Cooking for Ukrainian troops on the front line is not easy.
Recently, a Russian strike blew out the windows and the glass door of the oven in a kitchen on a military base in eastern Ukraine. Pvt. Yaroslav Breus and his team quickly replaced the door and resumed cooking.
“Considering where we are now, this meal might be the last one,” Private Breus said as he prepared pork steaks fried in batter and borscht for several hundred soldiers, surrounded by steaming cauldrons and sizzling pans.
Also on the menu: beetroot salad sprinkled with roasted walnuts and boiled potatoes with melted butter topped with parsley.
Even as they battle relentless Russian assaults under harsh conditions, the soldiers of his unit, the First Assault Battalion of the Third Assault Brigade, can consider themselves lucky in one respect. They are eating relatively well.
Private Breus, 31, a former chef from Veranda, a prestigious Kyiv restaurant, once competed on the Ukrainian version of the television show “MasterChef,” where he wore a distinctive headband and received praise for his borscht.
He now cooks his beet soup almost daily for soldiers in the trenches nearby in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine.
“My favorite dish is when they cook borscht, as it smells like home,” like it was made with “mom’s hands,” said Serhiy, a soldier from the First Battalion as he waited for the team to pack up food for him to deliver to his comrades at the front. Like other soldiers, he requested that he be identified by only his first name and call sign, Bison, according to military protocol for members of the Ukrainian military in combat.
A hearty meal is good for morale, Private Breus said, adding, “I want all the guys to like my food.”
For a recent dinner, his cooks made fried meat pies, or pyrizhky. His ingredients: “Pork, onion, love and a lot of oil.”
Private Breus, whose army call sign is Culinarian, said he joined the army on the fifth day of the war in 2022, and he was quickly ushered into the cooking corps.
“When I came, they gave me ingredients and said, ‘Cook!’” he said. “I asked, ‘What?’ They said, ‘We don’t know, but it has to be tasty and there has to be a lot.’”
Ukrainian troops cannot eat in large mess halls because of the risk of Russian missile strikes. Out of necessity, units organize their own kitchens, often with soldiers preparing meals for one another from basic ingredients, like potatoes, pork and vegetables.
They eat out in the open, or sometimes in the countless abandoned houses near the front line that serve as makeshift bases. They usually get their fresh food delivered from kitchens like the one where Private Breus works.
Even with professional training, cooking well for the troops can be a challenge, Private Breus said. The army provides only a few spices, he said ruefully — like paprika, black pepper, bay leaves and salt. So he and other cooks pool their own money to buy other spices and herbs at a market.
Private Breus also keeps a stock of condiments and pickles, like hoisin, sriracha and sweet-and-sour sauces, and even the Korean staple kimchi.
Potatoes are served every second day; on other days, Private Breus makes things like rice, buckwheat, bulgur or pasta. His team usually prepares about 900 meals a day.
On a recent afternoon, Private Breus scooped a ladle of borscht from a large pot boiling on the stove, smelled it by waving his hand above the steam and then sipped the broth. “Needs garlic,” he said, and put in a handful. He tried it again and added some sugar.
The work is exhausting, he said, with long hours and difficult living conditions, including the constant threat of missile and drone attacks. He gets only rare 10-day breaks from a war that has stretched on for more than three years.
But, he said, “my desire to cook is not gone — I know whom we feed.”
Next to him, Pvt. Halyna Radchuk, his assistant, shook her head as she plated pork steaks, signaling that she was fed up with frontline cooking in hot kitchens, especially in the summer.
She prefers making cool salads, she said. Remembering that she needed more ingredients for her next salad, she called out to a soldier smoking outside to bring more supplies from the storage facility nearby. “I badly need fresh cucumbers and tomatoes.”
When the soldier returned with a big van and a huge supply of groceries, the team left the kitchen and offloaded boxes containing vegetables, meat, yogurt and juice.
Private Radchuk, 51, also worked as a cook before the war, in a cafe on the outskirts of Kyiv. She said she still could not believe how much her life had changed since the Russian invasion. “Never in my life did I think I’d have a gun and be in the army,” she said.
She said she struggles emotionally when young soldiers she has fed get killed in the war. “One day I give that kid food,” she said, “and the next day he’s already gone.”
Sometimes, when fighting intensifies, it is virtually impossible to deliver food to the front line, Private Breus said. Drones can drop off some food, but only processed rations and nothing fresh.
On the recent afternoon, Bison, the soldier who had been waiting for meals outside the kitchen, was able to drive fresh, hot food to the soldiers at a training site outside the front line, bumping down a narrow track across a field, with red signs warning about land mines on either side.
When he arrived at the training site, a hilly field covered in flowers, gunshots could be heard, scaring birds in the meadows. Soldiers were practicing. When they saw the van, they walked toward a small wooden shelter covered with camouflage netting.
Private Yevheniy, 23, whose call sign is Artist, said he always seemed to be the hungriest person in his unit.
He said that he had once spent 32 days straight on a frontline position, and that he went to a restaurant during a short break from the front and ordered so much food that it made him burst into tears.
He entered the shelter and leaned his gun on a wall to take a plate of bulgur wheat and roasted chicken thigh with teriyaki sauce. He touched the chicken that Private Breus had prepared, licked his fingers and smiled.
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia.
The post Cooking With Love (and Lots of Beets) for the Front Line in Ukraine appeared first on New York Times.
