A former British Royal Marine who once led a headline-making animal evacuation from a city under siege has done it again — this time pulling cats and dogs out of another war zone under daily bombardment.
Paul “Pen” Farthing, 56, and a four-person team from his Nowzad charity moved 30 cats and dogs out of Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, driving them to safety in Smila, in the country’s central Cherkasy Oblast, before heading back toward the UK. The round-trip operation covered more than 13,000 kilometers.
Farthing was joined on the mission by veterinarians Lachlan Campbell and Angela Stoop and by Nowzad grants manager Nina Ley.
Speaking to the BBC by phone from the Ukraine-Poland border, Farthing said the mission had succeeded, and that he intended to return. “We are just little pawns on the chess board,” he told the BBC, describing the feeling of having “no ability to stop” the wider war around the rescue work.
The Ukraine mission echoes the operation that first made Farthing widely known. In 2021, he led the extraction of roughly 67 Afghans and about 150 animals from Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban, in an operation that drew weeks of British headlines. He served in Afghanistan himself between 2006 and 2007, and founded Nowzad afterward to care for animals caught up in the fallout of war.
Nina Ley, describing the team’s work in Kramatorsk, told Euromaidan Press it was only a first step. “This is just the very beginning,” she said.
Nowzad has appealed for roughly £50,000 (about $65,000) to fund further trips, with plans to restock supplies in the UK before returning to build more temporary housing for animals still in the region.
