A €20,000 pickup truck crosses from Estonia into Ukraine. It's outfitted with night vision, a drone jammer, and mud tires for off-road conditions. Within a week, it might be burning wreckage on the Kursk border.
That's the reality facing volunteer convoys that now supply 95% of Ukraine's military logistics vehicles. The award-winning documentary No Sleep Til Kyiv, released globally on YouTube on 21 January, captures one such convoy—and the fragile pipeline keeping Ukrainian units mobile across 1,000 kilometers of front line.
Why this matters now
The film arrives during one of Ukraine's darkest periods. Kyiv—the convoy's final destination—woke up cold and dark again this week after Russia launched over 300 drones at power infrastructure. The city the volunteers drove to in the film is freezing as Russia weaponizes the winter frost to terrorize Ukrainians into submission.
Meanwhile, US President Trump's encroachment on Greenland has fractured and distracted the NATO Alliance, endangering the weapons pipeline to Ukraine. His hasty attempts to broker a pro-Russian peace deal were rejected by the Kremlin. Russia continues a creeping advance, leaving demolished cities in its wake.
And yet, Ukraine fights on.
“I think this film is being released right now because Ukraine is facing one of the darkest moments of this war — not only because of shelling and the lack of energy, heat, and water caused by missile attacks, but also because of the global political climate. Attention is shifting elsewhere, while Ukraine continues to fight for its survival,” said Dimitri Nasennik, creative producer of the film.
Meanwhile, drone warfare has transformed logistics into a bloodsport. Vehicles are lost at a rate of 1,000 a month. The same drones that destroy trucks also force Ukrainian units to disperse, requiring more vehicles to move fewer troops.
"We are losing them every day, in big numbers," a drone operator with the 47th Mechanized Brigade told Euromaidan Press in November, after surviving a direct FPV hit that killed his driver and totaled their SUV.
What the film shows
No Sleep Til Kyiv follows American volunteer Peter Duke and the 69th Sniffing Brigade on their 30-hour marathon drive from Tallinn to Kyiv.
The Brigade is part of NAFO—the North Atlantic Fellas Organization—an internet community that emerged in 2022 to counter Russian propaganda with memes, then evolved into a real-world volunteer network. What started as online mockery of Kremlin talking points became fundraising drives, vehicle convoys, and direct support to Ukrainian units.
Since March 2022, the 69th Sniffing Brigade has delivered nearly 670 trucks to Ukrainian forces. Each vehicle—typically a second-hand diesel pickup—gets outfitted with night vision cameras, drone jammers, and mud tires for off-road conditions. The trucks arrive packed with FPV drones, medical kits, sleeping bags, and sometimes personal touches: Belgian chocolates, tourniquets, trench candles.
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But the film isn't just about trucks. The convoy visits Irpin and Bucha—sites of Russian war crimes in 2022—where Duke confronts the gap between reading about atrocities and standing in their aftermath. Interwoven throughout are stories of ordinary Ukrainians: people who paused careers to defend their homes, or found new purpose volunteering for soldiers and displaced families.
Duke, a Florida homebuilder, joined his first convoy in February 2023. He sees parallels to America's 1776 fight for independence: a nation seeking self-determination against a colonial power it cannot defeat alone.
"Ukraine is the dam holding back Russia from flooding into Europe," Duke said. "The war may not be in the daily news cycle anymore, but that doesn't mean the threat has diminished."
No sleep til Kyiv—and no rest until Putin’s empire falls, says Florida man delivering trucks, drones and Belgian chocolates to Ukraine
Watch and support
No Sleep Til Kyiv is available free on YouTube. Find out more about the film on its official website.
It has won awards at the Crown Point International Film Festival, Kollywood International Film Festival, and
Makizhmithran International Film FestivalTamizhagam International Film Festival.
To support the 69th Sniffing Brigade's ongoing convoy operations: linktr.ee/NSTK_donation
