Yet ask for saunas is what the Ukrainian military did, according to Ilmar Raag, an Estonian film-maker and humanitarian worker who has made frequent trips to Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Raag is now making crowd-funded mobile sauna units designed to serve hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. They come complete with showers and washing machines for military uniforms, and are carefully camouflaged to keep them safe from Russian fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re after a custom-made sauna, it makes sense to ask an Estonian. Sauna culture is huge in the country. And it’s as much about hygiene and a morale boost as getting toasty on chilly winter nights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Estonia’s soldiers rarely travel without a mobile sauna – including during recent missions in the Afghan desert and Lebanon. It’s a military tradition that began almost 100 years ago during Estonia’s fight against the Bolsheviks, when the national railway stationed a sauna train close to the front, so troops could bathe and disinfect after weeks in the trenches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Raag says he heard about Ukrainian soldiers going days or even weeks without washing or taking off their boots, which explains why a front-line commander near Bakhmut told me – on Facetime – that the Estonian saunas were heaven-sent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/emp.bbc.com\/emp\/SMPj\/2.50.4\/iframe.htmlMedia caption,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ilmar Raag and Katya Adler call a Ukrainian commander on the front line<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many people living in EU and Nato countries on Vladimir Putin’s doorstep are going above and beyond to help Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Estonia and its Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, were occupied by the Soviet Union for decades straight after World War Two. They say they feel Ukraine’s pain at being invaded by Moscow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They have also given or pledged more short-term aid relative to the size of their economy than any other nation, including the US and the UK – and only Norway surpasses them when long-term commitments factored in, according to the latest figures from Germany’s respected Kiel Institute, which has been tracking all the contributions sent to Ukraine since the start of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gediminas Ivanauskas, Lithuania’s national champion at “drifting” (a motorsport that involves oversteering and skidding at top speed) drove straight to Ukraine to help evacuate civilians from the very first day of Russia’s invasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His eyes fill with tears when he tells me of the suffering there. His desire to help, his frustration with the often slow pace of international aid efforts and his expertise in all things motorised, have led him to crowd-fund dozens of vehicles, which he armour-plates in a small rented garage in rural Lithuania. Some he painstakingly equips to act as four-wheel drive ambulances for the Ukrainian military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Mindaugas Lietuvninkas, a volunteer sniper with Ukraine’s International Brigade, has other motivations for helping the war effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A proud Lithuanian, he believes that by fighting in Ukraine, he’s protecting his own country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We have to stop [Russia] now. In Ukraine,” he told me vehemently as he packed his bags for another tour on the front line. Lietuvninkas thinks the Baltics could be next if Vladimir Putin is eventually successful against Kyiv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BBC News: Saunas for the front line… It’s not the first fundraising slogan you’d expect to hear in connection with the war in Ukraine. You can understand Kyiv asking allies for long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets. But saunas? Yet ask for saunas is what the Ukrainian military did, according to Ilmar Raag, an Estonian film-maker and humanitarian worker who has made frequent trips to Ukraine. Raag is now making crowd-funded mobile sauna units designed to serve hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. They come complete with showers and washing machines for military uniforms, and are carefully camouflaged to keep them safe… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34778,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776\/revisions\/34778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"map](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/1024\/cpsprodpb\/3977\/production\/_131011741_russias_european_neighbour_countries_2x640-nc.png\")
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