Ukraine's postmen risk drone attacks to deliver pensions and medicine

Every morning, Igor Smelyansky studies a large map of Ukraine on his office wall and decides where he can send his employees that day. His aides bring him current information about Russian attacks, and he weighs the value of each delivery against the risk to the lives of the people who make it.

Mr Smelyansky is not a military commander. He heads Ukrposhta, Ukraine's state postal service, and each day he must judge how far his postmen and women can travel into front-line districts, where the danger of drone attack is constant.

"If it's too dangerous to go today, we won't go," he said. "We'll go tomorrow, or we'll go somewhere else. The key is to be as agile as you can."

Ukrposhta does more than collect and deliver letters and parcels. It pays out pensions in cash and accepts payment for utility bills. It also delivers food and medicine to people living on the margins of society.

For millions of poor and elderly Ukrainians in remote villages, that makes the postal worker a lifeline. Shops are few, and a trip to the nearest town can be long, costly and, in wartime, dangerous.

Ukraine is one of the largest countries in Europe by area and has a large rural population. Russia's full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022, has disrupted transport, power supplies and banking services across wide areas. In many villages near the front, the postal service is among the few state services still arriving regularly.

Ukrposhta is a state-owned company and runs one of the country's largest retail and distribution networks, with branches in small settlements where private business has little presence. Its staff often know the households they serve, including those with residents who are elderly, unwell or unable to travel.

That work carries real risk. Postal employees are civilians, and international humanitarian law requires parties to a conflict to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to spare civilian objects. The company says it reviews the security situation daily and postpones deliveries when the threat is too high, rather than abandoning them.

The stakes are especially high for pensioners. For some, the monthly cash pension brought by a postal worker is their main or only income. Without it, they would have to travel to a town to collect the money — a journey many cannot make, or cannot afford.

The service reflects a wider pattern of the war. As fighting continues, civilian institutions such as banks, railways, utilities and the post have adapted to keep basic services running, often at considerable risk to their staff. Mr Smelyansky's account of conditions on the ground could not be independently verified.

For him, the calculation is renewed every morning at the map. Deliveries that cannot be made safely are postponed, not cancelled. "We'll go tomorrow," he said — a promise that, for many villagers, matters as much as the pension or the parcel itself.