DOG-EARED with Lisa Davis & the Health Power podcast.

BONUS DOG-EARED EP #10: SAVING THE DOGS OF UKRAINE with Ilya Knizhnik

March 13, 2023 Naturally Savvy
DOG-EARED with Lisa Davis & the Health Power podcast.
BONUS DOG-EARED EP #10: SAVING THE DOGS OF UKRAINE with Ilya Knizhnik
Show Notes Transcript

This is a very special and important episode of DOG-EARED with Lisa Davis  not to be missed.

Ilya Knizhnik, of Chicago-based aid relief organization Ukraine TrustChain, tells us about the plight of dogs and other pets in war torn Ukraine. This is a story of the bond between animals and humans that persists even in times of violence, hunger and fear. Dogs are an integral part of Ukrainian village and city life. Ilya tells Lisa about evacuees who carry their dogs many miles to safety, the girl who spends her days caring for dozens abandoned dogs and cats, the civilian volunteers who bring aid to communities and always carry pet food in their trucks, and many other touching stories. Ukraine TrustChain funds teams of Ukrainian volunteers providing aid in active war zones. 100% of your donations go directly to teams on the ground. To learn more and donate, go to https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/


Also, please follow on social media:

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/UkraineTrustChain

Twitter: https://twitter.com/UkraineTrustChn

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ukrainetrustchain/

Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ukraine-trustchain/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ukrainetrustchain







SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

dogs , people , ukraine , pets , evacuated , village , pet food , volunteers , teams , animals , dog food , organizations , shelters , deliver , trip , left , eastern ukraine , care , family , funds 

Lisa 0:01
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Lisa 
1:34
I am really thrilled to be doing a very special episode of Dog here today we do not have an author on but rather we have somebody who is involved with Ukraine trust chain, and it is a fabulous organization, a nonprofit that we're going to be talking about today. And we're going to be focusing on dogs what's going on with dogs in Ukraine, what help is needed and all the wonderful work that these fantastic volunteers are doing. We're joined by Ilya Kenisha. Nick, who joins us now. Hi, Ilya. Welcome.

Ilya 
2:04
Hi, thank you so much for having me on.

Lisa 
2:06
So before we jump into this, I want to ask you, when did your love of dogs begin?

Ilya 
2:12
It's hard to say exactly. I've always loved dogs and always wanted one as a kid. In the reality of growing up in the Soviet Union is that most people were in the apartments. And so dog ownership, especially for any dog of any size, event size takes on extra challenges. Compared to here, where people have a little bit more space and more resources. My parents were not huge fans of dogs. My mother always said how much work it would be and all that there was some negativity about that. Which is ironic, because these days, she's totally in love with her grandpa, the dog and her love each other. Like when the dogs smells her hears outside, she will rush her sometimes a little bit too much force issues with her size. And there is definitely a lot of infection. I think it was reinforced when we had a small summer house in Kyiv. And a cousin's dog was there for several summers and just being taken care of it. And it was actually pregnant at the time. So the puppies were born and seeing the newborn pups. And I think, you know, if I wasn't totally falling for dogs, then that would have probably been the moment and they just happened that for years there were some reason that like we couldn't have a dog or it didn't make sense either where we live their life is too busy and a neighbor was offering their dog for someone the neighbor was offering their dog for adoptions. They couldn't take care of it. The situation had changed. And like, we just totally fell in love with
that love is so incredible. The dog hair, the smells, the walks, you know, the vet bills, but the love right, alien, I just makes it worth it 

Ilya 
absolutely. Like I couldn't put it better. We always knew we'd have a dog and we just could not say no.

Lisa 
4:14
And you mentioned you have a family, right?

Ilya 
4:16
I have two kids, how do they they must love. They absolutely adore her. She's a member of the family and I love the relationship that they have with her just to see them grow up with a pet and help to take care of her unlearned responsibility, but also just how much my boys love her. It's just so heartwarming. I mean the irony in a lot of ways that we were concerned about getting a dog what are we? We like to travel we like to lead an active lifestyle. You know what happens? Well, we got dogs three and a half years ago, and three years ago COVID locked down started. So the majority of the time we've had her, you know we've reduced her travel dramatically because of COVID. And now Some of the trips that we did take we ended up doing road trips with

Lisa 
5:03
Ilya, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself how you got involved. And what exactly is Ukraine trust chain.

Ilya 
5:09
It's kind of a great intersection of my favorite topics. I love talking about dogs. I am from Ukraine, myself. I was born in Kenya, but most people in our organization, we're not. And what happened is a number of friends and acquaintances, we came together in response to Russia's horrible full scale invasion, just over a year ago. And it all started off with this one story. It's been published now in NPR, in Washington Post about the surrogate twins that were born in Kenya on the night of the bombing. You might have heard of it.

