At least three premature babies and a retired American paratrooper are among the more than 215 people that the civilian rescue group Project Dynamo has evacuated from Ukraine in the first month after the brutal Russian attack, the organization's leaders told National Review.

Since late February, more than 14,000 people have reached out to the small donor-funded nonprofit for help, a number that Dynamo founder and military veteran Bryan Stern said undercounts the demand, because many of the people who've reached out need to evacuate several family members.

The Dynamo team has conducted just shy of 30 rescue operations so far, with each given a codename, like Apollo and Gemini.

In total, more than 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24.

One of the more dangerous Project Dynamo operations occurred last week, when Stern's team pulled off a rescue of a U.S. Army veteran and former paratrooper who was living northeast of Kyiv with his wife and cats. Stern said Sergeant Robert Platt's home was in a community beyond both the Ukrainian and Russian perimeters. Platt told Dynamo leaders that Russian soldiers were looting his neighbors' homes and Russian tanks were blocking the roads.

"His community was stuck right in the middle of all of the back-and-forth," Stern said.

Project Dynamo Rescue — Bryan Stern, left, the founder of Project Dynamo, helped rescue Robert Platt, right, a retired U.S. Army sergeant, from Ukraine in mid March.

The first couple of rescue attempts were aborted when conditions on the ground got too hot, Stern said. At one point, when he was trying to pass through a Ukrainian checkpoint to get to Platt, Stern came under Russian artillery fire aimed at the Ukrainian soldiers, he said.

"I got banged up," Stern said. "I wasn't bleeding, but it was real, real, real close."

Stern said they eventually got Platt and his wife out underground-railroad-style, with lots of house-to-house and car-to-car movements and handoffs. "What we do is go from the hot zone to the warm zone to the cold zone to safety," Stern said of their rescue methodology.

"Getting him off his street was a miracle," Stern said of Platt. "He's a combat vet, he's an infantry soldier, he's a paratrooper, and we don't leave our people behind."

In early March, Stern's Dynamo team traveled to a hospital in Kyiv to rescue three premature babies — twin American boys and a British baby girl all born to surrogate mothers. The babies were transported in incubators by ambulance with an escort from Dynamo. The babies' American and British parents were not in Ukraine, and because the U.S. embassy in Kyiv has suspended operations, securing passports and getting the babies out of the country required "a tremendous amount of coordination," Stern said.

About a week later, Dynamo's team rescued an eight-day-old Canadian baby from a Kyiv clinic. Stern said they've also rescued an Afghan family who moved to Ukraine to escape the Taliban.

Stern first organized Project Dynamo last fall to help get Americans and American allies out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after the botched U.S. withdrawal from that country. Dynamo was one of the dozens of civilian rescue organizations that came together at that time to help people whom they believed the Biden administration was failing.

This winter, Stern and his team shifted gears, temporarily turning their focus on Ukraine ahead of the expected Russian invasion.

Stern and others involved in Afghanistan rescue operations have been critical of the U.S. Department of State's efforts there. But Stern isn't criticizing the department's work in Ukraine.

"State has been really good to us," he said. "I cannot say a bad word about State whatsoever."

Stern has spent most of the last two months in Ukraine. He declined to say exactly how many volunteers are working with him overseas, but he said "it's a very small footprint by design."

Project Dynamo also now has a couple of dozen volunteers stateside, said Stan Bunner, a military veteran and Naples, Fla.-based lawyer, who is managing the organization's finances. Bunner said some of the Dynamo case managers are working 30 hours straight making contact with people who need to be rescued and coordinating rescue efforts with the team on the ground in Ukraine. He called those volunteers the "backbone" of the effort.

"We're not just throwing buses out into the hinterland," he said. "We're plotting it strategically to try to maximize the effort."

Bunner also credited the generosity of the general public for Dynamo's success so far. He said people are donating everything from money to handmade pillows for the kids they rescue. Bunner said he's probably fielding 100 emails a day from people who want to help.

"I just answered one guy who wants to donate an unused airline ticket. I wrote back to him, 'That's extremely thoughtful of you, and I really appreciate it, but I have absolutely no idea how my organization could accept or use an unused airline ticket under federal law,'" Bunner said. "I don't want to discourage people. I think it's awesome that they're interested."

The Project Dynamo team is concentrating its efforts on people stuck in the most dangerous situations, typically east and south of Kyiv, Stern said. They're not only rescuing American and NATO allies. "If you're an 80-year-old Ukrainian grandma who can't walk, and you're saying, 'Help me, help me, help me,' I don't say, 'Sorry, better call another bus,'" Stern said. "I say 'Get on the bus. We'll take care of you. Let's go.'"

During their operations, the Dynamo team tries to avoid Russians and active fighting "like the plague," Stern said, noting that four of his Ukrainian military friends were killed by Russians earlier this week. He said the Dynamo team does its best to stay out of the way of the Ukrainian military.

"The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives against a very nasty and cruel enemy. The last thing they need is problems," Stern said. "They have enough."

The rescue work has taken a toll on the Dynamo volunteers' careers and businesses, the group's leaders said. But both Stern and Bunner described the effort as a highlight of their lives.

"If you look at our pictures and imagery, you see a lot of people smiling," Stern said. "And to be able to find an ounce of happiness in a truly brutal war — this is way worse than Afghanistan ever was, in my opinion — to be able to provide that to innocent women and children who did nothing at all, at all, they did nothing to deserve this, it's truly rewarding."