A DOG NAMED DONBAS AND HIS LIBERATION

One dog’s journey from war-torn Ukraine to the snowy fields of Canada.

On a cold November afternoon in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas region, a thin black dog appeared from the tall grasses at the edge of a ridge. Cautiously, he approached a bush where a former Canadian soldier and his colleague, both foreign fighters in the Ukrainian army, had quickly taken cover.

The soldiers had no idea where the dog had come from. Perhaps he had wandered from the nearby village, now little more than a pile of rubble, stuck in the battle-scarred no-man’s land between Russian and Ukrainian forces. From the dog’s sad amber eyes and the way his ribs and hips jutted out, it was clear he had been alone for a while.

The dog crept closer. Usually, the soldiers would shoo away stray animals, fearing they might jeopardize their mission or safety. But this time, something stopped them. Instead, they reached out to gently stroke his cheek. The dog curled up and fell asleep at their feet.

The Canadian soldier didn’t know it then, but this brief encounter would spark a mission of its own—a journey that would unite a global network of people with a shared purpose: to help this dog escape the danger of war, leave Ukraine, and eventually find a safe and loving home in the snowy fields of Canada.

“He was just so sweet, so innocent in his little ways,” the Canadian recalled in a pub in Zaporizhzhia one January afternoon, about 30 kilometers from the front. For safety reasons, The Globe and Mail is using the name Alberta, after his home province, to protect his identity. “I don’t know what it was, man, but he was just such a sweetheart. It felt like, here’s one life I can actually help.”

Alberta had been fighting in Ukraine since March 2024, shortly after retiring from a long career in the Canadian forces. During his time at the front, he’d witnessed many abandoned animals roaming the battlefields, their owners either killed or forced to flee. Cats were valued in the trenches for keeping mice away, but many dogs—starving and traumatized—could become aggressive. Some could even jeopardize the mission, getting in the way of combat or revealing the soldiers’ positions.

But the black dog wasn’t like that. He was quiet, and despite his large size, remarkably gentle. At first, he was nervous: that first night, when the soldiers crawled into a dugout, the dog hesitated at the entrance, then darted back into the brush and disappeared. The soldiers wondered if they’d ever see him again.

The next day, as the soldiers slept in a different trench about 500 meters away, the dog quietly approached the narrow entrance and, to the surprise of the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there, lay down between the foreigners’ feet. Likely, he had tracked their scent on the wind. “We probably smelled pretty bad by that point,” Alberta chuckled.

From that moment on, the dog never left their side. For six days, he followed them as they moved across the front lines, seeking shelter from the barrage of artillery, Grad rockets, and suicide drones that relentlessly targeted them. Huddled underground, they fed the dog cheese and sausage as the air around them vibrated with the deafening explosions of laser-guided KAB bombs.

“Whenever something loud happened, he’d hide behind one of us and stick with us,” Alberta recalled. “He’d follow us from hole to hole, no matter what we were doing. He’d just be like, ‘Okay, I’m coming with you.’”

One evening, Alberta named the pup after the region of Ukraine where he had been found: Donbas. Despite joking that their new pet might get them killed, both soldiers had already made a vow to get him out. With their operation over, an extraction truck for the fighters finally arrived. They jumped in, pulled Donbas onto their laps, and sped away from the frontlines.

Back at the team’s safe house, Alberta sent a text to one of his closest friends in Canada, Phil Morrow.

He shared photos of Donbas and raved about the dog’s gentle nature. Morrow, initially skeptical, was amazed that the war had led to such an unexpected companion. “At first, I was just like, ‘No way you found him,'” Morrow recalled over the phone last month. “But within a couple more days, I just knew this dog’s coming home.”

The real challenge, however, was getting him there. Morrow, who worked in forestry in northern Alberta, was eager to provide a perfect home for Donbas and was even ready to fly to Europe to pick him up. But with Alberta heading back to the frontlines soon, they needed to find a safe place for the dog until they could arrange the next steps.

By chance, Morrow’s friend knew Edmonton filmmaker Patrick Lundeen, who had recently traveled to Ukraine to film a documentary on humanitarian volunteers. Lundeen reached out to Justyna Trzeslewicz, a Polish volunteer he’d met on his trip. Could she help?

Animal rescue wasn’t her specialty, but since the full-scale invasion began, Trzeslewicz had made countless trips between Poland and Ukraine, delivering humanitarian aid and evacuating people from the frontlines. Last year, she and her colleague Adrian Gajewski had even formed their own NGO, Fundacja NOW, to continue their work.

During those trips, Trzeslewicz had seen the heartbreaking plight of abandoned animals wandering sick and frightened near the frontlines. Like many volunteers in Ukraine, she was deeply affected by the scale of the war’s suffering. So when she received the message about Donbas, she eagerly took on the challenge.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, we can save one,’” she recalled, speaking in Kyiv last month. “At least one will go to Canada—fantastic. So I was happy, but my first thought was, how… will I manage this?”

While Mr. Morrow raised funds to fly Donbas to Canada, Ms. Trzeslewicz began piecing together a plan. Her first call was to Artak, a shelter in Zaporizhzhia that cared for medically fragile evacuees from the front lines. At first, the staff were hesitant to take in a dog. Located in a cramped former clinic on the ground floor of a Soviet-era apartment building, the shelter’s narrow hallways and vulnerable residents left little room for a dog.

