Ex-Hill chief leads humanitarian effort in Ukraine

In a current-day revision of the 1980s “Charlie Wilson’s war” where a key American lawmaker embarked on a personal battle against Moscow’s war in Afghanistan, an ex-congressional aide has emerged as a humanitarian hero on the front lines of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.

Steven Moore, a political whiz kid who once helped Russian President Boris Yeltsin beat back a communist reelection challenge and served as a Republican House chief of staff, is leading a personal strike force delivering food, medical supplies, military radios, and body armor into battle-torn areas of Ukraine.

“I want to help,” Moore said in a call to Secrets from his hideout near the Ukraine-Romania border. “I think this is a defining moment in world history. If we don’t stop [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in Ukraine, it gets really ugly after this,” he said.

What started as phone advice from his mother’s home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to friends in Kyiv he met while working for a polling company in Ukraine in 2018-2019 has turned into a hands-on rescue mission that has prompted dozens of refugees to tell Moore that he saved their lives.

In the first few weeks of the war, he ran 70 refugees through his apartment, delivering all across the border to safety despite the constant bombardment by Russian forces early in the war in Kiev and along escape routes.

“Steven helped my sister to cross the border, he is my hero,” wrote Leah Zanko on social media.

Moore, 53, has since set up the Ukraine Freedom Project and started a fundraising campaign on the Fundrazr.com site to buy and deliver food and medical supplies inside the nation, sometimes just a few kilometers from the front lines.

An experienced political networker who has worked in five war zones, including Iraq, Moore said he was visiting his mother in Tulsa when the Ukraine war started. He spent two straight days on the phone organizing escapes for his friends and eventually decided to go to Ukraine.

“I just thought you know what, I can do this a lot better if I’m over there on the ground. So on day four of the war I landed in Bucharest on day five I had an apartment” inside Ukraine.

“This being my fifth war zone, you know, I kind of knew the dynamics,” he said. “A lot of this was just knowing where the safe roads were, giving people a destination to go to and making them feel comfortable that they could make it. They didn’t know where they were going. They just knew they wanted out,” he said.

Some friends didn’t want to leave, he said. He had to cajole one woman and her family out who later saw pictures of their bomb-damaged Kiev home. “She says I saved her life which, right there, was worth everything,” said Moore, who’s poured at least $50,000 of his savings into the mission.

One of his Ukrainian partners, Anatoliy Yevtushenko, told Secrets that he, Moore and the others helping who are not involved in the fighting feel compelled to stay to help. “It’s a gift to me,” he said of working with Moore’s Ukraine Freedom Project, especially after he was able to get his family out of Ukraine and safely to Sweden.


Members of the Ukraine Freedom Project givinga thank you message to Americans donating to the cause headed by former Capitol Hill aide Steven Moore. Photo courtesy Ukraine Freedom Project

© Provided by Washington Examiner Members of the Ukraine Freedom Project givinga thank you message to Americans donating to the cause headed by former Capitol Hill aide Steven Moore. Photo courtesy Ukraine Freedom Project

“We have a job now. It gives us a structure,” he said, adding, “there are things that are so much more important in life, like this project.”

When the refugee crisis slowed recently, Moore thought about leaving. But he and his team turned to helping those still in Ukraine get food and medical supplies, especially in areas where there has been no outside aid coming in. With the help of early fundraising, he and his crew bought a $10,000 used Sprinter van and started raiding grocery stories in Romania.

Eventually they bought a second van and delivered nearly 3 tons of food.

“There’s so much that needs to be done over here that I’m going to stay. Initially, I was like, you know, three weeks in and I got my friends out, I’d declare victory and leave. But every day I get someone calling me and asking me for help,” said Moore.

For example doctors at 10 hospitals have asked for the Ukraine Freedom Project’s help in getting medical supplies and medicines in. So Moore has filled his vans at Romanian drug stores with anything he can grab to deliver inside Ukraine.

And most recently the local militia have asked for his help in getting radios and body armor. It costs a lot, however, and while he’s raised over $100,000 online, he is desperate for more help.

One doctor in Bucha, where Russian troops have reportedly killed civilians at random and left them in the streets, said he was desperate for surgical tools and asked Moore for help.

“He said, ‘Right now I have eight sets of surgical instruments. And so I can do four people every two hours.’ He had this kind of equation. And then he said, ‘If I had four more sets he could do 12 people, but I don’t have those sets.’ That’s an example of just simple, relatively simple, things that can save a lot of lives that we’re trying to get,” said Moore.

He made his case to visiting House members when Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise and House appropriator Rep. Ken Calvert visited Bucharest.

Afterward, Moore tweeted, “I caught up with @KenCalvert in #Bucharest during @GOPLeader’s CODEL. I told him of my visits to hospitals taking casualties from #Irpin and #Bucha and experiences of my friends fighting #UkraineRussiaWar at the front. Calvert is fired up to help #Ukraine!”

His colleague Yevtushenko said he and Moore’s Ukraine Freedom Project are in for the long run. “The war hasn’t stopped so we won’t,” he said in the call, adding, “Every one of us thinks we should do more. I’m not satisfied. We can do more.”

And Moore told us that everyone he’s helped now want to give back, essentially expanding his private force.

“I’ve spent my life building a network of people, you know. I’m in politics and it’s a relationship business and, and so, what I’m fortunate to have is a bunch of people in Ukraine, who first needed the help, and now that they’re safe, they’re willing to help others in Ukraine,” said Moore.

 

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Tags: Washington Secrets, War in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Original Author: Paul Bedard

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