Displaced by war, Ukrainian student and aid worker begins at Cornell

In the summer of 2023, Haiar Isliamov '28 found himself at the border between Poland and Ukraine with 10 trucks of food and clothing to deliver to the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine War. Commanders were on the phone demanding the supplies, hired drivers waited in the trucks, food was about to spoil - and Polish farmers had just set up a blockade.

Isliamov, then 17 years-old, managed to get the phone number of a lead organizer of the Polish blockade and appealed to his humanity.

"I told him this was for people who are suffering," said Isliamov, now a student in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. "I must have melted his heart, I don't know, but he let us through. We're very proud to say that we were the first nonprofit that was able to cross the border."

Isliamov, who immigrated with his family to North Carolina after Russia invaded in 2022, was back in Ukraine on behalf of a humanitarian effort he started with his older brother that has now funneled more than $1 million to the war effort - in the form of bulletproof vests and first-aid kits for journalists, and food, supplies and relocation services for displaced families.

That particular trip was one of more than 10 Isliamov made during his junior and senior years of high school. When it came time to apply to college, the Dyson School's motto, "Our business is a better world," caught and held his attention.

"I really, really connected with that," Isliamov said. "The curriculum that Dyson offers is about the interconnection between finance and the technical and market knowledge with the world application of this knowledge."

As he steps back from his nonprofit to focus on his studies, Isliamov plans to gain skills and experience in the U.S. that he can eventually bring back to Ukraine. He also hopes to connect his nonprofit and its partners with students at Cornell who are interested in Ukraine, humanitarian work or nonprofit operations.

"There are a lot of people in the U.S. who want to help, but they don't have a ready hand to do something," Isliamov said.

Heroism in the air

Isliamov himself was displaced by fighting twice, first in Crimea in 2014, when he was 9, and then again in 2022 in Kyiv, where frequent bombing forced him and his family into bunkers for a week or more at a time without enough food or water. After Isliamov left Kyiv in 2022, he and his brother, who was then an M.B.A. student at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, resolved to contribute.

"We wanted to do something, so we can tell ourselves that we're not just pawns in this game, being moved around and thrown around with our lives," he said.

Isliamov's father, who owns a media company in Crimea and is now a commander in the Ukrainian military, had already founded a nonprofit in 2013, Kuresh for Ukraine, to support independent journalism and refugees from Crimea. Isliamov and his brother, with help from other Duke students, began crowdfunding and applying for grant funds to grow the foundation's humanitarian work during the war. Isliamov led both the on-the-ground logistics in Ukraine and surrounding countries as well as grantwriting.

In the first months of the war, the group helped evacuate the families of journalists who wanted to stay to cover the war and worked with local media outlets to provide supplies for more than 70 journalists - body armor as well as first aid kits they could use on themselves or those they came across in their work.

Then the Isliamovs pivoted to providing food, clothing and general supplies to the front lines and to helping relocate more than 500 families displaced by the fighting - both those from war zones within Ukraine and Ukrainians who had been evacuated from Russian-occupied territories into Russia, the latter a complicated legal challenge.

Isliamov said his work with the nonprofit has been a crash course in donor relations, global markets and high-stakes negotiation - like the situation at the Poland-Ukraine border. But it has also made him committed to helping others.

An inflection point was in August of 2023, when he was relocating a 4-year-old girl and her mother from an area that had been invaded by Russian forces - the girl's father, a soldier, had been captured, and their small town was no longer safe. During the three days he spent with the girl and her mother, she would not smile.

"The majority of kids, even with what they're going through, are still kids, they still want to play around," Isliamov said. "But she was as serious as a brigade commander."

When they arrived at the apartment Isliamov's nonprofit had rented for the family in western Ukraine, Isliamov saw the girl playing with a cat outside, in a much more peaceful setting. And she was finally smiling.

"I'm not a sentimental person, but that really got to me," he said. "That's a time when I was like, 'this is what I want to do with my life.'"

At Cornell, Isliamov is looking forward to using his studies to continue to think about how to effect positive change in his home country.

"The war has been a tipping point for a lot of people in my generation," he said. "When you go there, you can feel the air is filled with heroism. The front line is filled with the purest souls of Ukraine. And you just feel yourself motivated further and further."

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