get them out on trains. And we're trying to move people to relative safety in the west of the country.”
Lindquist told WCCO in March he wasn’t sure what he was going to do in Ukraine, just that he wanted to “go get my boots on the ground and see how I can help.” Lindquist said Thursday he feels like this is mostly a fact-finding mission and he has had to learn a lot on the fly.
“It takes an entrepreneurial spirit almost to be able to come over here and not speak the language,” he tells Jordana Green. “You didn't know anybody. I've never been here before. It's a war zone. And so to be able to come and be a service is a challenge, right? And not get in the way. In the military we say its organized chaos. It's not even organized. Why? Because how can anybody, no matter how prepared you are, be ready for 3 million people to move across a border. We have been setting up local relationships, building trust, getting transports out to the places that need them. We just served a local children, well, not local, but a children's home Northeast of Kiev that needed a supply run. In non-war time, some of these places that serve these special needs, individuals are forgotten. And certainly during war time, they are as well. And so we are trying to find these specific needs of those individuals, dispatch a van as soon as possible. And a lot of times we can source the products locally here with the donations that come in from back home.”
The Ukraine-Poland border where millions of refugees have crossed seeking safety. Photo taken by Mark Lindquist.(Photo Courtesy of Mark Lindquist)
