INTERVIEW: Kostyantyn Bevz discusses Motorsport UK’s Pinzgauer for Ukraine, the West and invasion

As the Russian invasion continues, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) could use all the help they can get, even from the unlikeliest of sources. Motorsport UK (MSUK) was one of these contributors, raising money to purchase a Steyr-Puch Pinzgauer 6×6 armoured ambulance that went to the 46th Airmobile Brigade on the frontlines in Kurakhove in September.

The effort was organised and coordinated with the Automobile Federation of Ukraine (FAU), a fellow FIA member club, under the watch of Kostyantyn Bevz. A member of the FAU Rally and Officials Committees, Kos was the first Ukrainian to serve as an FIA steward for a World Championship event when he oversaw the World Rally-Raid Championship‘s Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in February and March.

The Checkered Flag spoke with Kos about the Pinzgauer, the Western world’s support—and lack of—for Ukraine, and the importance of knowing history in order to fight back against Russian disinformation.

Pinzgauer for Ukraine

The seeds that would grow into the Pinzgauer were first planted in the early months of the war. Shortly after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Kos reached out to his FIA stewards to see how they could help, and Britain’s Andy Milns was up for the task.

“We started the conversation regarding what we can do with the motorsport society of UK to bring some aid to Ukraine,” he began. “Andy Milns found a review from one of the magazines that the UK embassy in Ukraine decided to purchase, order, and deliver armoured ambulances from a UK manufacturer.”

The idea of buying a Pinzgauer was then pitched to Motorsport UK chairman and Prodrive owner David Richards CBE. Following “certain deliberation, they decided to join the same programme and start the fundraising process.”

Pinzgauers were first developed by the Austrian manufacturer Steyr-Puch in 1971, though the final eight years of its production were done in the UK by BAE Systems and its subsidiaries. Venari Group, who was tasked with doing the upgrades for the FAU/MSUK order, specialises in converting off-road trucks like the Pinzgauer into armoured emergency vehicles; the Goole-based company had also helped in donating fourteen Pinzgauers to Ukraine in partnership with the Embassy of Ukraine for Belgium and Luxembourg in March 2023.

A GoFundMe was launched in May with the goal of raising £100,000. Richards, who also runs Prodrive, was the first and biggest donor when he provided £25,000. Others to join included the British Motorsport Trust and Association of Motorsport Recovery Operators, various racing clubs across the United Kingdom, and even the village of Duns Tew.

As the months progressed, however, things seemed to hit a snag for unknown reasons.

“In half a year, something changed and I was updated that we won’t be able to pick up the vehicle from the manufacturer,” he explained. “Maybe because it’s a long queue there or something else, I don’t know. But if you have somebody who is willing to help you, you will not push him too much because you will be happy if he will follow his intentions.

“We also had examples when the people were saying that they will bring something or they were declaring that they want to do something, but in the end, their intentions disappeared. You cannot blame the people that they didn’t do something that they said before, because it’s life. Today, you have one situation and next day, you will have another situation.”

Hoping to streamline the process, MSUK “started a collaboration” with Fynn Watt. A rallycross driver from Oxfordshire, Watt and his peers have donated over 130 vehicles to Ukrainian medical services including ambulances, pickup trucks, and SUVs as part of Driving Ukraine. With his help, the Pinzgauer was placed on display at Flywheel on Bicester Heritage in June 2023, which drummed up additional funding. By September, the fundraiser succesfully reached its goal.

“They purchased the truck, sent it to service, and then started the most “interesting’ thing,” Kos remarked. “It took about one year to manage all the export paperwork and permission to drive that vehicle through European countries. As soon as it was managed, the truck left to Ukraine.”

The Pinzgauer arrived in Lviv in early September, then was driven to Kyiv to be picked up by the 46th Brigade and its medical crew. The unit is among those leading the defence of Kurakhove, a city in Donetsk that has been besieged by Russian forces since July.

Bulletproof Angels, a documentary by Ivan Yasniy about Ukraine’s frontline paramedics that will also focus on the Pinzgauer, is in the post-production stages.

