From Survival to Dignity: The Red Cross on Ukraine's Eastern Humanitarian Front
An interview with Liudmyla Lashko, Chair of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Organisation of the Ukrainian Red Cross
By Dr Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief, Lviv Herald
The Ukrainian city of Dnipro has become one of the great humanitarian centres of the war. Situated at the intersection of several regions devastated by Russia's invasion, it has absorbed enormous numbers of displaced people, served as an evacuation and medical support centre and endured repeated attacks of its own. Beyond the military headlines, an immense civilian operation has developed to care for those whose lives have been overturned by the conflict.
Amongst the organisations undertaking this work is the Ukrainian Red Cross, whose Dnipropetrovsk regional organisation is led by Liudmyla Lashko. Her organisation operates across one of Ukraine's most strategically important regions, providing emergency assistance, medical care, evacuation services and longer-term support to people who have lost their homes, livelihoods and sometimes their families. Much of this work takes place far from international attention, in small communities where elderly residents, displaced families and people with disabilities struggle to obtain even the most elementary services.
Yet humanitarian work in Ukraine is changing. After nearly five years of full-scale war, the challenge is no longer simply one of distributing food, blankets and emergency medical supplies. It is increasingly about helping people who have lost everything to recover their independence and rebuild their lives, even as the war continues around them.
For the Lviv Herald, I spoke with Liudmyla Lashko in a written interview about her personal vocation, the extraordinary responsibilities of managing a regional humanitarian organisation and the changing needs of a population that has endured years of violence and displacement. Her answers reveal both the considerable scale of the Red Cross's operations in Dnipropetrovsk oblast and the deeply personal commitment that sustains those undertaking them.
Matthew Parish: Could you begin by telling our readers something about yourself? How did you first become involved in humanitarian work and what led you to become Chair of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Organisation of the Ukrainian Red Cross?
Liudmyla Lashko: The Red Cross is my life!
After finishing school, I applied to enter medical school, but I was not admitted on my first attempt. So I went to work in a hospital instead. Later I completed my university education and went on to teach medical genetics at a college.
Even during those early years, I understood that my vocation was to help other people. Near the hospital where I worked there was a Red Cross organisation, and I was offered the position of chair of its district branch.
That is how my journey began. I started as the chair of a district Red Cross organisation in Dnipro and eventually became the head of the regional organisation.
I love my work, and above all I love people.
Matthew Parish: Has the experience of the war changed the way you understand your humanitarian vocation? What does your work mean to you personally today?
Liudmyla Lashko: You feel the importance of your humanitarian mission particularly intensely during wartime. Every day you see people's pain, suffering and tragedies, and you see how desperately they need help.
Leading a regional Red Cross organisation is an enormous responsibility. It also represents the trust of the people who elected you, because the position of chair is an elected one.
For me, this work offers the opportunity to stand beside people and help them during the most difficult moments of their lives. It means giving them back their faith, their hope and the feeling that somebody is there to support them.
Matthew Parish: Dnipropetrovsk oblast occupies an exceptional position in the geography of this war. Could you explain the scale of your organisation and the people who undertake its work?
Liudmyla Lashko: Today Dnipropetrovsk oblast is a stronghold situated amid four fronts.
Across the region we have 12 city and district Red Cross organisations, employing 300 staff and supported by 890 volunteers. These are the people who undertake our humanitarian work every day.
When the full-scale war began, many people left the city and travelled elsewhere in search of safety. But all the chairs of our local Red Cross organisations remained at their posts and continued working. They have stayed committed to their responsibilities throughout the war.
Our employees and volunteers are courageous and selfless people. They continue helping others even when they themselves are in danger.
I am immensely proud of my team.
Matthew Parish: What are the principal responsibilities of the Red Cross in your region? The international public may be familiar with emergency food distribution and evacuation work, but I imagine that your activities extend considerably further.
Liudmyla Lashko: Our humanitarian activities are very diverse. One of our principal responsibilities is responding to emergencies, including assisting people affected by shelling and other disasters. Our rapid-response teams help victims, support evacuations and work at evacuation and transit centres.
We also provide assistance to the most vulnerable members of society. This includes internally displaced people, elderly residents, people with disabilities and families living in poverty.
Healthcare is another important part of our work. We operate mobile medical teams, teach the population first-aid skills, support medical institutions and contribute to the development of healthcare infrastructure.
We provide psychosocial support, rehabilitation and assistance for veterans, home-based care and other social services. We also work on water supply, sanitation and hygiene, as well as community recovery and rebuilding.
Finally, we invest considerable effort in developing volunteering, providing training, strengthening our own organisational capacity and building partnerships with other institutions.
