Hospital heroine: I wanted to give more to my people

VALENTYNA Pavsyukova left Ukraine by chance — and a fighting chance is what she now wants to give to the needy back home.

- JOHN MARONE

So over the last three and a half years of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, she has organised the delivery of £140million worth of surgical supplies and medicine to the east of the country. “I wanted to give more to my people,” she said.

Most of the supplies she sends go to Ukrainian military units. She said: “I supply every point along the evacuation line — from the stabilisation points to the field hospitals and the military hospitals. In Ukraine, every hospital is a military hospital these days.”

All supply lines originate in Zaporizhzhia Region, from where she herself set out 23 years ago, aged 18. Her mother had enrolled her in the US government's immigration lottery programme, and soon she was living in the Midwest as a hairdresser.