The Video That Stopped Me
A former classmate recently shared a video that has stayed with me since I watched it. American children, elementary school students, had written letters to Ukrainian soldiers. Not typed them. Written them. In Ukrainian letters, carefully copied from Google Translate, imperfect and sincere. “Dear Ukrainian soldiers, stay safe.” “Come home alive and unharmed.”
Behind this initiative was Arseniy, a Ukrainian teenager who arrived in the United States with his mother after Russia’s full-scale invasion, while his father remained to serve in the Southern Defense Forces. Arseniy did not wait for adults to act. He organized his school.
On the fourth anniversary of the invasion that changed everything, this video raises a question worth sitting with: What does it mean when children on the other side of the ocean understand something that political leaders appear to have forgotten?
The Canadian Context: 25,000 Postcards and Counting
What Arseniy and his American classmates did instinctively connects to a movement that has been quietly, steadily growing in Canada since 2022.
Postcards to the Front Canada, founded by Helen and Jean-Michel, a couple in rural Ontario, has delivered over 25,000 postcards to Ukrainian defenders. These cards travel more than 8,000 kilometres. They are kept in uniform pockets. They are displayed in what defenders themselves call “galleries of love.” They are reread during moments of isolation and exhaustion that most of us cannot imagine.
The research literature on this is not ambiguous. During the Second World War, soldiers ranked receiving mail as first, second, and third in importance to their morale and psychological resilience (Litoff & Smith, 1990). Clinical postcard intervention studies demonstrate that brief, consistent written contact reduces crisis events in vulnerable populations by up to 50% (Carter et al., 2013). Research on social acknowledgment confirms that simply knowing someone remembers you — that you are not invisible — is a foundational element of trauma recovery (Kumar & Epley, 2018).
What Arseniy’s classmates did was not a school project. It was clinical intervention, enacted through childhood sincerity.
Healing Does Not Wait for Victory
One of the most important insights to emerge from contemporary trauma research, and from the lived experience of those working directly with Ukrainian defenders, is that healing cannot be deferred until the war ends. As Helen, co-founder of Postcards to the Front Canada, articulated during a presentation our Kamloops community attended: healing must happen now, in the midst of the trauma, one moment at a time.
A woman living on the 22nd floor of an apartment building in Ukraine, unable to use the elevator during air raids, received a postcard. She stopped halfway up the stairs, read it through a window overlooking her city, and wrote to say: “Now I can carry on.” She climbed eleven more flights of stairs because someone had written her name, her city, the word “courage.”
In a war zone, at 2 a.m., a group of defenders received a package of postcards. Their colleague, a hardened soldier who had been wounded, returned to the front, and received the cards in darkness, called to whisper: “We’re all crying. Thank you for the cards.”
These are not anecdotes. They are data points in an emerging evidence base about what sustains human beings under conditions of extreme moral and physical duress.
From Kamloops to the Classroom: Bringing the Evidence to Practice
In December 2025, I completed Postcards That Carry Courage: A 12-Week Dual-Track Writing Guide for Supporting Ukrainian Defenders Through Postcards to the Front Canada — a practical, evidence-informed resource developed at Thompson Rivers University.
The guide emerged directly from our community’s experience. Every Saturday since February 24, 2022, the Kamloops Stands with Ukraine group has gathered, through snow, rain, and bitter cold, to hold vigil and, increasingly, to write postcards. When photographs came back showing our cards in the hands of defenders, the impact was not theoretical. It was visible. Tangible. A Kamloops postcard now resides in a museum in Ismail, Ukraine, placed there not by design, but because a museologist said it belonged to the whole community.
Postcards That Carry Courage translates this experience into a structured 12-week program for:
- Individuals writing postcards at home for the first time
- Families participating together, including children with age-appropriate guidance
- Educators integrating global citizenship and empathy into classroom practice
- Community organizations — churches, libraries, cultural groups — building sustainable postcard networks
- Ukrainian diaspora communities maintaining active connection to homeland
The guide addresses what the research demands and what Arseniy’s initiative demonstrates: that children can and should participate in this work, with appropriate ethical frameworks that protect both writers and recipients.
What Arseniy’s Initiative Tells Us About Information Warfare
The post that brought Myroslav’s video to my attention included an observation that deserves serious academic attention: if Russian propagandists had a comparable story, children in American schools writing in Russian to Russian soldiers, every state media channel would amplify it within hours. It would be presented to diplomatic missions, replicated across school districts, and embedded in narratives about global solidarity.
Instead, Arseniy’s story spread through personal networks, through the quiet sharing of a classmate, through a diaspora teenager who decided that silence was not an option.
This asymmetry in information mobilization is not a minor communication problem. It reflects structural differences in how democratic societies and authoritarian ones approach narrative coordination. It is also, I would argue, an argument for why academic institutions, diaspora communities, and educators must take a more active role in amplifying stories that the market of attention tends to overlook.
Postcard writing, community vigils, classroom letters, these are not soft alternatives to political action. They are, in their cumulative effect, among the most durable forms of solidarity that exist. They operate at the level of human recognition, which is, as the research consistently demonstrates, foundational to psychological survival.
An Invitation
If you are an educator reading this and wondering whether your students could do what Arseniy’s classmates did, the answer is yes. The guide exists precisely for that purpose.
If you are a community organizer, a library coordinator, a church leader, or a parent wondering how to transform the helplessness of watching the news into something that reaches actual human beings, the guide exists for that too.
Postcards That Carry Courage is available through DROKACADEMY.
📧 Contact for free access: drokacademy@gmail.com
🌐 Author website: krasun.ca
📮 Send postcards to: Postcards to the Front Canada, P.O. Box 184, Millbrook, ON L0A 1G0
🔗 Learn more: postcardstothefrontcanada.com
🎓 Scholarship support: www.tru.ca/ukraine
References
Carter, G. L., et al. (2013). Postcards from the EDge: 5-year outcomes of a randomised controlled trial for hospital-treated self-poisoning. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202(5), 372–380.
Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2018). Undervaluing gratitude: Expressers misunderstand the consequences of showing appreciation. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1423–1435.
Litoff, J. B., & Smith, D. C. (1990). Since you went away: World War II letters from American women on the home front. Oxford University Press.
Myroslav Otkovych Video https://www.facebook.com/reel/2361237671011858
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