Evacuating a Horse...
Eventually. Spartak really did NOT want to get into the van. But in Ukraine you learn that animal rescue is 10% dramatic action and 90% patience...
Ukrainians take their animals seriously. Pets have never been my thing – my ideal relationship with a critter is that I’m over here, and the critter is over there at a distance, and everyone is happy. However, if a foreign volunteer wants to meet Ukrainians on their terms and not ones we impose on them, that often means working as hard for animal lives as human ones, even if that isn’t your default position.
Kolia of Futurama will evacuate anything that moves. He says sometimes he leaves people behind and takes animals because the people can find transport themselves, but the animals can’t. That means cats, dogs, goats, chickens, cows and one fine day in early May… a horse. A spirited, three-year-old one called Spartak. A group of locals including Spartak’s owner and friends who ride him were leaving the town of Raihorodok for safer locations in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
With their fuel costs covered by the fabulous Roxolani Trust, who found them through this blog, Futurama and Druzi Space had become able to fund more, and more ambitious evacuations than was previously possible. But this does not necessarily make the evacuations simple.
The interconnected small local groups in Donetsk oblast often share vans and petrol supplies. In as far as anything belongs specifically to Futurama, these two buses, white and yellow, do. The white one is 30 cm too low to accommodate the horse… and the yellow one wouldn’t start. It was hit by a drone in June 2025 and since then has mostly served as an animal house.
The current problem was with its battery. So the first order of the day: Kolia and his fellow volunteer Sacha spent an hour crashing around with generator, tow rope and tools. Eventually we were on the road, the white van (Kolia and I) racing ahead to the rendezvous point in the city of Sloviansk, while Sasha and Nelly trundled along behind in the yellow one, which was rather slower even when it did not need towing. Nelly is a French volunteer who has been assisting Futurama with the evacuation of people and animals for the past six weeks or so, and it was her lot to drive Spartak all the way to Dnipro once he had been collected.
Thus we made it to Sloviansk, a few miles from Kramatorsk along a road that is now strung with anti-drone nets, though most of the burnt-out cars have been cleared away. Spartak was trotting around an open space by the river along with his owner, Valik, and friends Ira and Tanya. Kolia greeted them then we ducked under the anti-drone nets and crossed the road to a little shop to buy coffee… which was not available because there was an electricity blackout. Back we went, armed with Coke, when Nelly and Sasha arrived and the work began.
For Valik, anyway. It took over half an hour to persuade Spartak that climbing into a small, dark, confined space was a great idea. And he was ultimately more forced than persuaded, though the three-man team of Valik, Kolia and a friend of Valik’s managed not to hurt or scare him.
I documented the half-hour process for the annals of wartime heroism. Thanks to Yulia Appen for compiling it into a video:
Reader, I stood well back and tried to look busy, including a brief conversation with Spartak’s friends, who were also observing from a safe distance.
Where are you and Spartak from?
Tanya: Raihorodok.
Is he a working horse?
Ira: No… [sadly] We ride him.
Why did you decide to leave now?
Ira: Well, the situation is just getting worse and worse. No crisis but worse and worse for four years.
Tanya: The owner, Valik, is going with him. We’ve been preparing for this all year.
Do you have any other animals?
Tanya: Yes, a dog. But she’s going with us when we move.
The men did, as the video demonstrates, eventually get Spartak into the yellow van, but he wasn’t the only steed in need of coaxing…
The van required an oil change.
The pipe then had to be sealed with a zip tie and a plastic bag.
Kolia ziptied the licence plate on.
The driver’s side door would not open; the passenger side one didn’t for a while until Sasha hit it in some special scientific way.
More zip ties were applied somewhere inside the bonnet.
The more functional battery from Kolia’s van was swapped out with the one in the yellow van.
Finally Nelly set off to drive Spartak, Ira and Valik the six hours down mostly terrible roads, some subject to drone threat, to Spartak’s new home in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
If they needed to stop for petrol, Kolia explained, Valik could jump out and put bricks under the tyres so she didn’t need to switch the engine off, and go and get fuel from the petrol station in a can.
What could go wrong?
I thought best to ask that question openly only after the fact. I left Donetsk oblast myself the next day, and messaged Nelly to ask if she had survived.
Nelly wrote: ‘Yes I did but what a trip... in the end I had to bring the couple back to Sloviansk. After a battery failure at a gas station, we had a second one just before Sloviansk on the way back, had to push the van a couple of times!! Ended up in my bed at almost 5am, could hear the first birds singing!! 😅’
This post is lighthearted, but the overall context is not, and unfortunately since May the situation in and around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk has become much worse as the Russians concentrate their firepower on Donetsk Oblast. Futurama and Druzi Space are receiving dozens of requests for evacuations a day, and can only fulfil a fraction of them – or none at all if they run out of money for fuel, which happens all too often.
I am going back to Ukraine myself at the end of August and will report from the ground in more detail. In the meantime, you can donate to the evacuation of people and animals via the umbrella group Aid Ukraine UK, who have a PayPal, and can also take international bank transfers. 100% of money received goes to Druzi and Futurama’s emergency work on the ground.
Wow, what a situation! One tends to think of cats and dogs and zoo animals, but Spartak...! I appreciated how the loading was managed. It's a situation which happens also outside a war zone... You spotted it immediately: a narrow dark space is something to be avoided, especially by a young horse with no previous experience and no expert companion to show it's ok. It may have been easier without the pallets, but it looks like they were transporting other stuff also, so it may not have been possible. (In my times, it was thought that a narrow slot helped the horse balance by leaning on the sidewalls, while now the prevalent opinion is that it's better to have the horse free to balance on its own). The photo of Spartak inside the van shows a moderately relaxed face. Hooray for Kolia!
Just got back from Ukraine, including a few days there… so much respect for all the volunteers…