Lisa 
5:44
Yeah, I did read about that. For people who don't know about it. Tell us about this story.

Ilya 
5:49
Do these twins, that were born to a surrogate mother to Chicago family on the night that Russia invaded, and they're born in Kenya, and here, the, their premature, bombs are falling everywhere. And the mother went into labor early. And then this their family is here in Chicago, and they're worried and they're terrified. They don't have the right medicines, they don't have a preemie formula and electricity is going out. bombs are falling. So a number of friends of friends and acquaintances, tons of people came together to look for resources for to help these twins. And some of the people that are lead volunteers. Now, we've met through this initial outreach as brave woman good with Natalia, who was she was going pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find preemie formula as your bombs falling, she's like, nothing here, I'll try the next one. Wow. And that formed one of the first connections in the trust chain. We call it trust chain. Because every single team is in one way connected to either people that we know here in the States, or acquaintances, or some of our initial contacts. And what ended up happening very early on is that these people were just helping others. And when we saw how much they're doing, we passed a few small resources on to them, we were able to help a lot more people, and we passed on more resources to them. By the time it was exactly a year ago, so two weeks into the war. There were six teams in the ground, they were evacuating 1000s of people feeding 10s of 1000s. And all of this from funds that were passed instantly from the US to Ukraine. And we had unexpectedly formed an aid organization, we filed for a nonprofit exactly a year ago. And we've been working on this ever since.

Lisa 
7:50
Oh, that's fantastic. What does it meant to you to be able to help out?

Ilya 
7:54
It's kept me sane this year, this has been a very difficult year. And it's it's a very strange feeling too is because we've been able to do so much. But yet, we're doing this in such a horrible situation, that it's, we've achieved great success amid a great tragedy that we wish we wouldn't have to do any of it.

Lisa 
8:15
Yeah, that makes so much sense. Do you ever find yourself just feeling super overwhelmed by it all? And how do you handle those emotions?

Ilya 
8:25
Daily? I think that's probably fair. Actually, this morning, it was the first thing I read is the news when I woke up, and they're pretty massive bombings all over Ukraine, and checked in with a number of people in different cities, and that we know and they're like, well, it landed here, but not where we were, or but if we'd stayed in our old apartment, that would have been 100 yards outside our window. And that kind of conversation was in the morning. So sometimes it's hard to start your day like that, but at the same time, a lot of what we do, it's just it's incredible how many people the volunteers are able to help. So we talked about this as a small mutual aid organization at some time still feels that way. But it's had a tremendous impact in the last year, we've evacuated just over 49,000 people from war zones. I have to say that we have an exact count of people and I believe it's 49 892 as of Sunday. We do not have an exact count of the pets and is 1000s upon 1000s of pets have been evacuated. Animals are really part of life in Ukraine. Some teams keep better track of pets than others. But in addition to that, we fed about just over 1.7 million people on the ground. As an organization that didn't exist, we've delivered believe it's something on the order of Six and a half 1000 tons of A, that's incredible. And among that there has always been quite a bit of pet food that's been delivered. But I think a lot of people have seen the war images from Ukraine, they see the how people interact with pets and how you interact with their dogs, we see people carrying these, you know, incredibly massive dogs for days as they were escaping the country a year ago. And that kind of care for the animals that love for them that hasn't stopped. Like we see that everywhere throughout our work, just thinking of one of the times when you're hiking with our gold and and there was only one way to go. And it happened to be a metal bridge that she just would not cross over. And this is when I realized that I really need to stay in good shape, because she's a little bit on the larger side. 75 pounds. So I just left her uncarrier across. And that was the only way we were gonna get through. I can't imagine how what would we do? Right? It had to do that for days on that.

Lisa 
11:05
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Because I think people might have this impression that with this prolific war going on, the last thing you're thinking about is your dog or your other pets, but they're part of the family. Understanding the culture, like you talked about, instead of making assumptions is really important.

Ilya 
11:22
They are very much part of the family. And there's all kinds of reasons why people couldn't take them. In some cases, there were different periods where you could cross the border with your pets, with lots of exceptions. There are other periods when if you didn't have the right veterinary paperwork, and I think every pet owner knows about all the shots and all the paperwork, even if you want to hire a dog walker. We thought we adopted a dog that was up to date on all vaccinations and everything and turned out that she was actually a slightly different age. And that wasn't up to date on any shots, which is part of why she ended up having to give it away. Imagine leaving in an emergency and you didn't take your dogs records. And now you can't cross the border.

