Doe pheromones, dirty underwear, sex toys, expired medicines, broken medical equipment. All these goods Ukrainian charitable foundations have been receiving in humanitarian aid shipments from abroad since 2014. Sometimes they also receive goods that are expensive to dispose of in other countries. Part of foreign humanitarian aid has over time turned into an environmental problem because warehouses are clogged with garbage. Despite changes in legislation, the disposal of useless goods is still the responsibility of charitable foundations.
The journalists of the Suspilne investigative editorial office have inquired into this issue. We tried to find out whether charitable organizations have the opportunity not to accept such aid, how much disposal costs, and what steps the government takes to help charitable foundations. We talked to the representatives of four charitable foundations: “SVOI”, “Kryla Nadii”, “Skarbnytsia Nadii”, and “Ruievyt Ukraine”.
“A pig in a poke” on the balance sheet of charitable foundations
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, police officers from another country offered medical equipment to the “Kryla Nadii” charitable foundation. Upon arrival, the equipment turned out to be broken and out of date.
“Police officers from another country brought humanitarian aid. We were supposed to receive two pallets of bandages and ophthalmological equipment. We immediately sent the bandages to the frontline. Then medics phoned from there and asked, “Are you crazy? Made in 1984?” It was very unpleasant,” says the head of the foundation, Nataliia Lipska. “We brought the ophthalmological equipment to the hospital. The hospital said, “It is broken, it does not work”.
Last year, the foundation was offered help. One of the European clinics decided to provide Ukrainian doctors with equipment worth 500,000 euros. Only one component needed to be replaced. “I asked for an expert opinion. It turned out that the component costs 200,000 euros and had not been produced for a long time,” recalls Lipska. “We refused the shipment.”
In June 2025, Lesia Lytvynova, co-founder of the “SVOI” charitable foundation, published a post on her Facebook page stating that approximately a third of the foundation’s warehouses, for which they pay rent, are occupied by useless goods. In the comments under the post, we saw that many foundations have the same problem.
Humanitarian aid arrives in Ukraine in two ways, Lytvynova tells Suspilne: with shipping documents containing a detailed list of goods, and with the name “medical goods”.
The second option may come as a surprise to the foundations. According to our interlocutors, anything related to medicine can be sent under this category, including items that are unsuitable for further use.
Neither the first nor the second guarantees that everything will arrive intact and working, and in the specified amount. Senders mostly have no idea what it is and what it is needed for, says Lytvynova.
“In all developed countries, there are huge logistics warehouses where decommissioned medical equipment from hospitals is sent. It can be completely functional, but morally obsolete, or completely functional and not obsolete but medical institutions decided to update it,” says Lytvynova. “They need to do something with this equipment. The disposal process is expensive. However, if you give it to charity, it is free, and in some countries, it brings tax benefits. In addition, it provides an opportunity to say, “We are good guys, we sent 25 containers of medical equipment”. Volunteers come to these logistics warehouses and say, “I know where to send it, I know where it is needed, let us send it”. People who work in the warehouses are experts in logistics, not in medicine.”
“There are people who are determined to help as much as possible, they pack and assemble the cargo responsibly. And there are people who believe that we are in the Stone Age here or that we have the possibility to repair everything that is sent to us,” adds Iryna Koshkina, executive director of “SVOI”.
Back in 2020, the foundation received scales along with another humanitarian shipment. They are still in the warehouse. “The scales are not broken, but they were sent without a power supply unit. The original unit costs 3,500 euros. They do not work with a non-original one, because they have a special chip,” says Koshkina.
“A donor or a volunteer from abroad says, “Do you want us to send to you four trucks of functional beds?” I say, “Great! I will send them all to hospitals”. The beds arrive and it turns out that half of them have broken rails. In addition, there are no mattresses. And this means that we will need to find four trucks of such mattresses. Because a hospital can take only a bed with a mattress, as a set. I say, “Sorry, you did not send exactly what we wanted”. And I hear in response, “Are you serious? We sent the same beds to others, and everyone was happy. This is probably better than nothing?” says Lesia Lytvynova. “On the one hand, I understand that it is probably better than nothing. But I have four trucks with beds near my office. And according to the documents, they are ours. What to do in such situations? Look for someone who will take them, or pick one and a half trucks of working beds from four trucks. That is if you are lucky and the spare parts are suitable.”
