Usually, when foreigners meet in war-time Ukraine, one of the first questions we ask each other is how we ended up here, and why we stayed. But I didn’t ask Emma Igual that question until one of the last times I saw her in Slovyansk, when I realized that, despite hours of conversation about the war and the world and life, I still had no idea how she had wound up in Ukraine.
“I don’t either,” she replied, with a wry sigh. “I wonder most days.”
It was mid-June. By then, Emma, a former United Nations staffer from Barcelona, had been in Ukraine for over 15 months. She’d raced to the country just days after the full-scale Russian invasion, when she and a pair of French brothers she’d met in a hastily-assembled online group bought a used 20-seat Mercedes bus, crossed the border into Ukraine in the dead of the night, and headed to the front.
Over the ensuing months, they drove thousands of civilians to safety, pulling fragile seniors and families out of apartments bombarded by shelling. They slept in the ruins of half-occupied and embattled cities. They dodged death more times than they could count, squeezing through minefields, flying artillery and even small-arms fire.
At first, it was a chaotic effort. But in time, their work crystallized into a more stable grassroots non-profit: they dubbed it Road to Relief, scribbling the name and logo in the back of a bus loaded with refugees. By the end of this winter, they’d settled into a rented compound on the edge of Slovyansk, a short drive from war’s most punishing battles in Bakhmut, and managed a swelling 30-person volunteer team.
“There was never at any point a decision of sitting down and being like, ‘okay we’re going to make this project, with this and this programs, and these people,’” she told me. “At no point that was in our mind. It just kind of happened day by day. You take one decision that leads you to the next, and the next, and the next, and you just have to keep on adapting to the needs and to what you see in front of you.”
I’d learned about Road to Relief from one of their regular volunteers, a tanned and laid-back Canadian named Tonko. I’d met him in Kyiv in April, while working on a story about local rebuilding efforts for the Free Press. He told me I should come see the work they were doing; I was charmed by Tonko’s gravelly laugh and salt-of-the earth wit, and figured that if this colourful character thought this group was worth visiting, I should probably take him up on the invitation.
When I’d first arrived at the compound in late May, Emma was holding court in the ivy-draped backyard gazebo that served as her summer office, sitting at a long table covered with a mess of notebooks, half-eaten pastries, and souvenir cappuccino cups overflowing with cigarette butts. She beckoned for me warmly, though she wouldn’t have long to talk, she said: she had a meeting with a military commander in an hour.
As I settled into a chair beside her, I noticed, already, how all the compound’s energy seemed to coalesce around her. She was, simultaneously, typing emails to funders on her laptop; soothing a morose and slightly inebriated American medic who’d recently broken up with his girlfriend; explaining her policy of kicking out any volunteer who said anything racist or homophobic; and, on occasion, purring drink orders at Road to Relief co-founder Henri Camenen, with that silk-over-steel tone particular to women who aren’t afraid of being disliked.
As Henri loped off to fetch coffee, Emma caught my gaze. It was the first time I saw an expression that would become familiar, which was the way her wide brown eyes danced with mischief whenever her quick wit seized on a thought.
“Around here, we make the men serve us,” she said, with a conspiratorial wink.
Oh yes, I thought. She and I will get along just fine.
In a way, summer life at the Road to Relief house was a perfect snapshot of life in Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region, now. The compound sits at the juncture where the urban meets the pastoral, and where the brutality of war meets the cozy comfort of home. In the dirt alley behind the house, farmer neighbours kept a lone sheep on a chain; its bleating mixed with the constant booms of outgoing artillery and the much rarer roar of a Ukrainian fighter jet, shrieking low towards the horizon.
At any given time, there were about 20 people living at the house, a rag-tag rotating crew of medics, translators, and volunteers from across Europe and North America. Some stayed for only a short while before heading home, while others, like so many foreigners in Ukraine, washed up on the shore of the war and, to their own surprise, just stayed, finding on its fringes a life and community that suited them.
During the day, the compound was a flurry of activity. In the mornings, teams of four would load the Road to Relief vehicles with supplies and head out to the tiny villages dotting the verdant Donbas hills, offering remaining civilians evacuations, aid, and a mobile medical clinic. Other volunteers stayed behind, organizing the group’s stocks of medicines, clothing and hygiene supplies. At night, they mingled in the nooks and crannies of the house, sharing communal meals of rice and baked chicken, swapping tales of misadventure before retreating to their bunk beds to sleep.
In addition to those official compound residents, Emma took in strays, both human and animal. The latter included, at various times, several dogs, a donkey and a couple dozen roaming cats, one of whom, every month or so, would produce another litter of kittens. These were a source of both delight and annoyance: after dangerous missions near the front, volunteers would scoop up a kitten and hold its wriggling body to their chest, murmuring into its soft fur, laughing at its indignant mewling.
It was healing for them, Emma thought. That’s why it was good to have them.
