On a weeknight in Lviv, Ukraine, nine girls, ages 10 to 12, met in a basement room and competed in teams to see who could build the tallest tower out of paper.
The girls all belonged to the scouting organization, Plast, which is similar to the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and also has a mission to preserve Ukrainian culture and language.
Each of the two teams tried different approaches, folding the sheets of white paper into different shapes and stacking them. About 10 minutes in, one wobbly structure emerged as the winner, though it didn’t last long, either.
Counselor Olvia Kondratyk asked the group what they learned from the exercise.
“Even if something doesn’t work out, the main thing is to believe in yourself,” one girl chimed in.
With their national identity under threat since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of 2022, Ukrainian parents are increasingly signing their children up for the patriotic education, outdoor activities and summer camps offered by the 112-year-old scouting organization.
Plast members take a scouting oath swearing on their honor to do everything in their power to love God and Ukraine, help others and live by the Plast scouting law.
According to Lviv branch head Daryna Doskach, they are adding 20 to 30 new groups in the city each year, but it’s not enough to keep pace with how many kids want to join. (Plast started in Lviv, but there are branches all across the country.)
“We have about 1,200 children who are waiting in line in Lviv alone,” Doskach said. “There is a queue in Ternopil, in Kyiv, and so on.”
Today, there simply aren’t enough adult volunteers available to lead the groups — not when so many Ukrainians who grew up in Plast are in the armed forces. So far,74 Plast members have been killed serving in the war since 2014.
But Doskach stressed that Plast is not a military organization.
“This is very important to note. We are a youth organization that educates young people. But many of our Plast members are military members, and profess our values that we are defending our country,” she said.
Many Plast members who’ve joined the military find that the skills they learned as scouts come in handy when fighting a war — skills like navigation and tying knots.
Andriy Zholob served as a commander of a medical unit in an air assault brigade for two years. Now, he heads the veterans’ office in Lviv.
Zholob’s military patches, including one that marks him as a member of Plast, were mounted on the wall in his office.
“It was on my bulletproof vest during all the war,” he said, adding that the patches helped him and other members recognize each other.
They did their best to share the knowledge gained from Plast with their fellow soldiers.
“I was explaining to farmers from villages how to camp, how to start a fire,” he said. “It was again and again something about Plast.”
Zholob’s wife and older daughter are also scouts, and he said that they plan to enroll their younger daughter when she’s old enough.
For his family, he said, it’s not just about gaining practical life skills but its mission to instill Ukrainian identity in children, especially in the face of the Soviet authorities’ repeated attempts to stamp it out.
“Part of the great work of Plast is growing that understanding in young kids and children and so on,” he said. “So, to be proud you are a Ukrainian means to go to defend Ukraine if needed, to be happy with Ukraine, to be sad with Ukraine, to struggle with Ukraine and so on.”
The history of Plast is intertwined with the history of Ukraine itself. Plast, which originated in 1912, a few years prior to Ukraine’s first attempt at a modern nation, was banned during the Soviet era, according to Bohdan Hasiuk, who played a part in the organization’s rebirth in 1989.
That was two years before Ukraine’s independence. Back then, it was all secret, he said. Plast members from overseas, who had kept it going while it was banned, were instrumental in bringing it back to Ukraine.
“The first contacts were with the diaspora,” he said.
Hasiuk became involved when a friend asked him for help taking kids to the mountains. Before long, he realized it was something much deeper.
“And then, it started to spread, relaunching in different cities across the country at once,” he said.
A little over three decades later, on the third day of the current war, his son — also a scout — wanted to sign up to fight.
Hasiuk, who went with him, served for 2 1/2 months before he hit the age limit of 60 and was discharged. His son continues to serve.
Kseniia Baluk is a Plast volunteer who works with teenage scouts in Lviv.
According to Baluk, the war has created more programming challenges — like finding wilderness areas for summer camps that aren’t mined or otherwise too dangerous.
“First of all, it’s a challenge to go camping at all,” she said. “And without camping, scouting is not scouting, actually. So, we have a lot of challenges so kids are safe. We can camp only in a few regions in Ukraine.”
But it’s worth it to see the kids’ faces when they find themselves out in nature, she said.
“Even in the time of the full-scale invasion, we need to do camps, we need to have scouting, we need to have Plast,” she said. “Because they have something else in their lives and something good in their life.”