Cook For Ukraine Founders Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina Launch the Ukraine Hub in London

If anyone has kept the human cost of the war in Ukraine front and center in my mind over the last 18 months, it’s Olia Hercules, a chef whose cookbook, Mamushka: Recipes From Ukraine And Beyond, first introduced me (and countless others) to the likes of garlicky Pampushky, tsarka yushka—a broth laden with crayfish, dill and mushrooms—and dried fruit punch spiked with brandy and star anise back in 2015.

From last winter onwards, the Kakhovka-born, London-based chef has turned her Instagram over to updates about the conflict, interweaving political missives (when we speak, the Kakhovka dam has just ruptured, with disastrous consequences) with personal posts about the beauty of her mother country: mini essays about shopping for sour cherries and sweet melons on the side of the road in Voznesensk; studies of Ukrainian artists such as Polina Rayko and Tetjana Pata; videos taken of her family swimming in the waterlily-filled Dnipro River floodplains or roaming the sun-dappled pine forests surrounding her hometown.

But the 39-year-old is, of course, the furthest thing from a hashtag activist. Together with Russian chef Alissa Timoshkina, it’s the aptly named Hercules who founded the Cook for Ukraine movement within 48 hours of Putin’s invasion—raising millions of pounds to date. When I speak with Olia on a balmy June morning, her face is strained in the wake of the Nova Kakhovka incident, but she is, once again, turning her mind to the things she can do to help. This week, she and Timoshkina have launched The Ukraine Hub, a series of pop-up workshops in London that displaced Ukrainians will be able to attend free of charge, with ticket sales from non-Ukrainian guests helping to support future programming.

Part of the inspiration behind the project? Hercules’s own immediate family. “My mom is in exile—she left with my dad last April—and she ended up in Berlin. So, okay, she’s living in Germany, she’s doing a language course, but I could see how lonely she was. Losing everything—your home, your friends, your work—it’s so isolating. And so I thought, what if I offered some classes? In Ukrainian cooking, yes, but also other workshops. One of the things that’s helped me the most over the last year is doing things with my hands; it’s so therapeutic.” With the help of Timoshkina—whose support for the Ukrainian cause has been as indefatigable as Olia’s own—the pair began tapping into their considerable personal network to see who might be willing to host pop-ups, and were almost overwhelmed by the response.