But the kittens were also constantly underfoot and prone to clawing up pant legs; as their number multiplied, volunteers urged Emma, who was fiercely attached to the cats, to adopt some out and get the rest fixed. For unclear reasons, she was reluctant to do so, though she would poke fun at herself for that quirk: “I mean, look at me, I own 24 cats,” she quipped to me, on several occasions.
So the cats’ domain over the house was, in a way, an extension of Emma’s will, and much the same could be said for the organization itself. In structure, Road to Relief was democratic: a registered French non-profit, it has a board of directors, and the house voted on big decisions. Yet in practice, it felt like Emma’s kingdom, and her personality — sparkling, stubborn, determined — filled every aspect of its work.
Later, Michael Westermeyer, who had spent months with Road to Relief, expressed a similar thought: “Emma was Road to Relief, and it’s what some people loved about it and what other people hated about it,” he mused to me. “It’s precisely the fact it was so inextricably wrapped up in her. It was a part of her.”
Amidst the grim military drab of wartime Slovyansk, Emma stood out like a firework. In the blistering heat of early summer, she wore floral bikini tops and yoga pants and a ruby-red lipstick that, she told me, she’d found half-used in a box of donated aid and, deciding Ukrainian civilians deserved better than a worn stub of lipstick, plucked for herself. The colour suited her perfectly, not only in how the shade complemented her complexion but also, for lack of a better word, in its spirit: of course, it became clear, Emma was the type of person who would wear a bright red lipstick in a war zone.
And by this summer, Emma was also restless. As Road to Relief grew, now serving an area of 35,000 civilians with a spectrum of humanitarian aid, she’d become chained to the base, where she was constantly juggling paperwork, Zoom calls with officials and funders, and logistical issues at the house. This was her area of expertise — she had a long resume of work in humanitarian aid management — but she chafed to feel that direct connection to the people they were helping slipping away.
She made no secret of that frustration. In the base’s living room was a whiteboard. on which organizers tracked the locations of all Road to Relief personnel. Next to where Emma’s name remained listed as staying at the base, she’d jotted a three-letter note.
“FML.” Fuck my life.
I asked her about that, on the second-last day I saw her. In the two visits I’d made to Road to Relief, we’d spent hours chatting about many things, laughing like longtime girlfriends, cracking jokes only women would get. But it was hard to pin her down for an interview: she was always darting between meetings, or else needing to unwind.
Finally, one night in June, we found a couple of hours to sit down and talk. I wanted to ask her about how she had ended up in Ukraine, how she had built Road to Relief, and what she had learned about the chaotic world of foreign volunteers. By then, I already pictured her as the star of a long project I envisioned, the idea for which had actually first bubbled up during our conversations. To a journalist, Emma was a dream subject. She set no topic off-limits; she was thoughtful, sharply intelligent, and unflinchingly honest. She also had an inspired way with words.
For instance, she told me the story of a time in the summer of 2022, when she, Henri and his brother drove over a mine that disabled the bus. They were uninjured, but as the brothers set out down the mined road towards safety, “they’re walking like they’re in the fucking Alps,” Emma said, eyelids flashing wide for comedic effect. “They just start walking with their big fucking French feet, stomping on everything. I was behind them like, ‘oh no, they’re going to blow themselves up.’”
But they didn’t blow themselves up, and in fact the mine may have saved their lives: the mishap delayed them from being in Lysychansk when it was seized by Russian soldiers just a few hours later. If it hadn’t been for that mine, they might have been captured or killed.
“We were like, ‘fuck, okay, that was close,’” she said. “It was always those situations. Getting out of it by a hair, village after village, town after town, always like this.”
Though only 32, Emma had already seen a world of crisis. She had worked at refugee camps in Myanmar, Syria, and Greece; the chaos of these situations was home to her. Still, she said bluntly, none of that had prepared her for the brutality of the violence she witnessed in Ukraine, the intensity of the fighting, and the dangers that she and Henri had found themselves in, almost every day.
I wondered how she’d learned to mentally handle those situations.
“I have no fucking clue,” she said. “We just shat our pants regularly until shitting your pants became the norm, and we got used to it and we carried on. That’s the only thing we could tell you. We just did it and that’s it. I was scared all the time.”
She paused.
“Henri wasn’t, because he’s a psychopath,” she continued. “You can definitely quote me on that. He has no concept of fear. It’s ridiculous. So it was a bit of a balance. He always wanted to go, and it was like ‘yeah, but…’ It was like good cop, bad cop, these insane risks. When I look back, I’m like, ‘fuck.’
“I would not let any of these guys do that, or anything even remotely close to it,” she added, referring to the Road to Relief volunteers now under her wing. “No chance. I would be very mad at them for something much less bad than what we were doing.”
There is that note, I said, on the whiteboard. “Fuck my life.” Why did you write that?
“Because I’m here,” she said, gesturing to the compound, the garden, the kittens.
