Saving fifteen hundred people. A first responder about the evacuation from Mariupol and other cities

"War has changed something in us. Perhaps not the work itself, but the people. It has changed the way people approach the work they do. They’ve become a bit more responsible, more humane," says Valentyn Stetsenko, deputy chief of the 8th unit of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Zaporizhzhia. For over 15 years, he has been involved in mitigating the consequences of various emergencies, such as industrial accidents, car crashes, and both man-made and natural disasters. Although many of them involved lifesaving operations, none of them made him confront such large-scale devastation and omnipresent human suffering as the evacuation of people from Mariupol and other Russia-occupied territories in the Ukrainian South.

Valentyn is one of the 58,500 SESU workers who have been able to carry on their crucial wartime efforts thanks to the support of the American people. Since spring 2022, the United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has provided the Ukrainian government with $26.8 billion in direct budget support. These funds, which go directly to the Ukrainian state budget, are used to reimburse critical social expenditures, including the salaries of first responders from the State Emergency Service.

Rescue, healthcare, education: the U.S. government is helping Ukrainians access vital public services during the war

Since the spring of 2022, the US government, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has been enabling the Ukrainian government to fund critical social expenditures in the face of Russia’s full-scale military aggression.

During this time, the United States became the largest individual country donor of economic assistance to Ukraine, having already provided $26.8 billion in direct budget support.

Disbursed through the World Bank's mechanisms, American funds are directed into the Ukrainian state budget, reimbursing the government's expenditures on salaries for over 1.4 million workers whose uninterrupted work is most crucial for today's survival of Ukrainians and the future recovery of the country — first responders, healthcare workers, educators, and civil servants. 

Thanks to US budgetary funding, the Ukrainian government also continues to support the most vulnerable members of the population by providing social assistance to internally displaced persons, low-income families, and others.

Fire and rescue operations specialist Valentyn was not obliged to participate in evacuations but joined voluntarily. It was the second month of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the second month of fighting in Mariupol. Soon, the city was completely cut off from the rest of Ukraine by Russia’s occupation forces, leaving thousands of soldiers and civilians trapped inside without food supplies, access to water, electricity, gas, phone, and internet connection —and under constant fire. As people were leaving their hideouts in the basements under the shellfire to scout for food and melt snow to get drinking and cooking water, death became a frequent occurrence. The most secure remaining place was the Azovstal steel plant, with deep and heavily protected basements. Eventually, it became the last refuge for many civilians and defenders of Mariupol after the rest of the city had fallen to Russia’s occupation forces.