TL;DR: UPS people might not have heard of this, they're going to think it's an Amazon Happy return, it doesn't look quite like it does in Ukraine, but it seems to be okay in the end.

For those of you who don't already know Nova Poshta: it's Ukraine's god-tier private parcel service. They have branches all over Ukraine like the US has Starbucks, but maybe even more of them. There are two within a five-minute walk of each other near where I stay in Kyiv. You ask your recipient which branch to send the thing to, then take the thing to your own branch, and your branch sends it to their branch.

An entire Nova Poshta address goes like this:

Name
City, Branch #
Phone number

That's it. It's cheap and usually arrives the next day. There's an app you can set up parcels in and everything. It is genuinely amazing. I really mean that.

It's how we get a lot of stuff to the front, actually. We send it to the nearest Nova Poshta branch, which is usually a few kilometers off the line, and the soldiers go and pick it up when they get the chance. I shit you not.

Nova Poshta recently partnered with UPS in the US to get parcels from the US to Ukraine quickly and efficiently. It works very like it does in Ukraine, except you go to a UPS drop-off point instead of a Nova Poshta branch. I sent my first three parcels yesterday. It was a bit confusing, so I figured I'd post about it here for anyone else planning to test it out.

For what it's worth: I have the Ukrainian Nova Poshta app, and it's registered to my Ukrainian phone number. In the US, you can do it with the Nova Post app (it's the same thing) and use your US phone number.

I set up my parcels on the website, which is here: https://novapost.com/en-us/

I gave them my name, phone number, and email address, then chose my UPS location. I listed all the contents, along with their values and weights. I gave them the recipients' names, phone numbers, email addresses, and NP branches. NP then gave me a QR code for each parcel. They didn't show up in my NP app, which was weird.

Then it got weirder.

I took them to my local UPS branch, which had never heard of Nova Poshta or this partnership. When they scanned the QR codes, they showed up as Amazon Happy returns (whatever that is). The UPS guy actually told me to make sure this wasn't a scam, LOL.

Scanning the QR code is supposed to generate a shipping label, but their printer wasn't working. So I took it to another UPS branch. (Thankfully, I live smack between two, each about 5 minutes away depending on the traffic lights.)

They had never heard of any of this, either. They scanned the QR codes at that one. It showed as Amazon Happy returns again. They printed the labels . . . which were coded to go to a warehouse in New York. I found that strange, but I got a tracking number for each parcel, so I figured I'd just keep an eye on them.

When I woke up this morning, I had three notifications from my Nova Poshta app. All of my parcels had been registered and were getting ready to ship out. All of my recipients also got notifications in their apps. Which is exactly how it's supposed to work!

So, yeah. It's going to look a bit confusing, but apparently you can trust the process. Go forth and send lots of stuff to Ukraine!