“I suppose it’s already on the battlefield near Kurakhove, one of the most difficult directions for this moment,” said Kos. “This movie will be finished quite soon because they filmed the last part of it with the car, with all the volunteers, with me, with Fynn, with medics who received that vehicle. So this movie is now almost ready and quite soon it will hit the screens.

“I will try to speak with David Richards, who did a huge effort to bring this vehicle. I will speak to him, maybe we will be able to run another fundraising programme or something like this. This is our story.”

The West and Ukraine

The invasion was widely denounced almost from the start, especially among the Western world. A week after 24 February 2022, the FIA clamped down with measures stipulating Russian and Belarusian drivers must agree to condemn the war and not display their country’s emblems in order to compete in international races. Despite protests from both nations, the rule remains in place today.

A litany of FIA member clubs also quickly rallied together to donate supplies or provide services like free roadside assistance for those transporting goods to Ukraine.

Although those were certainly welcome gestures at the time, Kos revealed that only three FIA National Sporting Authorities (ASNs) have “really made a dedicated help” to the FAU since then: Motorsport UK, the Österreichische Automobil-, Motorrad- und Touringclub of Austria, and the Croatian Automobile & Karting Federation. The Baltic states’ ASNs as well as Germany’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club have also offered a helping hand, the latter via the ÖAMTC.

Otherwise, Western Europe as a whole seems to be more hesitant in helping to Ukraine, part of which stems from the fear that Russia—a nuclear power—might retaliate. As ironic as it sounds, being so far away from the front plays a role in stoking this worry.

Countries in the West are not at immediate risk if Russia were to invade the continent unlike their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe (which were in the Soviet sphere during the Cold War), hence the latter often being the biggest proponents of providing military hardware for the AFU. Lithuania, for example, has been such a champion for Ukraine that rally raiders Antanas Juknevičius, Benediktas Vanagas, and Vaidotas Žala were tasked with leading a nationwide drive to donate first aid kits in June 2023; Vanagas has also sent vehicles and even tyres used at the Dakar Rally to Ukrainian troops.

Conversely, the further west Kos travels, the more he senses people don’t get the gravity of the situation.

“They’re always asking, ‘What is going on? Why it happens like this? What do they want from you? How it looks like?’ I catch myself on the thought that despite all my conversation, despite all my explanations, showing videos, footage showing the missiles flying to the child hospital, for all the people, it will be something which is very far away,” he recalled, referring to the Russian air strike on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv in July. “Even if it was only 500 kilometres from them or 100 kilometres or 1,000, it’s too far away, it’s a movie, it is not the reality.

“It’s very awful that people are dying, but all the people, they can imagine that they can absorb that information but they will never understand what is going on.”

As the war continues and Western hesitance persists, there is the very real possibility of aid being too little, too late. The United States in particular has been one of Ukraine’s largest suppliers, though deadlock in Congress and hesitance from President Joe Biden‘s administration have stymied weapons deliveries.

“To be honest, we stand against Russia because of the help from the United States,” Kos began. “But all these three years, we have a strong feeling that the amount of aid which we are receiving right now is just enough aid to keep our body alive because we had a strong chance to throw away Russians from our territory, but everybody was too scared to give us enough weapons in 2022 to throw them away from Ukraine.

“In the United States, you have thousands of Abrams standing somewhere in the deserts, in the warehouses. It’s old tanks for you, it can be crucial and vital for Ukraine, and nobody sends it. When you have thousands of F-16s also standing in warehouses and able to join the forces of defence, we still have test units for six or ten units or something like this.

“You cannot imagine how many war machines Russia throws every day into Ukraine. Today, officially, we have 650,000 killed Russian soldiers. 650 thousand. We don’t calculate the wounded and we don’t calculate disabled soldiers, how they became after the war action.

“They’re preparing for something else. Probably they want to make Russia weaker with Ukrainian help, but now they’re making Russia stronger, and then they will have a mad bear which they have to disable. For now, it looks like nobody wants to make a decision and they are really happy with this war because they’re having bigger incomes.”