Lisa 
12:08
That'd be so heart wrenching. And that's

Ilya 
12:11
something that a lot of people have had to deal with, in some cases evacuated with the pets. In some cases, the pets have just stayed behind,

Lisa 
12:19
or their shelters or specific places that the dogs go or do they end up just kind of roaming around and like that girl who takes care of all those dogs are those just dogs that she found if you can expand on that for us.

Ilya 
12:32
So one thing that we've seen a lot this year is that people step up to help. It's not just the hundreds of volunteers that work through our network. It's just regular everyday people. And when the owners leave or have to evacuate and can't take their pets, or the owners are unfortunately not around, we've seen everyone around to step up and take care of the remaining pets. So a lot of times, sometimes it's just a neighbor that takes in one dog or a cat. Sometimes it's an old grandma that walks out into the yard and gives the leftovers to the dozen dogs that hang out there. Other times in some areas, we've seen these ag requests that are very, very specific where when each person evacuate, there's just as one animal lover that stays behind and often ends up being like a ham father, who's the only one left and he's now feeding the dogs of a dozen of his neighbors. And also, sometimes aren't, he was here then okay, well, they'll deliver him extra bags of pet food just to make sure he can keep going. Sometimes it's the grandparents gallery, sometimes it's the kids, it's a really different situation everywhere in there, plenty of large cities and where the majority of the population will 90% of the population is still there. Key of this population has, I believe actually increased since before the war, because for every person that's left the refugees came in the city's population is pretty much what it was before. In other areas, there's just very few people left. So in some places, there's formal dog shelters. In other places, there's very informal ones. In other places, it's organizations that have stepped in and they've organized so maybe there was a shelter before and now they've organized connections with shelters or other organizations that support pets. And then so they're taking in other animals. One of the things we do is that we run a number of shelters for people, we don't have any shelters and stuff for dogs, but we do deliver a lot of dog food. A lot of these organizations that help pets, what they don't have often is the logistics to deliver and help. Our teams reach all of the small villages and towns and all the areas near the front line and we Probably feed more dogs than a lot of organizations that whose focus is just that.

Lisa 
15:06
Now I know that there's been some heartwarming stories one that I saw on Twitter was about and I apologize if I mispronounce his name Timor's team rescued this starving dog. He was that a Doxon? That was

