Taffy came home from Ukraine and didn't recognize her person
Doges Editorial · 2026-05-28 · 5 min read
Olena fled Kyiv without her Labrador in 2022. Three years later, Taffy was thin, covered in lumps, and wouldn't come near her. A UK pet charity quietly changed everything.
It was 4 in the morning on 24 February 2022 when Olena Prokhorova woke to the sound of explosions above Kyiv. Within hours, she and her teenage children, Pavlo and Yelyzaveta, were pushing through crowds of terrified people and boarding an evacuation train toward Poland. There was no room in any of that for a Labrador. Taffy would have to stay behind with Olena's elderly parents, who had refused to leave. Olena stepped onto the train not yet understanding — not quite able to understand — that she wouldn't see her dog again for three years.
The dog who got left behind
Taffy didn't understand the bombs or the crowds or why the overnight bag didn't include her. She didn't understand evacuation. She understood that Olena walked out the door — and didn't come back. Dogs experience time differently than we do, and three years is a long time even by human standards. Three years through air-raid sirens, through the muffled percussion of distant strikes becoming close ones, through a household running on fear and habit and the will not to leave.
Olena, meanwhile, made it to Cambridge, where a friend had sponsored her family under the UK's Homes for Ukraine scheme. She found work as a catering assistant, moved her children into rented accommodation, and began the grinding daily work of building a life from nothing in a country where she knew nobody. Through all of it, Taffy was in Kyiv.
What I didn't realise at that moment was that I wouldn't see Taffy for the next three years.
— Olena Prokhorova
The reunion that didn't go how she imagined
In January 2025, Olena finally had a car. She drove to the Polish border to meet her parents — and Taffy. She had watched reunion videos online for months: dogs leaping, spinning, crumpling in apparent joy at the sight of the person they loved. She knew what she was going to feel. She had no idea what she was going to see.
'I didn't recognise her,' Olena told the Mirror. Taffy was extremely thin. Her body was covered in lumps. She was visibly stressed — the kind of stress that doesn't show up as frantic energy but as a particular held-down stillness, the body braced against the next loud thing. And when Olena reached for her, Taffy didn't want to be touched.
I'd seen videos of dogs reuniting with their family, and they're so happy. But Taffy was not happy to see me. She couldn't forgive me for leaving her in Ukraine.
— Olena Prokhorova
A bill that changed everything
A vet confirmed that one of the lumps was ulcerated and needed urgent removal. The cost was £1,200. For a woman who had arrived in Britain with nothing and was still rebuilding — who was still sleeping in the knowledge that everything she'd built before could be taken overnight — it was an impossible number.
'I didn't believe anyone could help,' Olena says. Then her vet mentioned a UK charity called Woodgreen — whose whole model is built around the idea that rescue doesn't always mean a shelter, and that keeping a pet and a person together through a crisis is itself a form of rescue. Woodgreen reached 220,000 people across the UK last year and helped 5,744 pets at home.
What rescue actually looks like
Woodgreen community support officer Nadine Coveney took Olena's first call in July 2025. The next morning, an outreach officer arrived at Olena's home with dog food and toys. Within a week, Woodgreen's surgery team had assessed Taffy and decided to remove not just the most urgent lump — but all of them.
Knowing that Taffy's health was affected by the environment she was exposed to was heartbreaking. I wanted to do all I could to help them.
— Nadine Coveney, Woodgreen community support officer
That was the moment, Olena says, when hope reappeared. 'That was the moment when hope appeared.' She says it simply, the way people say things that took a long time to feel.
Two weeks, and then a puppy again
Surgery happened. And then, in the way that animals sometimes quietly astonish everyone watching them, Taffy transformed. 'For two weeks after the operation, she behaved like a puppy again,' Olena remembers. 'Over the next two months, she became the same dog I knew before I left Ukraine.' The lumps were gone. The thinness filled out. The three years of perpetual bracing began, slowly, to release.
Taffy started following Olena from room to room again. She stopped flinching at sudden sounds. She became, in Olena's words, shiny. 'She looks great,' Olena says, 'and she is smiling again. I told Nadine that she saved Taffy.' She meant it medically. But she probably also meant it in every other sense.
Whatever I do, Taffy will be with me
Taffy is nine years old now. She still doesn't like it when anyone leaves the house — she sticks close, won't let people go, shadows the household in the particular way of a dog who learned, at some specific cost, what absence means. That anxiety is real, and Olena knows it. But so is the dog who sits beside her in the morning, the one who is shiny and smiling and, after everything, still here.
Olena has started a business since arriving in the UK — DeliUA, selling homemade Ukrainian food to cafes and shops. When the war ends, she plans to travel back to help rebuild. 'Whatever I do, Taffy will be with me. She's finally living her best life.'
There is something in that sentence — from a woman who crossed a border with nothing and rebuilt herself in a foreign city, and a dog who survived three years of bombing and learned to trust again — that is harder to shake than almost anything a dog story usually offers. Some mornings are difficult. Some routes feel too long. But the walk that begins with a dog who won't let you leave the house without her, who has decided that you are the thing most worth staying close to — that walk is everything.