On the frantically busy trading room floors of Morgan Stanley’s Manhattan offices where billions of dollars change hands every day there is one perpetually quiet corner – a single desk that sits unoccupied.
It is empty because the young Wall Street executive it belongs to remains on unpaid leave – as she is working as a paramedic on the frontline of the war to save her homeland, Ukraine, from invasion by Russia.
So incredulous were colleagues of Viktoriia Honcharuk, 25, giving up her six-figure salary job as a New York investment banker to go to war that her line manager promised to keep her job open for when she changed her mind.
That was in late 2022 – and that desk remains unoccupied.
Viktoriia was moved to sign up when Vladimir Putin launched his ‘special military operation’ and brought Europe’s bloodiest war since World War Two to her homeland.
’I thought if I don’t do something now, I won’t be able to look myself in the eyes,’ she recalls. ‘If something happens and Ukraine does not exist in a few years, how am I going to look in the mirror and say ‘I am Ukrainian’ or a person of values?
’If you care about something, you have to act on it, otherwise it just gets worse.’
And so the banker scheduled a meeting with her boss at Morgan Stanley and told him she was going to return to Ukraine.
Viktoriia Honcharuk, 25, gave up her six-figure salary on Wall Street to go and fight in Ukraine
Viktoriia was moved to sign up when Vladimir Putin launched his ‘special military operation’
Despite starting out with a phobia of needles she has now worked across some of the war’s deadliest battlefields, including in Bakhmut and Avdiivka
Most days she is triaging patients, who have lost legs, arms and even eyes in battle, documenting some of the gruesome injuries on her popular social media accounts
The high achiever first visited the United States when she was 15-years-old as part of a young leaders exchange programme. She later joined Morgan Stanley after graduating from university in San Francisco
To her surprise, her manager was fully supportive of her move – and three years later her desk still remains in the office, ready for her whenever she wants to return.
The banker-turned-battlefield paramedic added: ‘As soon as I went into his office, the first thing he said to me was: ‘You want to go to Ukraine, don’t you?’
’I asked him how he knew, and he told me ‘I can see you walking in every single day to your desk, and I see your eyes, and I know you are not here, you are not here with us.’
‘Which was fair and also true. So he told me to go, figure things out, take a few months and said I am welcome to come back anytime. And I never did.’
Since leaving the shimmering skyscrapers of NYC behind in December 2022, Viktoriia has treated thousands of soldiers as well as Russian prisoners of war.
Despite starting out with a phobia of needles she has now worked across some of the war’s deadliest battlefields, including in Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
Viktoriia says that at times she has feared she would perish on the front line.
Most days she is triaging patients, who have lost legs, arms and even eyes in battle, documenting some of the gruesome injuries on her popular social media accounts.
She has also set up a think tank where she leads on defence tech, warning politicians around the world about how fibre-optic drones are changing the nature of modern warfare.
Speaking to the Daily Mail this week about her former life of luxury in Manhattan, Viktoriia said: ‘I do miss it but my conscience couldn’t let me stay.’
Viktoriia got a internship at Citi Bank before joining Morgan Stanley
The high achiever first visited the United States when she was 15-years-old as part of a young leaders exchange programme.
She later returned to attend Minerva University in San Francisco where she was enrolled in the elite international programme, that sees students travel across seven cities around the world during their study.
Viktoriia had watched from afar as Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s borders four years ago, as Vladimir Putin began his invasion.
So when the 22-year-old quit her role at Morgan Stanley to become a paramedic on the frontline – despite a phobia of blood and needles – friends in New York begged her not to go. They called her foolish.
Her older sister, Maryna, 30, grabbed a bag and joined the resistance the day the war broke out – while her father and mother, who had previously been against women joining the army, joined the local territorial army.
‘My family is a lot more involved than most of the family’s in Ukraine,’ she previously told a YouTuber.
‘My Mum, Dad and sister all joined the armed forces at the beginning. Even my Mum, who was very against women in the army, was standing there with AK74s.
‘I was very proud of her and how my family reacted to the full scale invasion. I knew I needed to at least be as good as them.’
Thousands of miles away, Viktoriia offered support by donating money to Ukraine’s war effort to help buy food, clothes and other supplies for soldiers. Yet she suddenly felt that this was not enough.
She said: ‘The Ukrainian army quadrupled in a day, so people needed a lot of things, and that was making me feel that I was useful. But as time passed, what I was doing now was not enough.
Her older sister, Maryna, who was an inspiration to Viktoriia, is one of her biggest supporters and admires how she put her Manhattan life on hold for Ukraine.
Maryna, who was working at a television firm in Ukraine when the war broke out, told the Mail this week: ‘I actually think she is a very, very brave girl to leave her dream work and her dream life to do all this.
’It was not a big question for me about what to do – but for her, it required a lot of thinking, and she is an overthinker. I don’t know if I would have done the same if I were in her shoes.’
Not everyone in her life, however, was so supportive. Her mother even went on hunger-strike to stop her from joinin
Viktorria and her sister Maryna, 30, at the Osborne Studio gallery looking at their portraits from the front line
Speaking on the military YouTube channel NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade, she said previously: ‘My sister was always supportive of me and supports my choices because she knows I am going to do what I want anyways.
‘My dad has always been understanding but my mom not so much. She was not always supportive of my choices. For example when I went to Flex (Future Leaders Exchange Programme) she could not understand what it was.
‘So with this war she stopped eating for a few days as a sign of protest, even though she did the very same thing.
‘She’s good now and she’s supportive now. She’s learnt to support it.’
Friends in Manhattan had actively encouraged Viktoriia not to go to her war-torn country, fearing she was giving up on her career in the United States.
