If you can help, do it: Viktoriia Stetsenko, Sumy

Viktoriia Stetsenko knows well what it means to change your life for the sake of helping others. For more than 15 years, she worked in the banking sector before choosing a different path and becoming a nurse. She joined the Ukrainian Red Cross in 2016, first coordinating the donor movement and later becoming part of the emergency response team.

Over the years of volunteering, she has taken part in dozens of emergency responses, evacuations, and humanitarian missions. Among her warmest memories are deployments to the Kolotylivka–Pokrovka border crossing, where the team supported Ukrainians returning home.

But volunteering also has its difficult side. Deployments to sites affected by shelling always involve risk, as the threat of repeated strikes remains even after emergency services arrive. Viktoriia says the hardest moments are when she recognises the address and realises that her friends, neighbours, or loved ones could be there.

For Viktoriia’s family, volunteering has long become a shared mission. Her daughter, Varvara, is also a volunteer with the Ukrainian Red Cross emergency response team in Zakarpattia, while her ten-year-old son is always eager to know how he can help his mother’s team. Through her example, Viktoriia shows her children that helping others begins with compassion.

She believes that being part of the Ukrainian Red Cross is about much more than responding to emergencies. It is about continuous growth, new knowledge, practical skills, and experience that help people become stronger and more effective in supporting others.

“At the Ukrainian Red Cross, you learn, discover both your strengths and your weaknesses, improve your skills, and gain experience that is impossible to get anywhere else,” says Viktoriia.