What can we pencil-pushers do for Ukraine?

By the time our papers are done, the sun is up, and birds are chirping. Crossing the border to Ukraine with six cars has taken all night. During the coming weeks, mechanics will remodel the 4x4s for the front, and volunteers will repack boxes in line with hospital and front-unit needs.

To me, as a Swede, one group of professionals is conspicuously absent on the volunteer side of this operation — administrators.

This makes me uneasy. Who will dot the i's and cross the t's? Who will file the reports? Where is the evaluation form asking me to rate the experience between one and five? There is hardly any paperwork. Instead, my directives for the trip were basically "Here is your proof of ownership, here is your ferry ticket, and here are the car keys. Bye-bye!"

But it works. And with pragmatism like this yielding real results, is there any need for administrators at all? A joint Swedish-Ukrainian academic think-fest in mid-May gave that question a whole bunch of convincing answers, almost all of them having to do with the scale of the task at hand.

The conference was held in two hubs simultaneously — Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv and Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. Its headline was "Building Peace and Democracy in Ukraine: Civil Society, Institutions, and Economic Reconstruction."

For two days, participants lined up one professional group after another with the agency, will, and skills to contribute. There are researchers who crunch data to get the facts straight. There are historians who identify which myths have traditionally led to violence, ensuring the lessons we learn are about "never again" rather than "we can repeat".

Lawyers work for accountability for war crimes, the payment of reparations, and transparency rules. There are diplomats who speak EU-ish and can loosen purse strings. Civil society provides educators in civics to engage the youth, election workers, and grassroots activists who, in a pinch, can organize a rally.

Software developers give us ProZorro, ePidtrymka, and the Dignity Index, not to mention the alert apps that keep Ukrainians safe. System designers and programmers developed the lightning-fast military procurement chain and the efficiency-focused e-points incentive structure for soldiers.

Often these people are knowledge workers who sit hunched over keyboards at two in the morning, fueled by cold coffee and aspirin, stringing together loophole-proof texts that won't grab headlines, but that have teeth. Sentences you can base an international arrest warrant on, freeze an organization's assets with, or use to convince a group of nations to get behind a sanctions package.

They are the unsung heroes of a just society. They should also get points for something. Or at least hot coffee. Because the reconstruction phase that the Swedish-Ukrainian conference dealt with, provided it develops favorably for Ukraine, will require even more of these people. The national scale can't be managed efficiently by the grassroots.

Instead, we will need cool-headed administrators to ensure that all these efforts can be managed nationwide.

And there certainly needs to be someone who makes sure entrepreneurs – civilian and military – get to keep the fruit of their efforts. Clean bureaucrats, legal administrators, civil-rights activists, and the media.

You will have noticed that I keep writing "we" even though I am not Ukrainian. I am Swedish. I work with civil defense communications for a regional government. In my spare time, I try to stand up for human rights as best I can. And right now, ground zero for that fight is Ukraine.

When we, hopefully very soon, no longer need active soldiers in that fight, it will be government and civil society desk warriors who carry on by other means. With arguably weaker arms but sharp minds and tongues.

In the best of worlds, they will also be smart enough to know when to get involved and when to get out of the way. The nurse picking up our supplies at a depot in Volhynia doesn't need supervision, for example.

But coordinating the needs of the whole oblast's health services does. For this, you need coordinators and administrators to increase efficiency, avoid grift, comply with public safety standards, and ensure equitable health care.

Smothering our all-night border crossing in self-imposed paperwork would only have sapped our NGO enthusiasm.

On the other hand, the paperwork the customs and border control officers put us through was entirely appropriate, since they were working at a higher level.

For us, we were one group of cars crossing at one moment in time. For them, our crossing was a small part of a nationwide effort to gather data on the thousands of people crossing Ukraine's borders every day. Hence, the need for paperwork.

In short, grassroots efforts can move more quickly without bureaucracy. Large-scale management and restructuring can't. So, depending on what you're trying to achieve during reconstruction, making friends now with a few administrative pencil-pushers might well be a master move.

You can start with a cup of hot coffee.

Editor's note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.