“I’m alive thanks to us foreign help”

“I’m alive thanks to USAID,” says Dmytro Shermbey.

He has been living with HIV for 24 years in Ukraine and says the agency, which is distributing billions of dollars around the world, has helped prevent the virus from spreading there.

“Every second HIV-positive person in Ukraine was identified thanks to this program,” adds Mr. Shermbby.

But the future of USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) is now very uncertain.

One from the United States, President Donald Trump, upon returning to office, was the signing of an enforcement order that has stopped almost all foreign assistance for 90 days until a review can be carried out. He said the USAID is managed by “radical left -wing lunatic” and diverged with “huge fraud” – without giving evidence.

Mr. Sherombi, who heads a 100% life, the largest organization led by patients in Ukraine, recalls that when Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, HIV storage warehouses were bombed.

It was USAID’s help that made it possible to quickly supply replacement medicines and spread them throughout the country, he explains.

“The USAID slogan is that this is the help of the American people. But it turns out that this help can be stopped by the decision of one person,” he says.

USAID was created in 1961 by President John F Kennedy. It has about $ 10,000 and a budget of nearly $ 40 billion ($ 32.25 billion), out of $ 68 billion in foreign care costs in the United States.

It has bases in more than 60 countries and works in dozens of others. However, the bigger part of the on -site work is carried out by other organizations, which he concludes contracts and resources.

The scope of the activities it takes is huge. His work involves the provision of food in countries where people are starving to work in the global hunger system in the world, which uses data analysis to try to predict where food shortages appear.

Elon Musk – the most rich person in the world who is tasked with Trump’s task of shrinking the US federal government – called the Criminal Organization Agency without providing evidence and stating that it was “time to die.”

But in countries like Afghanistan, the end of the USAID can cause huge problems. The agency is one of the largest donors in the country’s health sector, funding projects that provide life-saving services to mothers and children.

A doctor responsible for USAID -funded projects there says that more than 60 of his team, including midwives, nurses and doctors, were told to stay home after the funding was stopped.

“The future seems dark and the impact on patients is massive,” he says.

“If the funding is stopped, the mothers will be forced to give birth at home as the facilities are closed and this will increase the mortality rate,” says one midwife.

USAID work also branches in areas such as cybersecurity. An Iranian activist focused on anti -censorship says their organization works with USAID funding.

“If the opposition figure, university student or women’s rights student has been arrested in Iran, this is an NGO like the one I work for it immediately act so that email and account in social media can be locked and removed,” says the activist , who requested anonymity for fear of repression.

This means that if Iranian scouts force detainees to disclose their passwords, they cannot gain access to that person’s communications, the activist says.

“If an internet company is working with the regime to limit the Iranians’ access to the Internet, we exhibit them publicly and receive them … Sanctured by the EU and the US,” the activist adds.

“All this job is now about to be stopped because of the freezing of funding.”

Among its other activities, USA also provides scholarships – with 1077 students in Egypt who receive money. Trump’s pause on international costs and his comments on USAID have questioned the future of these students.

“I have the feeling that I do not know my fate. I was once a top student with a bright future, but now my future seems dark and I’m afraid to go in the wrong direction,” says Mohammed Ashraf, one of the affected students.

Trump is a long -term critic of expenses abroad and stated that it is not a price / quality ratio for US taxpayers – separating the USAID, which he described as wasteful. But whether it can actually close the agency is not yet clear.

The closure of USAID is entirely, as Musk wants, will probably require an act of Congress – in which Trump’s Republican Party has thin majority in both chambers.

It is reported that the administration intends to unite the main aid agency for aid abroad into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he is now the agency’s acting head – who says thousands of his staff around the world will be put on leave at the end of the week.

For g -n sherombi in Ukraine, bets cannot be higher.

“My life is already at risk. If my hospital leaks out of this medicine, I’ll have to look for it elsewhere,” he says.

“But the HIV-positive tragedy in Ukraine is that you can’t just go to a pharmacy and buy these medicines. You can’t buy them on the black market. HIV-positive people here do not have alternatives,” he adds.

“It is barbaric that we returned to the Stone Age.”

Reporting by Diana Kurishko, BBC Ukanian; Marroof Hafisula, BBC Afganan; Maryam Zohdi, BBC Persian; Ismail rehabilitation, BBC Arabic; George Wright