Even the documents with a clear description of what is being transferred from abroad do not guarantee the arrival of the expected goods. “For example, in one of the shipments the documents indicated wheelchairs with footrests,” says Iryna Koshkina. “The shipment arrived, but the footrests did not fit the chairs. And it turns out that no one needs these chairs and footrests.”
The head of the “Skarbnytsia Nadii” charity foundation, Mariana Reva, faced the same problem. “As a rule, 80 percent of what arrives is what was supposed to be there according to the declaration. However, another 20 percent is something useless. People send everything just because the van is going to Ukraine,” she says. “Unfortunately, the logic of foreign donors is as follows: 30 percent of the van load is what you might need, and we will stuff the rest of the van with junk. There are a lot of unscrupulous benefactors abroad who believe that Ukraine is a garbage dump and everything can be sent here. We had situations like this: the van goes to the military with what they really need, but good people bring all sorts of junk to the church and stuff it into the van too. It arrives. You stand there, looking at it, and there are wedding dresses from the 1960s or shoes with 10-centimeter heels. We saw dirty panties, sex toys, used toothbrushes. Junk that is disgusting to touch.”
There is another problem: the expiration date of the needed goods is unknown, says Tetiana Melnychuk, an employee of the “Ruievyt Ukraine” foundation. “Take, for example, tube feeding. It is in a warehouse in Poland, imported from another country. Poland is a large hub where humanitarian aid is transported. They cannot process it right away, because someone needs to pay for the car. The food can arrive at that warehouse expired. And when you talk about deadlines, they answer, “How can we check this? It is in pallets”. There is no responsible person because it is humanitarian aid, and no one is responsible for it.”
Once, “Ruievyt Ukraine” received a truck with sweet water, chemicals for paving slabs, and doe pheromones to attract males. Some of the containers leaked along the way. Despite the stench, Melnychuk tried to wash everything that survived and then she found out why the cargo was so exotic. These were unsold goods from the supermarket. They are often sent for recycling or donated to charity.
However, when it comes to medicines, there is even a bigger problem for Ukrainian foundations.
A blister pack with two pills, one opened pack of diapers: medicines and medical devices
“Expired medicines are a total nightmare,” says Nataliia Lipska, head of the “Kryla Nadii” charity foundation. “Sometimes they are expired not for a month or two, but for years. Foreign clinics very often send all sorts of useless things to Ukraine under the guise of humanitarian aid. A used diaper, for example, or broken equipment. Because it is expensive to dispose of it in Europe. And by giving it to us, they have tax benefits. And it is just disgusting.”
According to Lipska, the problem is not that something is formally expired. Some things are simply unusable. For example, once the foundation received a box of diapers that had been produced five years before. They were already completely hard.
“Why don’t I like unspecified cargo? Because it is a pig in a poke. You ask, for example, for 60-milliliter syringes for feeding, and they send you four boxes with different syringes. Of those, one or two are the ones you asked for, the rest are for insulin, 5-milliliter, 4-milliliter, 10-milliliter. Maybe someone needs them, but not us,” says Nataliia Lipska.
“When they pack a truck with medical equipment, for example, to keep it from rattling, they stuff boxes in. And in those boxes, they stuff in large quantities anything that should have been disposed of after Covid: masks, overalls. We received medical supplies that were expired back in 2013. I wanted to cry, because such humiliation is hard to bear. There were questions in my mind: how do they treat Ukrainians, how can they send such things?” says Tetiana Melnychuk, an employee of the “Ruievyt Ukraine” foundation.
The “SVOI” charitable foundation keeps dozens of bags of expired medicines in its warehouses. The co-founder of the foundation, Lesia Lytvynova, says that items from hospices are often sent to Ukraine.