Although Russian casualties are staggering, the fighting has taken a massive toll on the AFU as well. TCF‘s interview with Kos came five days after he attended a funeral for his friend Oleksandr Kukhtin, whose unit was killed by an artillery bombardment on 14 December 2023 and he went unidentified until the end of September. From the motorsport realm, Ukrainian Trophy-Raid Championship regulars Andriy Gusev, Volodymyr Giba, and Mykhailo Svirgun, and kart racers Volodymyr Chernysh, Kyrylo Demidov, and Mykhailo Kravchenko have died in combat.

For those wishing to contribute despite lacking legislative authority, Kos urges for donations to be made to UNITED24. Launched in May 2022 by the Ukrainian government, UNITED24 is a fundraising platform with opportunities to donate to fields like defence, demining, medical aid, rebuilding, and education. Many celebrities including non-Ukainians like actor Mark Hamill, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, adventurer Bear Grylls, and historian Timothy D. Snyder, are ambassadors for it; Hamill, of Star Wars fame, also lends his voice as Luke Skywalker to the English-language Ukrainian air raid alert app.

“We need drones, we need ammo, we need tourniquets, we need everything to save our lives and help our soldiers to fight, and we need to help people who lost their houses and so on,” Kos continued. “If anybody is wishing to help Ukraine, this is the best way now if you cannot help us get the weapons, because weapons is the only language which Russia can understand. No way.”

Staying Educated

“Study history. Look at how it was, take a look in the future because you will never have a future if you don’t remember your past.”

– Kostyantyn Bevz

Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s rationale for launching the so-called “special military operation” is based on assertions that analysts note do not hold under scrutiny. While the claim that the invasion was to “denazify” Ukraine is perhaps the most prominent, another revolves around irredentism and the belief that Russia should reclaim territory that was once under its control as the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

This narrative is frequently repeated by pro-invasion figures such as 2022 Russian Rally-Raid Champion Anton Melnikov, who wrote a scatching blog post about TCF‘s coverage of him and other rally raiders donating supplies to Russian soldiers in occupied Ukrainian territory; Melnikov incorrectly referred to the TCF writer as a Chinese national living in Britain and challenged him to learn about the atrocities that Imperial Japan perpetrated against the Chinese people during the Second World War (for the record, the author is a Vietnamese-American in America and a history major currently attaining his master’s degree in World War II Studies). Vadim Pritulyak, a Ukrainian Dakar Rally veteran, defended TCF by calling Melnikov a “pseudo-historian” and an “utter chort” who once wrote to him, “We are an empire. It is up to us to decide where our borders will be.”

Both Russia and Ukraine trace their ancestry to the kingdom of Kyivan Rus’ in the ninth century, with Kyiv being founded in 482 CE and Moscow in 1147, though their specific views on their lineages afterwards clash. In an highly publicised interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin claimed Ukraine has “no historical connection” to regions that currently make up the eastern and southern parts of the country. Various historians like Snyder question Putin’s historiography, while Kos believes the Kremlin’s obsession with reclaiming its 18th-century past, especially by force, has held back the country’s development.

“Ukraine made Russia,” Kos started. “If we take all our history, Kyiv is a 1,550-year-old city. Moscow was born because of Kyiv, because the Kyiv king (Yuri Dolgorukiy) established Moscow 800 years ago. It’s not Ukraine, a small part of Russia; it’s Russia, the bad son of Ukraine, unfortunately.

“What I see for myself: in the beginning of the 20th century, when the First World War came and the Russian Empire split and the Bolsheviks and communists came, they started this war. When the world was on their pace to develop themselves, the Russian Empire and all the involved countries rolled back for 100 years when in the 20th century, everybody was developing. The Soviet Union was staying on the same level of mental development because they were living in the paradigm of empire of the past.

“Now, when you come to Europe, when you come to the U.S., when you come to any other developed country, you see that the countries are investing money in better living, technology, hospitality, infrastructure, education, science. Russia was investing money in weapons and dreaming how to restore the empire. But in the 21st century, empire doesn’t mean anything.”

Despite this, hesitance to take action as discussed earlier remains in the West, which Kos suggested is because of a “big problem with tolerance.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, much of the world made efforts to normalise relations with what is now the Russian Federation in the hope that it would develop into a Western-like democracy.

