Matt Thacker is not a soldier, and he does not go to Ukraine’s front line to fight.
He goes to cook.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the 41-year-old has gone from Chernihiv and Sumy to Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv — and once into Sudzha, inside Russia, during Ukraine’s Kursk operation — bringing homemade meals to Ukrainian troops. The menu ranges from traditional Ukrainian borscht to American classics like ribeye steaks and chicken wings.
“I’m not saving lives. I want to show you with my body, my presence, not just money, that the world supports you,” he says. “I am a symbol for global support.”
Since the start of the full-scale war, he has personally donated more than $50,000 to Ukraine’s military.
Thacker, who studied Slavic history, first came to Ukraine in 2013. He arrived just in time to witness the Maidan uprising — the pro-democracy revolution that would eventually push out Ukraine’s Russia-aligned president. He remembers the cold most of all.
“Ukrainians were living out there, like in minus 15. It was a super cold winter,” he says. “People were living out on the streets, protesting for what they felt was right. I was just so shocked. Like I felt very Ukrainian there.”
He stayed and built a career in Kyiv’s IT industry. But Thacker’s real passion was cooking.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Thacker wanted to find a way to give soldiers a break from what he calls the standard front-line diet — canned meat and buckwheat.
“That’s my idea of, like, a nightmare,” he says. “But when I feed them this stuff, it sort of opens them up a bit.”
Thacker has also turned his cooking into a broader project — a YouTube channel dedicated to Ukrainian food, aimed at helping international viewers understand the country through what it eats.
He shoots at the pastry stands of Kyiv and among the pork sellers of Odesa’s Pryvoz Market. The videos can also sometimes serve as a small act of counter-narrative, particularly on dishes like borscht, whose Ukrainian roots Russia has long tried to claim as its own.
Ukraine is home now, Thacker says. He has no plans to leave. And as long as the war continues, he will keep cooking for the people defending it.
