Interview & deep dive · 7 min

How NESEMOS Veteran Auto Hub creates a business, jobs & perspectives amidst war

The NESEMOS service station: a white workshop building with a glass canopy and the NESEMOS sign, and a courtyard with cars.

During a visit to Kyiv in May 2025, our Chairman Martin Vogelsang met NESEMOS in person and was impressed by the clarity and simplicity of their business model. Since then, Social Synergy Deutschland has been supporting the founder Mariia Ksondzyk and her team in further developing their model as well as in fundraising. In February 2026, Mariia joined a panel at Café Kyiv, invited by the Plattform Wiederaufbau Ukraine of the German Federal Government. We took the opportunity to talk to her on their challenges and rewards in building a business as well as on the perspectives for veterans, internally displaced persons, their families and communities in the fourth year of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

How did you come up with Nesemos' business model?

At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, my friends and I started helping the military with vehicles. We collected donations, bought cars abroad, repaired them at different service stations, and delivered them to military units. These were regular pickup trucks and SUVs, such as Mitsubishi L200 or Nissan Navara, which Ukrainian defenders use for fast logistics and evacuation.

Over time we saw two major problems:

  • Many people donate vehicles, but very few maintain them afterwards. As a result, a single military brigade may have hundreds of vehicles, but up to half of them are not operational.
  • Soldiers often have to raise donations for repairs themselves or spend their own salaries. This makes vehicle maintenance unstable and unpredictable, and it directly affects the country's defense capacity.

That is why we decided to create our own service station based on a mixed model: the commercial side services civilian vehicles, and these resources help support the social side - repairing vehicles for Ukrainian defenders. Since we were investing significant resources into this project, we also built a foundation for long-term social impact after Ukrainian victory. This includes supporting veterans through training in auto service professions, employment opportunities, and adapting vehicles for veterans who were injured during the war.

What makes Nesemos unique compared to other social startups?

Nesemos' uniqueness lies in our balanced financial and organizational model.

  • We raise donations for repairing military vehicles: 1 million UAH every month. This allows us to repair as many vehicles as possible and plan our support for the defenders. A big role in this is played by our community of more than 27,000 people, which formed around our small independent media platform covering current political and military developments.
  • We operate a commercial service station that repairs and maintains vehicles for civilian clients. Thanks to this direction, we currently cover our operational costs and support the charitable work as well. We clearly felt the resilience this model provides during the winter of 2025–2026, when severe frosts and constant Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure forced us to operate entirely on generators. These were significant costs, but we managed to keep working and supporting the defenders every single day. A similar principle works in our trophy store, where we sell souvenirs made from downed Russian aircraft. A significant percentage of the revenue goes to vehicle repairs for the military, and in strong months the store covers about 30% of our monthly fundraising goal.
  • We attract grants from local and international donors, mostly for development and scaling. Thanks to this support, we doubled our capacity in two years and launched a new social direction: adapting vehicles for wounded veterans.

This structure allows us to remain stable, avoid dependence on a single funding source, hire strong professionals, and scale our impact. When we started, we repaired 6–10 vehicles per month for our defenders. Today we repair 35–45 vehicles per month, and this is not our limit. Our goal is to reach 100 vehicles per month and develop the commercial direction enough to cover not only operational costs but, if necessary, fully replace donations.

Can you give a brief explanation of how your model works?

The Nesemos model consists of two interconnected parts.

  • The commercial side is a modern service station that repairs and maintains vehicles for civilian customers. It creates stable income, jobs, and infrastructure.
  • The social side focuses on working with veterans and repairing vehicles for Ukrainian defenders. The repairs and spare parts are financed by donations, while tools, equipment, and operational costs are covered by the commercial activity.

In this way, we build a system where business helps create long-term social impact.

Four members of the NESEMOS team standing in front of an olive pickup truck in the courtyard.
Mechanics working on the open engine of a vehicle.
A mechanic in the NESEMOS garage next to a car with its hood open on a lift.
The whole NESEMOS team standing in a group in front of the workshop.

Photo credit: NESEMOS

How do you create social impact and how do you measure it?

Our social impact has several levels:

  • Supporting defense capacity, because every repaired vehicle helps soldiers perform their missions and saves their lives.
  • Employment and professional adaptation of veterans. We create jobs and are developing training programs for those returning from the front.
  • Adapting vehicles for veterans who were wounded during the war. This has a direct impact on their quality of life, as it gives them mobility and independence.

At the moment, we mainly measure quantitative impact indicators:

  • the number of repaired military vehicles
  • the number of trained and employed veterans
  • the number of adapted vehicles for injured veterans.

As we scale, we also plan to measure qualitative indicators, such as how satisfied veterans are with their new profession and job, and how vehicle adaptations influence their daily lives. However, this requires significant resources that we currently do not have. For now, our priority is to grow, strengthen the organisation, and increase our financial sustainability.

Do you see a need for an organisation like Nesemos beyond the war?

Absolutely!

According to surveys conducted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Veterans Affairs, the automotive sector is among the top five fields where veterans want to work or retrain after demobilization. We are already building the infrastructure for that.

Beyond that, we will always feel a deep responsibility toward veterans for their contribution to protecting Ukraine. That is why we will continue helping them with their personal vehicles whenever needed. From a business perspective, car repair is like baking bread: it is a service that will always be needed. Even if the world turns into something like the reality of Mad Max. This means our model can work in the long term: on one side, developing a modern network of service stations, on the other, creating new opportunities for veterans in the civilian economy.

Do you plan to turn Nesemos into a for-profit company?

We are already building Nesemos as a hybrid model, where commercial activity plays a key role. Our plan is to scale a network of service stations that operate as profitable businesses. This will make the social side more stable and less dependent on donations. In the future, this could become a network of auto service stations with a social mission, where part of the profit supports repairs for defenders' vehicles and veterans, training programs for veterans, and eventually the launch of veteran-owned franchise service stations.

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