It was difficult for an outsider to understand. She’d just spent an hour talking about the multiple times they could have died, about driving over mines, about being shot at, about feeling scared all the time. She still missed being out in the field?
“That’s what we came here to do,” she said. “It’s just at some point, I feel like having this structure we have now is indeed helping more people… So I just bite my tongue, chew my cheeks. I know no-one else here right now could take over the amount of work. But I would love to go on missions. Of course I miss it.”
You do realize, I said, that to normal people, that sounds insane?
Emma laughed, and her eyes danced with that familiar mischievous glint.
“Oh, I never claimed to be normal,” she shot back. “That’s very much on the record. Nobody here is normal. If they tell you they are, then they’re the most abnormal. The thing is, there’s good insane and bad insane. It’s a very fine line to navigate.”
— — —
The writer everyone admired. The journalist you’d heard so much about, but never met. The soldier you’d followed on Instagram for months. The other soldier you’d followed on Twitter. The friend’s uncle. The friend-of-a-friend’s husband. The Ukrainian veteran who, when you tell him you’re sorry that multiple men he served with died in an air strike that week, takes a drag of his cigarette, sucks the smoke through his teeth and says, without feeling, “Everyone is sorry.” The photos. The names. Every day, every day, every day. It’s too much, and then a new morning comes, and it starts all over again.
— — —
Everyone who stayed at Road to Relief tended to describe it as a family, which meant that for alumni, the goings-on of the house were a source of endless fascination. After I’d returned to Kyiv from my second visit, I cajoled friends who were still there to text me the latest Road to Relief gossip: who was still there, who’d left, who was new, what the latest topic of debate was, whether there were any new kittens.
Recently, on one of these catch-ups, a friend mentioned that Emma had delegated some of her workload to other volunteers, and started to go back out on missions.
“Aww, I’m happy for her,” I said. “It’s what she really wanted.”
And I thought about Emma often, as I slowly picked my way through the long project of which I envisioned her voice the star. There was much I still didn’t know about her. Every so often, facts about her curious life drifted to me from the mouths of others; I made mental notes to ask her about them, the next time we spoke.
Facts, such as:
Did you know she adopted five kids from Palestine? They’re adults now.
I never got that story from her.
But I was planning to see her again soon. I’d recently had another idea, something I thought she would find interesting too, and in the first week of September I jotted a reminder in my day-planner: “TEXT EMMA R2R.” In the end, a few things came up, and I didn’t send that text. It wasn’t urgent, so I postponed it until this week.
Then came Saturday afternoon.
I was reading. The phone rang. It was my friend Spencer, who I wrote about once in this newsletter, though then I called him the American medic. It was the American medic. I didn’t pick up at first. I was reading, I wasn’t feeling up for talking, so I put the phone down, then picked it back up again, washed by a strange feeling.
Why is he calling? Spencer never just calls.
When I answered, he gave me the news in blunt, simple words.
That morning, the team was out was near Chasiv Yar. Their van got hit by something.
“Emma is dead, and Tonko is dead, and…”
The gasp that rushed into my chest blotted out the rest of his sentence. My mind went blank; I couldn’t process what I was hearing. Sorry, I told him, sorry to make you say it again. But take me through it one more time: what happened to whom?
This is what happened: on the morning of Sept. 9, Emma and Tonko, along with two of Road to Relief’s regular volunteers, were headed to a village just up the road from occupied Bakhmut. They were looking to get to know the village and the needs of its few remaining civilians. They were going to help, in a place few would dare go.
I hear her voice in my head, the nearly imperceptible lilt of her Spanish accent lifting the words of conviction: “That’s what we came here to do.”
Somewhere on the road near Chasiv Yar, Russian forces fired an anti-tank missile at their vehicle, which flipped and exploded into flames. Emma and Tonko were killed; the other two volunteers escaped with burns and shrapnel wounds.
After Spencer hung up, I walked to the grocery store in a daze, hunched against the wall of a hotel across the street from my apartment, called a friend, and just cried.
The next day, they were all I could see on social media. Emma and Tonko, photos and names. This is what good people become in Ukraine, one after another, day after day, and no matter how often it happens you still can’t wrap your mind around the endless parade of loss, the constant grinding of human life thrown to waste.
If you take anything away from this piece, it should not be that Emma was a saint. I didn’t know her very well, or for very long, but enough to know she’d roll her eyes at such a depiction. Emma was many things, none of them simple: she had a sharp wit, an infectious laugh, and an unerring sense of justice. She cared deeply about others, and listened tenderly to their problems. She was also honest, including about herself; she made little effort to hide her imperfections and abrasive edges, or any of the ways she was imbued with the normal range of human quirks and contradictions.
Yes, she saved lives in Ukraine, and put her own on the line. But she wasn’t a saint. She was just a person who threw herself into life, cared for the world and its people, and knew her own mind well enough to see herself in everyone she met.
She was just Emma. She just was.
Was.
God, Emma, I’m so sorry I have to say “was.”
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