The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been going on for around 200 days when I sit down for tea with Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina, founders of #CookForUkraine and winners of a special OFM Editor’s Award, at Timoshkina’s house in north London. “It’s 201,” corrects Hercules, as if she has the days scratched on a wall at home.
“They have been the longest months of my life,” continues Hercules, who was born in Ukraine and has written four cookbooks on eastern European food. “I’m just reading about trauma and vicarious trauma and they say time actually slows down for you so much when you’re going through traumatic events. Every day, it’s just been … It’s been long.”
Timoshkina, who was raised in Russia and is the author of Salt & Time: Recipes from a Russian Kitchen, looks on warmly. The pair have been friends for more than 15 years, since meeting on a cigarette break while studying for their MAs in London. “I don’t know how Olia does it,” Timoshkina adds, shaking her head. “It’s a long time, but also, 200 days, the amount of stuff you’ve managed to achieve, it’s incredible.”
#CookForUkraine was born in February, the idea hatched on a protest outside Downing Street. Both Hercules and Timoshkina had been involved with #CookForSyria in 2016, which raised money for Syrian refugees. They wondered if they could borrow the template, which encourages people to donate, but also to host supper clubs and bake sales, as well as mobilising restaurants to add a voluntary £1 donation to their bills. Clerkenwell Boy, the anonymous food influencer who was part of the team behind the Syria effort, quickly agreed and the campaign rolled out pretty much overnight. Hercules and Timoshkina have scarcely stopped since and, by early October, had raised £1.8m for #CookForUkraine.
It is a staggering effort, and one that has clearly had a heavy toll, especially on Hercules. In the early days of the war, she scarcely ate or slept, mainly because she was worried about her family: her parents lived in Kherson, southern Ukraine; her brother, Sasha, who before the war worked for an e-bike startup in Kyiv, joined Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces. Eventually, she managed to persuade her parents to leave the country and her brother’s teenage daughter, Aysa, came to live with her in London.
Sasha is still enlisted and her father has since decided to leave safety in Germany to return to his homeland. “He said that he can’t sit around any more looking at the news, he needs to be there and he needs to volunteer,” says Hercules, with a weary shrug. “I said, ‘Dad, you can’t even walk for more than five minutes!’ And he replied, ‘No, but I’ve got a car …’ I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but yeah, so he left.”
Tears fill Hercules’s eyes. “Sorry, I’ve actually been doing really well recently,” she says. “But sometimes I lose hope and I think, ‘I was so naive, thinking that I’ll go back to the Kherson region and I’ll be able to open this dream cookery school’ and all of these plans that I have. And I just think I’m a naive idiot and that will never happen.”
Timoshkina, too, has been working non-stop, though more behind the scenes, sensitive to the fact that her nationality could be “triggering” for Ukrainians. But the initiative is clearly a deeply personal one for her: her great-grandmother was a Jewish Ukrainian who fled to Siberia when the Nazis invaded during the second world war, and a few years ago she persuaded her parents to leave Russia because of concerns about Vladimir Putin’s regime. Before the war, she had been planning a trans-Siberian journey for a new cookbook that collected recipes from her relatives, but that has been shelved. “It just completely feels wrong for me now to talk about Russian culture and Russian food in any positive light,” she says.
So far, #CookForUkraine’s funds have been channelled mostly through Unicef, but also the charities Choose Love and Legacy of War Foundation. Hercules and Timoshkina are planning a cookbook celebrating Ukrainian food, along with cooking classes and a space in London where they will train Ukrainian refugees to work in hospitality. Timoshkina again isn’t exactly sure yet what her role will be. “A question I have for myself is how do I position myself in a Ukraine hub project?” she asks.
Hercules, though, is quick to answer. “Alissa, sorry, I just think, ‘Noooo! You can’t teach? Why not? You don’t have to be stuck in some kind of a pan-Russian thing: your food is amazing and you’re an amazing teacher as well. So I really hope that you will be able to do some teaching as well.”
As exhausting and emotionally draining as the past six months have been, Hercules is reluctant to accept that she has done anything special. “People keep telling me, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe how much you’re doing’,” she says. “But I think, imagine somebody coming in and moving into your house, as the Russians did with my mum and dad’s house, people coming in and killing your families and friends. You’d be doing exactly the same thing. It’s survival, right? You have to do it.”
For Hercules and Timoshkina, the challenge for #CookForUkraine is sustaining engagement from people and the hospitality industry with the war as it rolls on, and dealing with the aftermath when it ends. “I know that I’ll never be the same,” says Hercules. “Nothing will ever be the same. There’s billions of pounds of damage and that’s just in financial terms, so there’s going to be quite a lot of work ahead for years to come.”
Hercules sighs. “A lot to do,” she says, “and, yeah, I’m definitely going to keep doing it.”