Ilya 
15:19
very eventful. Dave. So two more is one of our lead volunteers in Harkey, which is the largest city in eastern Ukraine. Harkey prewar has almost 2 million people. And at this point, only about 40% of the population remains. And then part of that, as the refugees that have come there, it's been pretty devastated is it's right on the border with Russia. I mean, it was, it's difficult for people to describe this relationship. But a decade ago, people would go for a day trip into Russia, you would just go, oh, I want to have dinner and you would just drive across the border. And you'd go into Belgrade, which is the large city on the other side, and you'd come back, and it would really be a very short drive. Like from the suburbs into a city. It's was just normal. All of these villages, and the city had been under pretty constant fire this year. And on that one trip into these villages, they encountered, they went pretty close to the front line. And they encountered. There's a starving dog that they ran into starving dogs and that look like, I mean, when I first saw that picture, I'm like, okay, that dog, I wasn't sure that dog was going to make it. It was just, it was heart wrenching. Also on that trip, they ended up picking up several kittens and tuition chilas Nice Chinchillas are from a grandmother who couldn't care for them anymore. So she's like, please take them and give them to get home, the dog they just found in the streets. And this one particular team, they're very social media savvy, they've had quite a few videos go viral and seen by millions. And they thought, Okay, well, maybe the owner could be found. So they formed a hurricane, they took her dog to veterinary clinic. And all this time, they're posting videos on their Instagram and Tiktok. And one of the 1000s of people that followed them recognize the dog. That's so cool. And then they contacted them and reached out and this was the family, the family had to evacuate. But in the bombing. In the initial attacks, they couldn't find a dog when they evacuated. And then they Kevin able to go back to their village since. But they were very happily reunited with their dog, who's now doing much better. All the stories are heartwarming, but there's a degree of difficulty and sadness to all of them than Neil. He was recently in Ukraine for several weeks. And in eastern Ukraine, kind of north of the area that I described. He was visiting one village, and there's this one young girl there who's about 10 or 11, similar age to my kids, and she takes care of all the village dogs. Like that's what she's taken on as her as her job. She carries these heavy bags of pet food, like all throughout the village and make sure that all the dogs are okay. And it's incredible. And she doesn't even know what some of their names are like some, a lot of the owners have left. So she's come up with new names for a lot of them. And she was telling him, we're hoping to have at least one of these videos translated and caption soon. And then we'll share on our socials and she's telling him all of the names that she's come up with for these dogs and how she helps them and how they need different things. And like this is her job. This is her. That's what she's doing now. An interesting note is that the audio recording was apparently realistic enough that when I started playing at home, my golden thought that dogs were barking right outside, I guess it sounds realistic enough to get she speaks dog Ukrainian. So the other day in Odessa, we just heard from one of our lead volunteers that they had this really difficult trip to a village, this is about four hours away. And most of that on small dirt roads where you can't really go off to either side, because you might get blown up by mind. So they went to this village that they haven't been to before. And they there's some things that were there brought a couple of generators and they brought over 100 packages of food. And when they approach these villages, they never really know what to expect because they know that there is a need there and there's a great need. But in this case, it was definitely worse than they expected. Like their very heavy military action took place there and it was devastated. There are still old rusted tanks left within the village much of it was destroyed. And the people there hadn't received much aid so everyone just kind of seemed beaten down. When they got there, the thing is finally saw the people and they saw the, you know, their dogs and everyone like this very happy to see them and they all lined up, including the dogs. They're very excited. But it all of this took, the villagers shared their stories. And all of this took a really big emotional toll like they describe that the tank was blown up right in the village and how they, you know, saw the dead bodies there and how the dead bodies were just left there, because it was in the middle of a war. This was just blended between the devastation and the poverty and everything. Everyone was really just incredibly exhausted, emotional. Usually the volunteers know how to deal with this. But this will prove too much for many of them. One of the people that came on this trip as volunteers, I believe he's German, he sometimes joins them. In this case, he brought him he always brings his two dogs with them. And in this case, his dogs on the trip on the long trip back kind of just comforted everyone, like everyone was so emotional upset and and just having the animals there in their van. They were kind of like the support animals for the group. This wasn't the plan, like the dogs just happened to come with him. But in this case, this really, it meant a lot for the group. And it felt like it really like it was like the one bright spot on the trip was spending time and hanging out with these couple of dogs there. Usually the animals are there in the village. So that's one thing in some ways, it's one of the animals really, almost serve as an amplifier for the emotions and for everything that's going on. People, especially if you're close to Warzone will hide. So your first sign of anything will be the animals, like somebody an experienced volunteer driving through the village can tell exactly what's going on. But how what they see from the stray dogs. If the people are in hiding, they'll know how to find them. Usually the dogs are constantly traded around the houses where there's still people living there. So just quickly driving through the village and seeing okay, there's a couple of dogs here, there's a couple of dogs there, they know exactly where to deliver the aid because they see the dogs, if they don't see any animals at all. Or they see just a couple of dog strays like randomly wandering around, and nothing else they'll know that there might not be people left. There's one village that they arrived that where there was a dog, because it's a village, it was a guard dog. And it was it was tied to guard the property. Well, except that the Russians invaded. And the owner is either evacuated or was killed. And they don't really and the dog was still tied up. And the villagers were afraid to approach so they they eventually calmed this dog down and seemed like the dog was tied up there for at least two weeks. Oh gosh, because without anybody attending with maybe somebody throwing in patient food, so they're able to finally free the dog and make sure it was okay. And it was a really like, major thing, because if they hadn't gotten there, they're not sure that the dog probably would have just been left there.

Lisa 
23:17
Yeah, I know, right now you have a pet food drive happening. Tell us about that.

Ilya 
23:22
So we recently just launched a fundraiser on our Facebook page for pet foods or Ukraine. Now this is something that we've when our trucks go out to deliver aid to remote villages, we make sure that almost all of them have at least some bags of pet food. Because it's not just the people who need to eat. It's the animals. And I know sometimes people don't quite understand, like, why isn't a priority to save people's lives. You know, animals are secondary animals are theirs, but, but that's not really how it works on the ground. One of the things you quickly learn about international aid and helping people in different country or culture is that you have to meet them where they are, you have to make sure that the aid is aid that they can use, and that it fits into the ecosystem and the world that they live in. In these villages, the animals are not secondary, they're part of the family. So what we've seen in places that haven't received any pet food at all, is that people are using the aid that they received from other organizations to feed the pets. So we want to make sure that we can help the people in their pets because they're responsible for them. And since there's in all of these villages, there are fewer people around whether they evacuated internally within Ukraine, outside the country, or they're not around for other reasons. But the pets are still there.

Lisa 
24:49
Let's say I'm in the Ukraine and I need help. I would reach out to you and I would say I don't have enough clothing or food or you know other resources and dog food Give us the logistics on that.