All these activities are connected by the same purpose: helping people survive difficult circumstances and recover their ability to live independently.
Matthew Parish: How have the humanitarian needs of Dnipropetrovsk oblast changed since February 2022? In particular, what has been the impact of the enormous numbers of people displaced from other parts of Ukraine?
Liudmyla Lashko: From the beginning of the full-scale war, our region received internally displaced people from every direction of the fighting. People arrived from Donetsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
At present, approximately 475,000 internally displaced people are officially registered in our region.
These are people who have lost everything. Very often they arrive carrying nothing more than a single suitcase.
Initially their needs are the most basic necessities of life: food, drinking water and hygiene supplies. But their greatest needs are housing and employment.
The Red Cross takes particular care of society's most vulnerable people: the elderly, people with disabilities, large families, families living in poverty and especially those who have lost absolutely everything. These are human tragedies and experiences of suffering that we witness every day.
Everyone affected by the war needs support, but their needs have changed over time.
At the beginning of the invasion, we concentrated on immediate survival. We provided food, hygiene supplies, water, temporary accommodation, medicines and urgent medical and psychological assistance.
Now people are trying to integrate into society and rebuild their lives. They need stability and long-term solutions.
What I see today is that people need more than humanitarian assistance. They need the opportunity to regain their dignity, independence and faith in the future.
We must remain alongside them not only during the moment of crisis but throughout the entire journey of rebuilding their lives.
Matthew Parish: Can you give our readers an idea of the overall scale of the assistance your organisation has provided during the war? How widely have you been able to reach communities across the region?
Liudmyla Lashko: During nearly five years of full-scale Russian aggression, the Red Cross in Dnipropetrovsk oblast has provided various forms of assistance to approximately two million beneficiaries.
This includes humanitarian assistance, medical services, psychosocial support and advice to people in need.
We have provided assistance across all 86 communities in the region. In other words, our humanitarian activities have reached 100 per cent of the region's communities.
Matthew Parish: Evacuation from frontline communities is among the most dangerous forms of humanitarian work. What role does your organisation play in these operations, particularly when elderly or disabled people cannot leave without assistance?
Liudmyla Lashko: Our rapid-response team participates directly in evacuating the population from dangerous frontline communities.
At the beginning of the war, and subsequently, we also helped receive and dispatch evacuation trains. This was a very important part of our response to the enormous movement of civilians fleeing the fighting.
So far, our volunteers have evacuated approximately 1,000 people from dangerous areas affected by hostilities.
These include people with disabilities, elderly residents and families with children. We pay particular attention to people with severely limited mobility, including bedridden patients who cannot be transported by ordinary means.
These evacuations require special care, equipment and transport. They are often exceptionally difficult operations.
Matthew Parish: What are the greatest obstacles to evacuating civilians safely? Is the principal difficulty the physical danger of the journey, or are there other problems that are less obvious to people observing the war from abroad?
Liudmyla Lashko: The first difficulty is danger. There is constant shelling, and evacuation routes are not always safe.
There are also logistical problems. Sometimes people do not want to leave their homes, even when remaining there places them in serious danger. Their psychological condition is an important factor, particularly when they have already endured prolonged trauma.
Evacuating people with limited mobility is especially challenging.
But there are also enormous difficulties after the evacuation itself. Once a person has been removed from danger, we must help restore their feeling of safety, their dignity and their hope for a better future.
This is very difficult.
We urgently need more vehicles for evacuation, particularly specially equipped transport for bedridden patients and armoured vehicles that can provide greater protection during dangerous operations.
Matthew Parish: One of the less visible consequences of the war is the disruption of ordinary healthcare. How does your organisation provide medical assistance to people living in remote communities where conventional medical services may be unavailable?
Liudmyla Lashko: We currently operate ten mobile medical teams across Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
These teams bring medical care directly to some of the most remote settlements in the region. Family doctors provide assistance in places where there may be no outpatient clinics or pharmacies and where residents have great difficulty travelling to the nearest medical institution.
Many of these communities have large elderly populations. Without mobile medical assistance, some residents would struggle to obtain even basic healthcare.
In addition, we have two multidisciplinary medical teams whose members include specialist doctors. These include cardiologists, ophthalmologists, endocrinologists, gynaecologists, neurologists and orthopaedic trauma specialists.
Our teams travel every day to provide qualified medical assistance to the most vulnerable people. They treat internally displaced people, people with disabilities, children and elderly residents.
Where prescribed by a doctor, medicines are also provided free of charge.
Matthew Parish: How extensive has this medical programme become, and what role do international Red Cross partners play in supporting it?
Liudmyla Lashko: During the period of the war, 70 highly qualified personnel, including doctors, nurses and drivers, have helped provide 196,394 medical consultations through our programme.
