Under sullen skies and netted tents, among spent shell casings and tattered camo, “Rambo” the puppy springs happily.
Suddenly, Rambo’s ears prick and he snaps to attention, his matted paws planted in the mud. He leans intently forward. His wispy tail sweeps the air. The Ukrainian troops he’s hunkered down with fall silent. Rambo’s heard something.
The sound flits away. Perhaps just an insect, but you can’t be too careful. Not with an enemy that bombs schools and maternity hospitals.
Rambo resumes leaping and bounding in the mud. Soldiers mutter speculations, breaking the quiet. Their “Protector” has signaled “all clear.”
Rambo has served as sentry for a weary Ukrainian platoon since he was found nearly frozen on the street. “We felt sorry for him,” the soldiers told Freedom News TV. “We took him into our post and he stayed with us.”
Soon as he thawed, Rambo volunteered as four-legged radar for a platoon holding a tenuous line somewhere in Donbass, Eastern Ukraine. “He is our watchdog,” one soldier said. “He can hear very well if there’s a stranger nearby.”
Soldiers surmised that Rambo was whelped by a pregnant dog they’d spotted near their camp. “He was so tiny, he could fit in one hand.” Two additional pups, presumed to be from the same mother, stay in the makeshift mess hall. Since giving birth, Rambo’s mother has not been seen.
Other dogs have joined the sentries’ canine corps. Muha (fly), Babai and Malish (baby) saw their neighborhoods leveled. The whereabouts of their humans is unknown. But, thanks to Ukrainian troops, they will never want for companionship and food.
In another muddy and frozen trench outside Avdiikva, an adult female dog stands watch. “She immediately barks or growls if the enemy is planning an attack,” a young soldier told The South China Morning Post. “It’s safer and calmer with her [here].” An AFP journalist reported that about fifteen cats and several dogs have joined Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches.
“The animals aren’t to blame, the war is,” one veteran soldier commented. “They were abandoned. They had to fend for themselves. We have to feed them.” Currently, the International Fund for Animal Welfare struggles remotely to help homeless animals in Ukraine’s embattled shelters.
Caring for displaced animal companions is not new to Ukrainian soldiers. When fighting erupted between pro-Moscow separatists and eastern Ukraine loyalists in 2014, more than two million people fled to the west, some leaving their pets behind. Soldiers cared for many of the abandoned animals. Many eventually adopted them.
A BBC documentary about forces guarding the now Russian-seized Chernobyl nuclear power plant highlighted the special barter struck between soldiers and stray dogs in the area. Food and shelter in exchange for keen senses of hearing and smell is how wolf and human forged their special bond 14,000 years ago.
“They give us joy,” a guard told the BBC. “For me personally, this is a kind of symbol of the continuation of life in this radioactive, post-apocalyptic world.”
Since arriving, Rambo and his four-legged troop have opened an endless supply-line of hope, resolve and love. Powerful ammo against a ruthless enemy led by a depraved despot whom a few crackpots have dubbed a “genius.”