Two soldiers fell in love with a stray pup, named him Donbas and made it their mission to get him safely to a new home in northern Alberta
The skinny black dog showed up on a cold afternoon in November, emerging from the grasses at the lip of a ridge in Ukraine’s battered Donbas region. Cautiously, he padded up to the bush where a former Canadian soldier and his colleague, both foreign fighters in the Ukrainian army, had hastily staked out a hidden position.
“He was just supersweet, and very innocent in his mannerisms,” the Canadian said, chatting one January afternoon in a pub in Zaporizhzhia, about 30 kilometres from the front. For safety reasons, The Globe and Mail is referring to him as Alberta, the name of his home province. “I don’t know what it was, man, but he was just such a sweetheart. It was just like, this is one life I can actually help a little bit here.
After that, the dog never strayed from their side. For six days, he shadowed the soldiers as they weaved across the front line, sheltering from a sky that rained artillery and Grad rockets and suicide drones that hunted their every move. Hunkered underground, they fed the dog cheese and sausage as deafening blasts of laser-guided KAB bombs burst nearby.
By coincidence, a friend of Mr. Morrow’s knew Edmonton filmmaker Patrick Lundeen, who had recently been in Ukraine filming a documentary on humanitarian volunteers. Mr. Lundeen reached out to Justyna Trzeslewicz, a Polish volunteer he’d met on his trip. Could she help? But Ms. Trzeslewicz had helped them with rides and supplies so many times, they decided to take the chance. “Justyna is a person we couldn’t refuse,” Artak director Natalia Ardalyanova said, speaking in Russian through a translator one January afternoon. “Once we saw the dog, all those worries just disappeared. He’s a special dog.”
“I started to say to my husband, ‘Dima, we haven’t any place, sorry, Dima, no,’” Ms. Revnyuk said, with a laugh. “But Dima said, ‘Dasha, please, it’s a very beautiful dog.’”
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