Some are in disbelief at the war, others are afraid, but there are thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have decided to help their army defend the country from the Russian invasion.
Citizens responded to the call from the country’s government, which has a military force and a population significantly smaller than Russia’s.
Many resorted to so-called molotov cocktails, homemade incendiary bombs made of flammable substances in a glass container.
Images of ordinary people dedicated to the manufacture of these explosives traveled the world.
With them and other state-provided weapons, civilians helped defend major Ukrainian cities such as Kiev or Kharkiv, still under Ukrainian control.
The Defense Ministry even gave guidance on its social media on how to use them against Russian army vehicles.
These “home bombs” have a surprising origin — and their name comes from a former dignitary of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who was the protagonist of another military conflict.
Who was Molotov?
Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, of Russian nationality and born with the surname Scriabin, was Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR twice, between 1939-1949 and 1953-1956.
Born in 1890 to middle-class parents, he was since 1906 part of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which later became the Communist Party of the USSR.
According to the Wilson Center in the United States, he was a collaborator with Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin in the 1917 revolution, which led to the downfall of the Tsarist dynasty and inaugurated the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
He later held various positions in the party, such as secretary of the Central Committee and leadership of the Party Committee in Moscow.
This last position, according to the Wilson Center, was achieved after participating in the so-called “purge” of the Soviet Communist Party, a process of persecution of Stalin’s opponents.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
However, he is best known for signing — as Commissar of Foreign Affairs — the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939, a non-aggression treaty between Stalin’s USSR and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
The agreement, according to various sources, also contained an agreement between both powers to divide their conquest interests in Poland and the rest of Europe.
Unafraid of provoking the USSR, in September 1939 the Nazi government attacked Poland, an invasion that led to World War II.
The Soviets, in turn, invaded Finland in November of the same year, in what became known as the Winter War.
It was in this conflict that Molotov cocktails gained fame.
The Winter War and Homemade Bombs
A review of the book “A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940” by historian William Trotter explains why Finnish soldiers named their homemade bombs “Molotov cocktails”.
Molotov diplomat, on Soviet radio, said that his country’s army during the conflict did not drop bombs on Finnish territory, but “supplies and food”.
With his words, the soldiers began sarcastically to call the Soviet bombings “Molotov picnic baskets”.
They later adopted the name for their own makeshift bombs.
The origin of Molotov cocktails predates, however — there are records of the use of these explosives, for example, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.
Now, Molotov cocktails are back in the news as the Ukrainian people resist the Russian invasion.
Read more on the BBC
