Illustration: #SofiaRunova
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Delicious food, which volunteers give to the military, is something that can support a defender and improve his or her mood. So behind the lines, people make preserves, after which they are sent to the front along with sweets and letters of support.
Thus, in the village of Ostrynia in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, during the two months of the full-scale war, the community handed over 800 cans of stew, buckwheat and rice porridge to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Residents bring food to the local school, and the teachers and all those willing to use it prepare nutritious meals according to cook Liubov's recipe. Such preserves can be stored for up to one year, and their taste is indistinguishable from home cooking. Liubov taught the volunteers to make cookies as well, which allows us to send up to 20 boxes of sweets to the front lines each time.
And in the Velyka Andrusivka community in Kirovohrad Oblast, volunteers have been preparing food for the military since 2014, since the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine. In February 2022, they began to help even more intensively: they reoriented the food block of the school to the needs of the army, and involved many local people. Now the school makes canned fish, stew, cabbage rolls, dumplings, pancakes, cutlets, pies (600 pieces per day!) and sweets. Products are donated not only by community residents, but also by farmers and businesses. Once, 400 kilograms of fish were brought to the school, and it was possible to make 700 half-liter cans of preserves from them. When provisions are sent to the front, they enclose letters of gratitude for the defenders.
In Volyn Oblast, instead of letters, volunteers invented original appeals to the soldiers to be glued to cans: "Please return this can in person, we are waiting for you in Lutsk." Such appeals should support the morale of the military, because they are welcome in all corners of Ukraine, and their loved ones want only one thing—that all those who are currently defending the country return from the war.