However, when Russia shifted to a more aggressive foreign policy under Putin in the late 2000s, Western states were left trying to salvage their ties. On the other hand, countries that were behind the Iron Curtain tried to sound the alarm to little success. For instance, the former Soviet republic of Georgia is increasingly in favour of joining NATO and the European Union in the wake of Russia’s 2008 invasion to take South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and protests started on Monday amidst reports of Russian meddling in last weekend’s parliamentary election. Likewise, Ukrainians who were previously content with their ties to Russia shifted towards a pro-Western stance following the Maidan and Russian occupation of Crimea.

Crimea’s annexation is considered a violation of international law and therefore unrecognised by many, while the Kremlin line insists it was the will of the populace following a referendum. Over ninety-seven percent of the vote was in favour of being part of Russia, though it was conducted under the eye of occupational troops and following the exodus of much of the population. This also extends to the Russian takeover of the Donbas after the Maidan.

“Crimea has never been Russian except in the 19th century when they won the Crimean War. No village name is in Russian or Ukrainian. Everything is in Tatarian: Mangup-Kale, Chufut-Kale, and so on,” Kos explained. “Moscow was established by Kyiv. Donbas, which they say is a ‘truly Russian’ region, is a Ukrainian region in which during the Soviet Union, people all around Russia were brought to work on the coal mines and that’s how it became Russian. All in the 20th-century Soviet Union and before in the 18th century, in the 19th century, all their kings and queens and all the rest of the militaries that were trying to forbid Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature, they were burning their books, forbidding to teach scholars, to teach students and children in schools in Ukrainian language with Ukrainian language.

“Unfortunately, they want to kill us for the last 300 years because they’re still in history and Kyiv is a vital point to fulfill their history.”

In a follow-up message, Kos emphasised Russian contempt for Ukrainians by discussing the Holodomor, a man-made famine that resulted in the deaths of millions but was covered up during the Soviet era. Multiple countries as well as the European Parliament recognise it as a genocide.

“They starved Ukrainians and simply killed them by their wish,” he wrote. “Just remember Holodomor, when Moscow managed a planned confiscation of the grain harvest and all other food products from the peasants by representatives of the Soviet authorities during the Holodomor of 1932–33 directly led to the killing of peasants by starvation on a scale of millions, while the Soviet authorities had significant stocks of grain in reserves and exported it abroad during the Holodomor. They prohibited and blocked the departure of the starving outside the Ukrainian SSR, refused to accept aid for the starving from abroad.

“Despite the fact that the actions of the representatives of the Stalinist government, which caused people to die of starvation, were qualified according to the norms of the Soviet criminal legislation of that time as murder, the causes of this mass crime were never investigated in the USSR, and none of the powerful people involved in the crime did not suffer punishment despite the fact that even the highest leadership of the USSR knew about the facts of the deaths of people from hunger. Demographers estimate that the total number of Holodomor victims is 3–7 million people. For decades, the mass murder of people by artificial starvation was not only deliberately hushed up by the Soviet authorities, but it was also forbidden to mention it anywhere.”

Yet these events, along with pro-Russian forces shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, did not move the needle in the West out of fear for retaliation:

“When we cannot say that grey is grey and black is black and white is white, we start to say, ‘Uh, it’s obviously not so certain as you think for the moment.’ You start to bring some wording which does not belong to the situation. If you see the blood on your finger, you can say, ‘Oh, it’s blood. No, no, no, no, no… Maybe some video effects or somebody painted your finger. Let’s make a working group and let’s discuss what is going on.’ No, it doesn’t work like this.

“In 2014, Russians knocked down that Malaysian Boeing in Ukraine, we thought, ‘That’s the end. Now the war is finished.’ But then Europe started to blew like, sorry for my frank wording, ‘It’s not so certain. We have to develop it. We have to discover it, we have to take a deeper look.’ No.

“We finished the Second World War. We finished that war because we had the people who had their point of view and who had the possibility to call the things with their proper names. Till the world will not call it war, till the world will continue to purchase something from Russia, till the world will tolerate Russians, till the world will allow them to do whatever they want and till they will be so scary as they are for this moment, I can say that there is no scare to Russians. Anybody should not scare them.

