José David Chaparro was born 55 years ago in San Cristóbal, capital of Táchira state, but settled in Ukraine since its independence in the early 1990s. Life led him to be the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires in Moscow and, now, he is the commander of a small division of volunteers who distribute humanitarian aid to those most affected by the Russian invasion.
Every morning he dresses in his military uniform, his cap and his rifle. He meets up with his division mates, all of them Ukrainians, and they load their vehicles with dozens of boxes of food, water, essentials and even gasoline to power electricity generators in villages devastated by Russian bombardment.
Despite the fact that he is perfectly fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, his colleagues address him as commander, in Spanish, something that puts a smile on the face of this Venezuelan married to a Ukrainian for 30 years who, during these times of war, is in command of a small group of volunteers.
It all started on the second day of the invasion, when Chaparro enlisted as a volunteer in the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, a reserve body of the Army also made up of civilians receiving military training, with the aim of participating in combat or in humanitarian aid tasks. .
A Venezuelan in Ukraine
“When this started, I felt a patriotic call. I felt that Ukraine was my second homeland and that I had to give everything I could for it,” says Chaparro in an interview with EFE, while taking a break after distributing humanitarian aid in the small town of Rozhivka, 40 kilometers northeast of Ukraine. kyiv.
For him, that call was “stronger” than what he felt in Venezuela in 2014, during the protests against the government of President Nicolás Maduro, in which he participated.
“In Venezuela we did not achieve the objective of restoring democracy and here I was not going to lose that chance. Here now I am giving my life again,” she said.
“In Venezuela I did not carry a weapon, nor a uniform, nor was I available for combat. Now I am. I carry a weapon, I wear a uniform, I am under a civil and military line. And that’s a pretty substantive difference,” she noted.
For him, the Russian invasion of Ukraine made his life turn 180 degrees, since it gave him “a different soul”, he learned about the spirit of collaboration, to “understand human pain” and, above all, to share .
many laps
Chaparro’s life has always taken many turns. He settled in Kyiv in the early 1990s to study international law, driven by “the desire to understand the Soviet system.”
“It’s like someone who wants to go to North Korea now to study their economic and political system,” he said with a laugh.
In Ukraine, Chaparro opened a legal services company because “private property did not exist” and returned to Venezuela to work in the Office of Strategic Planning, where, among other things, he coordinated Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s first visit to Russia.
From there, he was appointed charge d’affaires of Venezuela in Moscow, where he served from 2001 to 2005 to develop political and economic ties between the two countries, he says.
However, despite being a great connoisseur of Russia and having moved in the upper echelons of that country, he claims not to understand the “real reason” for this Russian invasion of Ukraine that has caused the death of thousands of civilians, something barbaric and unspeakable, in his opinion.
“If you tell me that this happened a hundred or 150 years ago, it was more feasible. But right now? Right now when we are already reaching Mars, sending satellites, sending people to other planets… are we right now cutting our throats and killing each other in cold blood?”, he asked himself.
And it is that after going around Ukraine distributing all kinds of humanitarian aid, observing the devastation and despair that the war has sown, only one thing is clear: “I hope it ends.”