But Ms. Trzeslewicz had been a frequent supporter, providing rides and supplies, so the shelter decided to take a chance. “Justyna is someone we couldn’t refuse,” said Artak’s director, Natalia Ardalyanova, speaking in Russian through a translator one January afternoon. “Once we saw the dog, all those worries vanished. He’s a special dog.”

For two weeks, Donbas slept under a desk in the shelter’s office. The elderly residents fed him borscht and took him for walks, where he quietly matched their slower pace. When they scratched behind his ears, he would gently lean into their legs. By the time Ms. Trzeslewicz had organized the next part of Donbas’s journey, the residents were reluctant to say goodbye.

“He’s a legendary dog,” Ms. Ardalyanova said. “The people here have lost everything, and there was nothing left. When he came, for many, he provided emotional support and a sense of home.”

In December, Petya Petrova, a Bulgarian volunteer with the front-line animal rescue group UAnimals, arrived at Artak to pick up Donbas and drive him nearly 600 kilometers to Zoopatrul, a shelter for war-affected animals in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv. Ms. Trzeslewicz had never met Ms. Petrova before; they connected through a social-media forum for volunteers.

“Donnie is a perfect example of how many hands are needed to save one life,” Ms. Trzeslewicz said, referring to the dog by his nickname. “When we have one goal, it doesn’t matter if we don’t know each other. The goal is more important. It’s about trust: ‘I don’t know you, but take this dog, take these people.’”

Like Artak, Zoopatrul staff were initially hesitant to take Donbas, but for different reasons. The shelter, founded by Daria and Dmytro Revnyuk shortly after the full-scale invasion, already cared for over 700 animals, including around 400 dogs. Many were sick or wounded, some missing limbs. Ms. Revnyuk, a veterinarian, wasn’t sure there was space for one more.

“I started saying to my husband, ‘Dima, we have no place, sorry, no,’” Ms. Revnyuk recalled with a laugh. “But Dima said, ‘Dasha, please, it’s a very beautiful dog.’”

It helped that Donbas already had a home waiting for him. While Zoopatrul has little trouble finding homes for cats, adopting out dogs has been much more challenging. The shelter navigates complex paperwork to send animals abroad, including to Canada, but the process has been slow. Meanwhile, calls continue to pour in from soldiers and civilians discovering new animals near the front lines.

At Zoopatrul’s shelter, a large truck sits by the entrance, its bed and chassis shredded by shrapnel. It was from an evacuation last summer in the then-besieged city of Vovchansk. Ms. Revnyuk said they rescued about 40 animals that day but barely escaped with their lives as artillery pounded the area. That was the last time they risked such a dangerous mission.

“I try to save all of the animals, but now we don’t have the resources, we don’t have enough kennels, and we don’t have enough people to work,” Ms. Revnyuk explained. “I’m the only veterinarian here. Five hundred animals for one doctor is a huge amount of work. It’s a very hard situation now.”

In the end, Donbas didn’t stay at Zoopatrul for long. In late December, Alberta’s unit got some time off to rest, so the soldier drove to Irpin to pick up the dog and bring him back to the team’s safe house in the east. The next month was spent mostly in relaxation, with Alberta starting work on a children’s book to share the dog’s incredible story.

Two months after Donbas had first wandered into their hideout, it was finally time for the dog to complete his journey to Canada. On a chilly morning in January, Ms. Trzeslewicz and Ms. Gajewski arrived in Kyiv with a van packed with medical supplies, food, and toys for hospitals and shelters on the front lines. They met Alberta and Donbas at a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, unloading the aid while the dog sat and observed.

Earlier that morning, two Russian missiles had struck Kyiv. At Alberta’s hotel, Donbas had woken up to the explosions, snuggling closer to his rescuer before falling back to sleep. Now, as Alberta placed the dog in the backseat of Ms. Trzeslewicz’s van for the long trip to Warsaw, he tucked one of his shirts beside Donbas for comfort.

Before leaving, Alberta wrapped his arms around the dog one last time. Then, he climbed into his truck and prepared to head back east to rejoin his team, who had received new orders. As he watched the van drive away toward Poland, where Mr. Morrow was waiting, Alberta felt a sense of completion. “Mission complete,” he said, or at least his “small part” in it.

“It’s bittersweet,” Alberta remarked. “I’m definitely going to miss having him around, going for runs, just hanging out with him, you know? But he’s going to a better life. He doesn’t have to deal with any of this anymore—no more airstrikes, no more shelters or danger. He’s out of here.”

Eleven days later, a plane landed in Edmonton. Shortly after, Mr. Morrow sent Alberta videos of Donbas running through snowy fields, his tail wagging and tongue out as he frolicked in the cold, free from war. No more gunfire. No more artillery. The devastation of Ukraine continues, but for Donbas, those days were behind him, thanks to the efforts of so many people working together.

“It’s not just about the dog—it’s what he represents,” Mr. Morrow said, as Donbas rested beside him. “He’s a soul caught in the middle of a brutal conflict, surrounded by human atrocities. But so many people came together to do something good, just because it mattered.”