This is an enormous collective effort. It reflects the dedication of our medical workers and the importance of continuing to bring healthcare directly to communities that would otherwise find it difficult to obtain.
The project is being implemented with the support of the Norwegian Red Cross.
Beyond Emergency Relief
There is a particular quality to Liudmyla Lashko's account of the war that distinguishes it from many institutional descriptions of humanitarian work. Although she describes an extensive organisation employing hundreds of people and supported by almost a thousand volunteers, her attention continually returns to the individual human being. For her, a humanitarian organisation is not simply a mechanism for distributing supplies or coordinating evacuations. It is a means of restoring people's confidence that their lives still possess dignity and purpose, even after extraordinary suffering.
The figures she provides are substantial. An organisation operating across 86 communities, supporting hundreds of thousands of displaced people and delivering nearly 200,000 medical consultations is undertaking work on a formidable scale. Yet those figures also reveal the extent to which the war has transformed Ukrainian society. Ordinary public services, family networks and personal savings have been stretched or destroyed, while the responsibilities of humanitarian organisations have expanded far beyond their traditional functions.
There is something particularly revealing about the mobile medical teams. In peacetime, the presence of a family doctor in a remote settlement would be regarded as an ordinary component of a functioning healthcare system. In wartime Ukraine, providing that same service may require a specially organised humanitarian team, vehicles, external funding and personnel willing to travel through regions exposed to continuing attack. What was once routine becomes an act of perseverance, undertaken repeatedly by people who have chosen to remain at work despite the danger.
The same is true of civilian evacuation. Removing an elderly person from a village under shellfire is not simply a matter of finding a vehicle and transporting its passenger to safety. It may mean persuading somebody to abandon the only home they have ever known, arranging suitable transport for a person who cannot walk and finding accommodation, medical care and social support once the immediate danger has passed. As Lashko explains, the evacuation itself may be only the beginning of the humanitarian challenge.
Her remarks also reveal a changing understanding of what successful humanitarian assistance should achieve. During the first months of the full-scale invasion, the immediate objective was survival. Food, water, shelter and emergency medical treatment were necessarily the overriding priorities, because people fleeing the fighting frequently possessed nothing beyond the clothes they were wearing and the few belongings they could carry.
Almost five years later, a different set of questions has emerged. How can a displaced family find permanent accommodation? How can someone who has lost their employment recover financial independence? How can an elderly person separated from familiar surroundings rebuild a sense of security? Above all, how can people whose lives have been interrupted by war begin to imagine a future again?
These are not questions that can be answered by humanitarian organisations alone. They concern the future of Ukraine's economy, its housing stock, its healthcare system and the reconstruction of communities affected by Russia's invasion. Nevertheless, organisations such as the Ukrainian Red Cross occupy an indispensable position between immediate emergency relief and the longer process of national recovery. Their employees and volunteers encounter the practical consequences of war in ways that politicians, international donors and distant observers often do not.
There is also a lesson here for Ukraine's international partners. Emergency assistance remains essential, particularly as shelling continues and civilians are forced to leave dangerous communities. Lashko's request for specially equipped evacuation vehicles and protected transport is a reminder that the practical requirements of saving lives are immediate and tangible. Yet longer-term assistance must also support the ability of displaced and vulnerable people to regain their independence rather than remain indefinitely dependent upon humanitarian provision.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this interview is the modest simplicity with which Lashko describes her vocation. She did not begin with grand ambitions to lead a regional humanitarian institution. She began by working in a hospital, teaching medical genetics and accepting responsibility for a local Red Cross organisation because she believed that helping others was what she was meant to do.
Decades later, that conviction has become the organising principle of an institution confronting some of the gravest humanitarian problems in contemporary Europe. The dedication of the people who remain at their posts, even when they are themselves exposed to danger, is one of the quieter forms of Ukrainian resilience.
Lashko's most memorable observation is not a statistic about the number of people evacuated or medical consultations provided. It is her insistence that people affected by war need something beyond immediate material assistance: the opportunity to recover their dignity, independence and confidence in the future. Humanitarian work, in this understanding, does not end when a person has been removed from danger or has received a parcel of food. It continues until that person has a realistic opportunity to rebuild a life.
That is a considerable ambition for any humanitarian organisation operating amid a major war. It is also a profoundly humane one, and perhaps the most important explanation of what Liudmyla Lashko means when she declares, with uncomplicated sincerity, that the Red Cross is her life.
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This interview was conducted in Ukrainian in November 2026. Liudmyla Lashko's answers have been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity and presentation. Operational statistics are those provided by Ms Lashko in her responses to the Lviv Herald.
