Under fire and on mined roads. How first responders save civilians and their pets near the front

"Saving lives, treating the wounded, and conducting evacuations were our top priorities in Toretsk. With so many injured, this became our primary focus during the intense hostilities near our city," says Oleksandr Storiev, the First Deputy Head of the Main Department of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SESU) in the Chernihiv Region. Having started as a first responder in 2007, Oleksandr has spent years working in his native Donetsk region.

Oleksandr once lived with his family in Bakhmut, a city with a population of over 70,000 before Russia’s full-scale invasion. When Russia forced his nearest and dearest to leave everything behind in search of safety elsewhere in Ukraine, he chose to stay in the eastern part of the country and dedicate most of his time to rescue operations in Toretsk, a satellite city of Donetsk. The distance between the two cities is slightly more than 40 km.

During the war, first responders play a vital role in supporting civilians who live near the frontline. These dedicated professionals, often under intense pressure and facing real danger, save lives and provide emergency medical care to people.

To help pay for their work, the U.S. government provides the government of Ukraine (GOU) with direct budget support (DBS). Since 2022, GOU has received $26.8 billion in DBS aid to reimburse the salaries of educators, healthcare workers, and civil servants, as well as 58,500 first responders—including those working near the frontline and saving civilians from the horrors of war.

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.

Face-to-face with the war for the first time

The year 2022 wasn’t the first time Oleksandr encountered war face-to-face. When Russia’s aggression against Ukraine started in 2014, Oleksandr and his colleagues from the east of Ukraine had to quickly adapt to new realities, conducting rescue operations that felt like something out of a movie—managing the aftermath of shelling and evacuating civilians from devastated towns and villages.

Since then, civilian evacuation has been a primary responsibility for SESU crews in the region. "Our crew evacuated people from Debaltseve when it was encircled. We were evacuating and rescuing people on buses. The road was being shelled. It was scary," explains Oleksandr.

Then came Avdiivka. In 2017, the city faced severe damage to its electrical grid from constant large-scale shelling by Russia’s forces, resulting in a series of blackouts. The lack of electricity caused the Donetsk Filtering Station to halt operations, leading to water supply outages. During late winter and early spring, SESU first responders set up generators and tents to provide humanitarian aid to the affected population. Tragically, in January 2017, they came under fire from Russia’s forces, resulting in the deaths of two first responders.

"In Avdiivka, there were many wounded. Shelling was relentless. Buildings were collapsing, and we had to rescue those trapped," Oleksandr recalls, reflecting on the haunting memories from seven years ago.

Operating at the temporary crossing points from the Russia-controlled territories in the so-called "DPR" to the territory controlled by Ukraine was another job that SESU first responders near the frontline had to do before the full-scale invasion. Oleksandr’s crew worked near one of these crossing points until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted operations. They provided crucial assistance to civilians crossing the demarcation line. 

"Sometimes it took days for people to make the crossing, but they could spend the night in our tents, warm up in winter, and drink a cup of tea," Oleksandr says.

According to the first responder, he has experienced enough of the war since 2014 to know what it is truly like. But whenever he talked to his colleagues from other regions, they struggled to fully understand the realities that first responders from the east of Ukraine used to face—that is, until February 24, 2022.

The full-scale invasion

Oleksandr and his crew anticipated that any escalation in 2022 would occur in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where fighting had been concentrated since 2014. Yet, despite all his extensive wartime experience, he was startled by a call from his mother about explosions in Kharkiv in the early hours of the full-scale invasion’s first day.

"At five in the morning, I called the dispatcher. We gathered our team, and I rode to Toretsk with my unit," recalls Oleksandr. Toretsk is a city in the Donetsk region, now an area of active fighting. In early 2022, the city and its suburbs were still home to approximately 8,000 people. Already then, conditions were dire: no water supply since the beginning of 2022, no gas since May 2022, and problems with the electricity supply.

SESU crews used generators to power "Points of Invisibility," keeping people warm during winter blackouts and connecting them with Starlinks when the electricity was out.

Amid all of this, Toretsk was suffering from the proximity of the frontline in 2022-2023, as the never-ending shelling added to the chaos. "In one day, the village of Niu-York (also known as New York in Ukrainian – ed.), near Toretsk, could experience up to 50 fires. We simply didn’t have enough time to extinguish them all, so we shifted our priorities from putting out fires to saving lives. If we couldn’t extinguish a fire in a building, we focused on rescuing people and moved on to the next location to help civilians there," explains Oleksandr.

One of the primary responsibilities of first responders was to help evacuate civilians. However, the process in 2022 was strikingly different from 2014: "In 2014, we conducted mass evacuations with columns of six to seven buses, organized by local administrations that gathered people at designated spots for pickup. After 2022, we had to evacuate people from Niu-York and nearby villages in smaller groups, using ambulance cars to transport five or six individuals at a time."

The evacuations often took place along dirt roads or through fields, as Russia’s forces had already taken control of the main roads, making them impassable.

"There was this village of Novoselivka. To get there and help local children, we had to remove the anti-tank mines that were lying on the road and also be on the lookout for the possibility of shelling"

"At one point, the military stopped us and warned that it was dangerous to go there, so we waited until the mortar attacks subsided and went to evacuate people anyway," Oleksandr recalls.

And it’s not only people but pets as well. "After one of the shellings in Niu-York in 2023, a woman called us, desperate to save her dog that was trapped on the ninth floor of a damaged building. The stairwell was destroyed between the ninth and sixth floors. The apartment was intact, and the dog was fine, but there was no way to reach it. So, we decided to enter through the attic via a nearby entrance, lower the man down from the roof with a rope, and bring the dog out of the apartment," the first responder explains.

Since April 2022, SESU crews in the Toretsk area also took on the critical task of providing emergency aid to the wounded. At that time, only one healthcare unit served the entire Toretsk community, and it struggled to keep up with the influx of casualties as shelling intensified. To address this gap, Oleksandr’s crew was assigned an ambulance. As first responders, they had studied first aid at university and received additional training from the Red Cross.

Together with personnel from the police, they formed teams focused on providing first aid and transporting the injured to the hospital. Unfortunately, they also faced the danger of Russia’s forces shelling ambulance vehicles.

"We had an incident in the summer of 2023 when we had to reach the wounded woman but couldn’t because the Russians started shelling us. Our ambulance came under fire. It was rattled. They fired seven times, and all the shots landed precisely on the ambulance," Oleksandr recalls. First responders had to retreat, and the ambulance was so damaged that it had to be replaced.

Before the full-scale invasion, a day could pass without a single deployment for Oleksandr and his crew. However, no day passed after February 24, 2022, without the need to conduct operations.

Since the fighting near Toretsk intensified in 2024, first responders are no longer deployed there for firefighting or other types of work. However, a dedicated SESU evacuation group remains ready to assist, venturing to nearby settlements when it is safe. In September 2024, Vasyl Chinchyk, head of the Toretsk City Military Administration, reported that approximately 1,600 people still reside there.

As for Oleksandr, in April 2024, he was promoted to the First Deputy Head of the Main Department of the SESU in the Chernihiv Region and moved there. But just like him and his crew, hundreds of first responders in southern and eastern Ukraine are still helping civilians near the frontline.

"While you are at work, you do not notice the time. But once you save a person, you realize that such work is probably the main source of inspiration and strength," Oleksandr sums up his experience.

All photos provided by the SESU.