’Some of my friends were not very supportive,’ she said. ‘They thought it was a very foolish idea. They had seen me trying to get the career that I had really wanted throughout the years and saw how hard it was for me to do.
’They said I was giving up too much by doing something like this. But some were supportive and that’s what I needed.’
Viktoriia – or Tori as she is called in the military – now works in the Third Assault Brigade, the same unit her sister works in intelligence in.
The unit is a volunteer-only unit, mostly made up of young, smart, educated Ukrainians who gave up their everyday jobs and studies at university to join the resistance.
Seen as one of the most elite and efficient units, known for its intense training, has more than 500 people trying to sign up to join every month.
Maryna has been working in the army for four years, since the day after the war broke out. She was given a week’s training in technical medicine before being let out into the field and in those first days of war, when no one knew what lay ahead, she did not know how alone she would live.
Viktoriia – or Tori as she is called in the military – now works in the Third Assault Brigade, the same unit her sister works in intelligence in
‘When I joined, I thought I would die in three days because I didn’t know what would be happening in the next week,’ Maryna said.
‘There was no understanding on how the world would be and if Russians would come here. We didn’t know anything so my plan was to do something and if I was going to die, I would die for my country.’
Maryna, who was Ukraine’s first female assault trooper and now leads the intelligence unit in her squad, has, according to her sister, ‘the most badass job here in Ukraine’.
The older sister captured members from the Wagner Group, who her sister says ‘couldn’t believe he had been taken prisoner by a woman’.
When Viktoriia joined, she was given a week’s training in technical medicine before being given her first assignment.
The sisters, who used to constantly squabble as children, are now grateful they work in the same unit and can check in on each other.
The pair, who were brought up in Baranivka, close to the Belarus border, can hear each other chatting on the radio and know they are okay.
’I can tell by her voice if she was tired or not, if she was scared or not, for me it was a lot more peaceful just knowing she was okay and we were getting to see each other a lot more often,’ Viktoriia said.
There are still disagreements, however. Most notably on their view of Russian prisoners of war.
Speaking of having to treat their opponents, Maryna said: ‘I see this sad little guy. This old white guy, who is so scared to say a word to you.
’It’s not like an option [to treat them]. You don’t think he is a prisoner of war (PoW), just someone you need to help.’
As part of the think tank Viktoriia set up she has spoken in the US, London and at the Munich Security Conference
But Viktoriia, who admits she is the more emotional one of the pair, said while she will always treat PoW with compassion, she finds it hard to fully disassociate from the situation.
She said: ‘I don’t feel the same way. It is hard for me not to think that these are the people that came. They could have made a different choice. They could have done something about this.
‘I was a very big believer that people are inherently good before all of this but I don’t think so anymore.
‘One of the PoW I had to treat was right after four friends were killed, right after we retrieved their bodies, and then the same night I had to pick up a PoW and change him adn I thought, really – this might be the guy who killed our friend.
‘It’s difficult because it’s something we have to do because Russians are really cruel with our prisoners of war and we are not like this, we are civilised people.’
When she is not working as a paramedic, saving lives in often terrible conditions, Viktoriia is working on her think tank – the Snake Island Institute – which was set up in the wake of President Trump’s bust-up with President Zelensky in the Oval Office.
The think tank aims to represent Ukraine’s military experience in the international arena, communicated by those actively working in units, rather than purely through politicians.
It has led to Viktoriia speaking in the US, in London and last week at the Munich Security Conference about various issues from defence technology to building better partnerships with allies.
’Often, certain messages about Ukraine’s military experience do not get across in the way it needs to,’ she said.
‘We saw this urgent need to create something that is independent and that can communicate our Ukrainian military experience to our Western allies.
So we started the Snake Island Institute as an emergency think tank with the goals to aggregate Ukrainian military experience and use it to position Ukraine as a partner.
‘Ukraine has so much to offer. President Trump wants a deal, let’s have a deal, right? The deal is we help you, you help us.’
And it’s not just the United States Viktoriia wants to send a message too – it is also to the UK and the rest of their allies in Europe, who she believes are simply not prepared for the threat of war.
’You guys [the UK] are not ready to fight anyone and you need to be,’ she said bluntly.
’In Ukraine, we are really interested in you guys [Europe] being strong as you are our allies.
‘It is not a race between the allies; we should be one big allied association.’
The work the sisters have done over the past few years has seen them being made poster-girls for the Ukrainian army – even being painted by the British war artist Max Denison-Pender.
A portrait of Viktoriia sitting in a ruined tank in the city of Bakhmut in 2023 hangs in the reception of the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, as an inspiration to British troops.
She has spoken at Sandhurst and spoke at the Munich Security Conference last week about how fibre optic drones are changing the face of warfare.
Viktoriia has been depicted as a role model to many in Ukraine, and around Europe as a whole and while she was initially proud of this, it comes at a price which weighs on her conscience.
’I thought it was cool at first until the first girl I knew who I was inspired to join went into the army and was killed,’ she said. ‘I felt very uneasy about it.’
’That is the hardest part, the hardest part is to see people die,’ she adds.
A portrait of Viktoriia sitting in a ruined tank in the city of Bakhmut in 2023 hangs in the reception of the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion four years ago, at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since 24 February 2022 according to President Zelensky, however, the estimated figure is expected to be higher.
Amongst the pictures of herself surrounded by friends in the army, there are several tributes to close friends of Viktoriia who have died in the war.
And as for her return to Manhattan, Viktoriia does not know what the future holds. Her desk remains open for her at any point she does decide to return, but for now, she is focused on creating a stronger Ukraine.
