The Work to Make Soldiers Work: Civilian Engagement in Support of the Ukrainian Army

Since February 2022 the Ukrainian army has been resisting the Russian invasion; this defense would have been less effective without material and logistical support from civil society. While HCI and CSCW have examined ICT in crises, little addresses how civilian–military cooperation is enacted in interstate war and how civilians appropriate commercial technologies into military infrastructures. We report an interview study with observations (N=13) conducted in Lviv during the first five months of the full-scale invasion (Feb–Jul 2022). Our findings show how civilians performed largely invisible work to make soldiers’ work possible: they circumvented broken supply chains, fundraised through digital micro-donation tools, re-engineered commercial drones and software into command-and-control workflows, and joined early cyber and counter-information operations. We contribute to CSCW by theorizing this civilian engagement as wartime infrastructuring and appropriation under extreme risk, and by detailing methodological implications for conducting cooperative-work research in hybrid-war settings.