“It’s like a bear coming into town and you say, ‘Okay, just wait. Take my hand, eat it, and don’t touch anybody else.’ He will take your hand, he will take your body, he will take your neighbour, he will take whatever he wants, what he sees. Unfortunately, the world decided to speak with barbarians, with tolerance and with intelligence. It doesn’t work like this.”

Kos is also bemused by the Kremlin’s argument about Ukrainian Nazis as justification for the war, and he drew parallels between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Nazi German propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“Sometimes we joke that Mr. Goebbels is spinning in his coffin when he sees how the Russian government with Putin, with Lavrov, is twisting the history and telling the bullshit and true lies in the eyes and ears of people who listen to them, and how Goebbels’ often-repeated lies become truths,” he began. “They do the same now. They call Ukrainians as Nazis, but we never had any problems with any language, with any religion, with anything.

“Ukrainian restaurants are one of the best in Europe. We are one of the most developed countries in the digital area. We have one of the best army of IT programmers and so on who work to make life better. We have plenty of people who develop in the media, Google, and other countries because they came from Ukraine or they were born in Ukraine. They want to steal our history and they want to rewrite our history and they are doing it right now.”

Kos stressed the importance of educating oneself on history and global affairs to better understand the conflict, which in turn would reduce the tolerance for Russia’s behaviour and hopefully inspire genuine action.

This can be a difficult process, especially in the West after years of trying to cozy up to Russian culture. Russian soft power, a doctrine of pushing the country’s values onto others without being coercive, also pervades much of European society. The Silk Way Rally, one of the largest rally raids in the world, is an example of this concept as the Silk Way Rally Association has hoped to bring the race through nearby countries to develop closer relations and influence their politics. Soft power can also be as subtle as unconsciously reinforcing societal biases like normalising Russian spellings of certain terms (Kiev rather than Kyiv, etc.) or associating anything remotely Slavic with Russia.

“Study history,” he stated. “Look at how it was, take a look in the future because you will never have a future if you don’t remember your past. Analyse history, look at the roots, and try to make certain decisions, not about ‘We will tolerate it and everything will be fine.’ No, Crimea showed us that tolerance doesn’t work. The situation in Georgia, in Abkhazia, showed us that tolerance doesn’t work. Syria showed us the same. Libya showed us the same.

“The war in Europe, it’s not a war in countries with plenty of natural resources where some big countries have their interests and they just split in the countries without taking people into account. We have to name it how it is. For example, that war in Syria and war in Libya, it’s not about the independence of people, it’s about the resources and how the big countries and the big corporations are trying to share their parts. But now, the war in Ukraine where we don’t have as much resources as Syria or Libya, now it’s the war for philosophy. It’s the war, the matter of what is to bring the Stone Age in our lives and the life of Europe.

“I just want to wish that people will be more considerable, people will think more, and people will understand that uncertain positions bring a lot of deaths.”

This emphasis on learning is especially vital in the Internet age. Russia is notorious for its use of online troll farms and disinformation campaigns to stoke political and social tensions overseas. As a result, sentiment directly supportive of the invasion, mainly espoused by those pejoratively known as “tankies” and ostensibly in the name of peace, is not entirely uncommon in the West.

In response, social media movements such as NAFO (the North Atlantic Fella Organization) strive to counter Russian propaganda just as much as academics. Likewise, Kos noted “everything is bullshit” that comes from the pro-Russian camp.

“Now, it’s much easier to twist history because you can say, ‘Oh, that source there, that newspaper, that book,'” Kos concluded. “You can write that book and then you will reference that book and you will go and write some bullshit and then you will say, ‘That book and that newspaper,’ that you paid for the posting in that newspaper, references that you did this, this, this, and it will not be a truth.

“When I was in Austria one month ago, on my way from Bordeaux to Czech, I brought a gift to the Austrian club. It is the photobook How We Pass Through the Fire. That photobook is the collection of the best photos made from the first two years of war by national and international photographers. I talked to Eva-Maria (Kerschl, of the ÖAMTC), I said, ‘You know, history can be twisted because we don’t know who will win the war, but the photos will keep the reality. And photos will make the reference for the future generations.'”