The loss of our dearest friends

On October 23, 2025, our best friends and regular travel companions Alyona Gramova and Yevhen (Ghenya) Karmazin were killed in a Russian drone attack. We immediately traveled back to Ukraine to support their families and attend the funeral and memorial services.

Our driver Sacha was also seriously injured in the same attack. We visited him in the hospital; he is alive, but his recovery will be long.
 

Alyona and Ghenya meant a great deal to us and to our work. Much of our footage was shot by them. In December, they were supposed to come and stay with us in the Netherlands for two weeks.

We miss them every day, and we will continue in their name.

 

We are Franky and Coen.

What started with a French fry cart at the border grew into a dangerous mission deep in a war zone.

 

We hand out fries and snacks, sometimes as many as 2,000 portions in a single day, but that is no longer all we do. We provide all kinds of humanitarian aid, evacuate people from the front lines, take in refugees in our own refugee hotel, The Holland House, and bring relief supplies, food parcels, and medical supplies to places where almost no one else goes. We record as much as possible on video so that people here can see what war really means.

These images can also be used later to prove war crimes.

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Where we fried fries, and why that is important

Giving away fries may seem like a small thing, but it is a moment of warmth and humanity for war victims in a cold war.
 

We fried fries in Kherson, Kramatorsk, Lyman, Mykolayiv, Kyiv, Irpin, Butcha, Borodyanka, Hostomel, Kharkiv, Izium, Dnipro, Pokrovsk, and Zaporizja, among other places. Sometimes we were right behind the front lines, sometimes in the middle of a city that was already 80% in ruins.

 

Avdiivka

We were in Avdiivka shortly before the city was completely taken over by the Russians. When we were there, almost everything had already been destroyed.

 

Missile attack

On June 27, 2023, Alyona, Sacha, and I survived a rocket attack in Kramatorsk. We were sitting in the RIA restaurant when a Russian Iskander cruise missile struck. Thirteen people were killed and more than sixty were injured. We were very lucky, as we escaped with minor injuries. But we lost friends, and two 14-year-old girls, a 17-year-old girl, and the waitress who had just served us died. That day changed us forever and at the same time strengthened our conviction: we will continue to help Ukraine. Period.

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The Holland House, shelter in a war

In Dnipro, we opened our own shelter:

The Holland House.

This is a place where people from the most dangerous areas can catch their breath. Our guests come from cities such as Bakhmut, Kupiansk, Marinka, and Avdiïvka, places where there has often been no heating, electricity, or running water for months. Many have been evacuated with our armored cars. Without our help, they would not have survived. Literally!
 

The Holland House can accommodate 70 people at a time. They are given their own room, good meals, medical care, and psychological support. Together, we look for a safe, permanent place for them to rebuild their lives.
 

Evacuations, our most dangerous work

The most risky thing we do is evacuate people from frontline areas. We drive armored vehicles to villages where bombing continues daily. Where drop and kamikaze drones from the air make it particularly dangerous and people sometimes spend months in basements. These people can no longer flee themselves because it is far too dangerous. We sometimes have the opportunity to pick them up in cooperation with the police or military. We prepare everything in detail. Sometimes we arrive and find no one there. And sometimes we do. Then we pick up someone who has been waiting for weeks.

 

On each trip, we carry out a few evacuations, but we also work with Ukrainian heroes who risk their own lives to free people from their perilous situations.

What else we do
 

We bring food parcels to families in occupied areas. We help orphanages. We support military hospitals where wounded soldiers are treated, often young boys, severely maimed by mines or drone attacks. We brought medical equipment to an operating room in Kyiv. And we visited a stabilization post, a temporary medical post near the front line where seriously wounded soldiers receive first aid. We will never forget what we saw there.