“There could be anything there: a blister pack with two pills, an opened pack of diapers and three unopened ones. Recently, we received reusable diapers. They were washed, but not very well,” says Lytvynova. “The invoice does not say anything about the name of these two pills or the expiration date, because it will take a month for a person abroad to describe all this. They simply load everything and send it. That is, it is a lottery. They can be really valuable things, for example, medicines that cannot be found here, and you have a patient who will die without these medicines. Or bandages from the times of the Second World War, which crumble in your hands, and a broken tonometer may come.”
“You have received a gift that you did not agree with anyone”
From the beginning of the full-scale war and until 2024, volunteers from abroad who wanted to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine only needed to know the details of the legal entity to which they were to send the cargo, says Lesia Lytvynova. Because of this, in addition to the things that charitable foundations really needed, uncontrolled humanitarian cargo began to be brought into Ukraine. The cargo included trucks with unusable medical equipment, expired medicines, and food.
It was difficult, and sometimes impossible, to control exactly what the donor was sending from abroad, continues Lesia Lytvynova. “You have received a gift that you did not agree with anyone. But you are already in the customs database as the recipient. So the further responsibility before the control authorities is yours.”
In addition, the humanitarian aid sent to a certain organization did not always end up in the foundation specified in the documents, says Mariana Reva, head of the “Skarbnytsia Nadii” charitable foundation. “People simply said the code of our organization at the border, the cargo arrived in Ukraine, we did not even see it, but were responsible for it.”
Everything that officially comes to a charitable foundation is recorded in an electronic declaration on the website of the Ministry of Social Policy and in the tax office. At the end of 2023, the import, accounting, and use of humanitarian aid were regulated by the Law of Ukraine “On amendments to certain laws of Ukraine regarding the import, accounting, distribution of humanitarian aid, peculiarities of taxation of relevant transactions and reporting”. Since 2024, the procedure has become completely digital. This has significantly simplified the work of foundations, although it has not solved the issue of receiving poor-quality humanitarian aid.
“Now we enter information into the declaration ourselves, and it is assigned a unique code, which we give to the driver. He crosses the border using this code, arrives in Ukraine, and unloads. But we can only see what has arrived when we have the cargo,” says Mariana Reva.
If something useless, overdue, or harmful arrives, dealing with these things becomes the task of charitable foundations.
Disposal at the expense of foundations
According to our interlocutors, medical waste disposal in EU countries is an expensive process. What should have been disposed of but was instead brought to Ukraine becomes a problem for Ukrainian charitable foundations. The legislation does not allow them to simply throw away useless things in the trash.
Only recently, the disposal procedure was standardized, making it possible for charitable foundations. However, they have to dispose of useless goods at their own expense.
“From April 2000, the Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 728 “On approval of the procedure for exporting outside Ukraine or destruction (removal) of substandard/unfit for consumption goods (items) of humanitarian aid” was in force. According to this resolution, in order to dispose of substandard or unfit for consumption humanitarian aid items, it was necessary to convene a commission at the level of representatives of ministries and departments, but there was no clear mechanism for who, how, and for how long should assemble this commission,” says Iryna Koshkina, executive director of the “SVOI” charitable foundation.
“The resolution was non-functional, the mechanism did not work, and foundations had to keep all this junk that had accumulated,” says Nataliia Lipska, head of the “Kryla Nadii” foundation. “We worked on the new resolution for three years.”
In 2025, the government amended the Procedure for utilization of substandard humanitarian aid. Now, the recipient of humanitarian aid, on whose balance sheet it is, independently creates a commission that conducts an inventory, draws up a corresponding act, and sends it to the regional administration within five days.
Within 10 working days, the regional administration sends a letter with a decision, granting consent or notifying of the need to create a commission for additional verification of the humanitarian aid to be destroyed. After the commission draws up an act, the regional administration will have 15 working days to grant consent or refuse disposal.
