Back from the Donbass (I'm Back!)

Hello everybody, I hope you are all doing well. I haven't posted on here in ages, but filming the war in Ukraine has somewhat taken over most aspects of my life. I didn't expect for this war to happen in the first place, and I especially did not expect to travel to Ukraine and spend half a year here. I was only supposed to be in Ukraine for a month or two, but this work has fulfilled me in a way that basically none of my other work online has. This is on top of the fact that I have made a lot of friends here who I feel incredibly close to, and have grown to care a decent amount about in a short period of time. It's easy for that to happen in this environment. This has helped reinvigorate my original ideological and journalistic reasons for coming to Ukraine, and has kept me very interested in my work on the ground here. I plan to stay to at least October, when I plan to head back to the states to visit family, and possibly speak at a few conferences (nothing is concrete yet). 

I hope you guys understand why it has been hard for me to keep Patreon updates and posts active during this hectic and very busy time period. Between all of the traveling, set-up, safety preparations, etc, the Patreon just always seemed to slip through my mind. With all of this happening I also had to stop doing movie nights, never got to do any of the AMA's, and even saw the end of my flagship show: The Hippy Dippy Roundtable. There has really been so much change since my last update here, hell, I even just released my new website https://www.dylanburns.tv/ where you can access a live chat for streams, have access to all of my platforms. So I am viewing this as kind of like my official re-launch of my Patreon, where I start promoting it again and make a strong commitment to keep you guys updated and give you all access to any behind the scenes photos, videos, thoughts, and more that you guys might be interested in. I really want to work hard on this, so any suggestions to make this Patreon better for all you guys who are supporting the channel and making all of this possible would be appreciated. 

So here are some of the immediate changes I will be making so that Patreon better reflects the current state of my content and community. Obviously, with the end of Hippy Dippy having Patreon supporters name appear at the end of it will no longer be offered as a reward. I am changing this to every video we release on DylanBurnsTV, which will also help us better promote the Patreon. As I have already hinted towards, photos and videos from behind the scenes here in Ukraine will also be posted here anytime I find the opportunity to post photos that were not posted publicly due to any number of reasons, or I may repost photos and videos and try to give more context that was left out in the released version. Sadly, movie nights at dead in the water for time being. I just don't have the time to reserve one day a week to movie nights at the moment. I will say that the 500$ Patreon goal includes hopefully hiring a community manager, who would possibly be able to schedule community movie nights in the discord. So there is hope! And lastly private Q & A's/Calls for the top donors (Mover and Shaker Role) will start early next month. 

The photos that I have posted above are of a trip I came back from a few weeks ago to the Donbass to film the delivery of aid, and film in Kramatorsk. I was with my good friends Filip, Pawel (who are both from Poland and on the right side of the first picture), and Patrick. I Have also filmed with them on the Zaparoshia frontline and in Bucha, both of those videos are already available here: https://youtu.be/YIwFkBXYDp0 and https://youtu.be/TlMoTbP0y8s

One of the interesting things I noticed about the aid we were delivering (picture above) is that a good bit of the aid was actually from Taiwan. A decent amount of it was Polish, which is not a surprise a lot of the aid in Ukraine is from Polish groups, but I had not seen aid from Asia before. I've seen posts online about aid coming from Taiwan, but it was still a pleasant surprise to see it in person and play some small role in delivering it. I have seen a lot of Taiwanese people supporting Ukraine, more on average than other nations in Asia, and I do think that they find themselves in a situation that is very relatable to what the Ukrainians have been going through over the last 8 years. There also seems to be a lot of ideological commitment to Democracy from a lot of the Taiwanese community that is supporting Ukraine, not just the run of the mil humanitarian response. Ukrainian Democracy is very young and fragile, and this war threaten to kill it in its early developmental stages. That is very relatable to the Taiwanese, who only had their first democratic elections in the 90s. 

The older looking man who is in many of those photos posted above is a Ukrainian medic who has served in one capacity or another since the start of the war in the Donbass in 2014. The guy was a real character. He did not speak any English, and we had to ask those with much more familiarity of the language about what he was saying, but he was so expressive. While he was trying to express how certain incendiary weapons have been used, he took out his lighter made motions with his hand to show how the fire would spread during combat. We got at least 1-2 hours of this guy talking along with other soldiers after we got trapped at the aid drop off point after our route out was targeted by the Russian military during the night. We ended up spending the night, and he made sure to keep us company until we passed out telling us stories long into the night. He also took us to the sight of a Russian missile strike that killed 8 civilians the next day, which I have also posted photos of above along with the missiles serial number which was among the rubble. The most interesting fact about this guy is that he has a religious objection to using weapons, and so he saves lives by using a bullet proof shield to cover himself as he runs into danger to retrieve the wounded. He does this all without a weapon. His devotion to his religion was most obvious to me when I woke up after spending the night at the aid drop off because he was blasting religious hymns on a small speaker. 

Excited to release the footage of my time filming in the Donbass, but it will probably take some time to release it, since I already have so much other footage that I have to release. 

Thanks again for your support,

Слава Україні