The frontline postal service that goes the extra mile

Even under fire, Nova Poshta helps hold the country together - delivering everything from home comforts to house-moving boxes

- Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk

In a post office 15km from the frontline, in a suburb of the eastern city of Kharkiv, business was brisk on a chilly autumn morning - despite the ballistic missiles that had shaken the city at midnight, lighting up the sky with a false dawn of flames.

The customer area was fitted out with phone-charging stations “and a small co-working space, which people can use during blackouts, since we have generators”, said the branch manager, 30-year-old Yaroslav Dobronos. There was also a changing room, in which a young woman was trying on a pair of jeans, before repacking them and sending them back.

Behind the counters was a miscellany of parcels waiting for customers to collect. Each was a fragment of life lived in all its normality and fragility in a frontline community.

Here were winter tyres, widescreen TVs, a package from an upmarket Ukrainian skincare brand, a bare-root tree, a pram, a vacuum cleaner and parts for Starlink (a satellite internet provider for use in remote locations). Out of one enormous, bulbous parcel poked a fistful of camouflage net.

Ukraine’s main postal service is, like the country’s rail network, one of its most vital arteries: a matter of national pride for Ukrainians and incredulity for visiting foreigners.

Nova Poshta, founded 25 years ago, is one of the chief reasons that Ukraine continues to function during a time of extraordinary violence and peril. It is affordable - it costs the equivalent of between $2 and $2.90 to send packages of between 5kg and 10kg within Ukraine - and it connects citizens across the nation and beyond.

“We used to see our jobs here as just work,” Dobronos said. “Now we see that it’s really important. We provide something of a peaceful life amid the war. In frontline areas, we are the last to leave, and the first to come back.”