“Next, we find a company that will dispose of it for us, we receive a disposal certificate from them, based on which we make an internal deregistration certificate. After that, we report that we are deregistering humanitarian aid on a specific basis. And if it is a car that is registered, for example, then there must also be a deregistration certificate, it needs to be deregistered,” adds Nataliia Lipska.
This entire process should be funded by foundations or sponsors. In addition, the disposal of useless goods in Ukraine costs from 30 to 65 hryvnias per kilogram, says Lesia Lytvynova, co-founder of the “SVOI” charitable foundation.
“These are millions of hryvnias. Where can we get them? Charitable foundations do not make money. Charitable foundations collect donations. Shall we start fundraising campaigns for recycling useless things? So that people will give money to take to the trash things that were not taken to the trash in Europe?” Lesia Lytvynova is indignant.
In addition, only those organizations that have the appropriate license can destroy useless things, says Iryna Koshkina. “And we have medical waste, medical equipment with microcircuits, lithium batteries, etc. That is, this is especially hazardous waste,” she adds.
Each organization tries to solve the problem of useless things in its own way. Unusable blankets and mattresses, minimally expired food are given to animal shelters. Clothing and small things, such as children’s toys, are given to other charitable foundations. They try to repair broken medical equipment with own funds. And they are looking for funds for official disposal.
Thus, the head of the “Kryla Nadii” foundation, Nataliia Lipska, says that the foundation is currently trying to find an environmental organization that can help with money to dispose of useless things that they are currently keeping in their warehouses and garages.
A garbage dump for the whole world: how to fight against unscrupulous benefactors and useless cargo
According to our interlocutors, they had to stop communicating with unscrupulous donors from some countries. However, there is no way to prevent humanitarian aid from becoming a humanitarian disaster, says Lesia Lytvynova, co-founder of the “SVOI” charitable foundation:
“The culture of charity should be at a different level than it is now. One of the big problems, in my opinion, is the issue of dignity in charity. You should not give away something that you would not use for your loved ones.”
Lytvynova is convinced that it is impossible to legally solve the problem of useless goods entering Ukraine:
“The absolute majority of aid is secondary market, but there are a lot of working things on this market. If the aid is limited by the parameter that it must be new, it will completely destroy all aid. And if this is limited by the parameter that it must be working, then there should be experts at customs that determine this. Then the question arises: what competence should such a commission of experts have to evaluate everything that is sent to us?” says Lytvynova.
The best thing, according to the co-founder of the “SVOI” charitable foundation, is to ensure that those who send humanitarian aid and those who receive it do not do it in a chaotic manner.
“It is possible to check at the sending stage. It is possible not send something that you are not sure about. You can also ask if it is needed, if there will be anyone here to check it, and if there are spare parts for it,” says Lesia Lytvynova.
Nataliia Lipska, the head of the “Kryla Nadii” charitable foundation, has the same opinion. “At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I called everyone who sent us unspecified goods and said, “Don’t send this shit to us anymore,” and hung up, deliberately making them feel offended,” she recalls. “Because it is impossible to explain to people that we do not need it. Sometimes it is important for people not to help or to get rid of junk, but to participate in the process. In this case, they do not care what to send. They are happy that they sent three boxes of aid to Ukraine or two trucks. But this is not aid.”
“There are such concepts as conscious volunteering and constructive charity. It is important that people who are engaged in either volunteering or charity do it with the aim of doing some social good. It is not just bringing anything anywhere. You need to understand in advance why you are doing it, what your ultimate goal is,” continues Natalia, the head of the “Kryla Nadii”. “That is, if you need an ultrasound machine so that the wounded at the frontline medical point can have timely diagnostics, you have to clarify what characteristics are needed, what level of wear the equipment should have, what sensors it should have, you have to google what they look like. And it is better the device to be a tablet, because there is not much space at the frontline medical point. And, based on these characteristics, we communicate with the donor. It is not just, “There is some equipment. Will you take it?” – “Well, we will take it”. Because this is how we are becoming a garbage dump for the whole world.”
This publication was funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.