Ilya 
25:01
So logistics are complicated. And the first admit is that we couldn't talk to 1.7 million people one on one. But sometimes it is the case. So some of the times someone will just reach us directly and say, you know, I'm in this town, actually, this was a very specific request. And so eastern Ukraine, hard to give. And they reached out to us saying that my elderly neighbor was taking care of my dog and a couple others, but he just called me that the ATM ate his card, and he doesn't have resources to buy the food anymore, and there's no power in the city. Could you help them. And they reached out, and then we connected him with one of our local teams, who brought over some bags of dog food, make sure he was good, and he had the resources to continue. And that's just, you know, one very specific example. But it does happen like that. Other times, when they just go to a village to help people, they will bring bags of dog food, because every single village has pets, and everywhere there is a need for it. And it's one of those things that's pretty universal, all the teams across the country do it, the ones that have access to it. And you know, if one of your listeners happens to work for a dog food manufacturer, or a large store selling pet food, we and you'd like to organize the donation, you know, we would love to help ship that over. We've worked with a number of US companies large and small to ship donations, they're most of the time, we will buy it on the ground, unless it gets shipped in from Europe. But if somebody wants to ship a container of dog food, we would gladly pay for that and help organize all of it, because it is much needed there.

Lisa 
26:46
If somebody's listening, and they want to volunteer and become part of Ukraine trust chain, do they need to speak Ukrainian or Russian, so

Ilya 
26:54
that helps, but it depends on what they're going to do. Volunteering, there's 100 Different things that volunteers do for us every day. on the US side. There's people who organize fundraisers, there's people who write to newspapers, there's people who actually have more of an interaction with people in Ukraine, like I talk to a number of our teams daily, some of our members talk to more, some handle more of the shipping logistics, I work with that as well. So there, there's a form on our website, and people can sign up to volunteer, the most helpful thing, most of the time, unless you can donate that truck of NetSuite or truck of human food, we will gladly take that as well or medical supplies. But the most helpful thing is funds, these funds can be transferred over instantly. And we're other organizations, we're waiting months to pack a container here and to send it there. We're able to just transmit funds instantly. And pretty much anything can be purchased in bulk on the ground, and has the effect of helping the local economy. And it gets there

Lisa 
28:04
certainly much faster. Yeah. And how do people donate,

Ilya 
28:07
they can go on our website or Ukraine trust chain that work. We're 501 C three nonprofit, so all of your donations are fully tax deductible. We can take donations by everything from credit card to bank transfers to cryptocurrency. We're also on every single social media, from Facebook to Twitter, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, Instagram, so anywhere, find your favorite social media, please follow us. I'm sure there'll be lots of posts about dogs and the people that we help as well,

Lisa 
28:39
easily. Is there anything that you were hoping that I would ask or something that we didn't discuss it you'd like to before we end today?

Ilya 
28:45
You know, it's hard to convey everything that we do and what we're about in just a short interview. And I find myself saying this often as I speak to a lot of people that we do so much on our new site. website, there's a link for reports where we post weekly newsletters. One thing that makes us a little bit different than most nonprofits is that we don't just have a report for work that we do over a course of a year or a month, every single week. Everything that happens on the ground in Ukraine is reported in great detail where the teams go where they meet the animals, on, you know, where they help the people. And I just really encourage people to read that. Even if you don't feel like you can donate now. Just sign up for the newsletter or read some of the work. We think that the work speaks for itself. We've helped 1000s of people we've helped 1000s of animals, and if more people can help and provide some resources, then we can continue to help 1000s more you know, this is all donor funded like we got when we started off sending all of our own money. Well, at first we thought we sent we could just do it ourselves because we didn't want to risk somebody else's Money, we weren't sure what was happening. But when we sent the first couple $100, and then we saw a video of the orphanage that was evacuated with that. And then we saw the food being delivered. The more work we saw, the more we wanted to help. And we quickly realized that we can't just do this on our own. And when we asked our friends, then our friends started telling us that they're running out of disposable funds. And so we asked the friends, friends and their friends, our estimate, and I have all these really great numbers because we just did our totals for the year. So our the total number of estimate is 6386 donors, I believe, this year that have contributed.

Lisa 
30:43
Oh, that's fantastic. Well, let's get let's get more easily I'm so glad you came on. Give us a website one more time.

Ilya 
30:50
It's Ukraine trust chain.org A

Lisa 
All right, everybody,
30:53
please donate help them out. This is such wonderful work that they're doing. I really appreciate you and keep coming back to dogeared rate review, subscribe. Never miss an episode.