Not the story people expect: inside a front line evacuation in Ukraine

By Dana Costin, founder of ROLDA

I’ve just returned from another journey into eastern Ukraine, near the Donbas front line, an area where the war never really recedes, it only pauses.

When people imagine animal evacuations in a war zone, they often picture urgency and spectacle: shattered buildings, animals pulled from debris, vans racing against time. That does happen.
But those are not the moments that stay with me.

What lingers are the quiet exchanges, the ones that take place in doorways, in silence, before the engine starts.

One woman, elderly and unsteady on her feet, met us at her threshold. Before letting go of her dog, she broke off a piece of bread from the small loaf she had left and pressed it into his mouth. Then she bent down, whispering something I couldn’t hear. It lasted only seconds. She handed us the lead, turned away, and walked back inside. I never learned her words. I already understood them.

Another man, retired, stood waiting with his large female dog. She had been sedated to make the journey possible. She was heavy, and he was not young. When we offered to help, he shook his head. Carefully, slowly, he lifted her himself, carried her to the van, and placed her into the crate. He adjusted her position, smoothed her fur, and lingered there for a moment before stepping back. Then he left.

We also pulled a mother dog and her eleven newborn puppies from underneath an apartment building that was close to collapse. The puppies were unaware of the danger surrounding them. Their mother was not. Her body shook with every distant blast she heard.

This is what an evacuation really looks like.

It’s never only about animals

These missions don’t transport animals alone. Often, they are the last chance out for people too, civilians who waited until there was almost nothing left, then finally asked for help. If there’s room, we take them.

There’s much else that happens beyond what’s visible. We recover animals whose owners have died and who would otherwise be left behind. We act as the final link in a chain for other animal welfare groups that are not allowed so close to the front, moving animals they’ve secured to safer zones. And we reunite families with their pets after displacement, transporting animals to wherever their people have managed to relocate.

In the chaos of war, keeping that bond intact matters more than most realize. A family that has lost everything else should not also lose the last living connection to home if it can be prevented.

These evacuations do more than save individual lives. They preserve family units, human and animal, when war threatens to break them apart entirely.

What this work demands

People often say this kind of work requires heart. It does. But heart alone would not keep anyone alive out there.

What’s required is discipline, preparation, and the kind of judgment that only comes from experience. Each mission demands planning that resembles military logistics. Routes change constantly. Conditions shift without warning. There is no formal training that prepares you for being targeted by drones, yet the team I work with has survived three such attacks in recent months.
Skill is not optional. Neither is calm.

On this most recent mission, we evacuated 36 animals:
• 10 adult dogs
• 13 puppies
• 9 cats
• 4 kittens

There was one more, a large dog with eight puppies,who could not be taken that day because the vehicle was already full.
Ruslan will return for them.

He never leaves any animal behind.