This Ukrainian woman rescued dogs as she fled war. Now she’s rescuing more in Serbia.

Maia Ernst opened the gate of her tiny wood cabin to reveal a huge yard that is perfect for her pack of dogs. The isolated house is set back off a country highway in the Serbian countryside just outside of Belgrade, the capital. 

Above the sound of lots of barking, Ernst said she had five dogs and then, found two more. The one she found on the street was a blind, old beagle, the only dog in her pack that wasn’t barking.

Ernst sat on her stoop to scratch ears and rub bellies. To call her a dog lover is an understatement. Ernst and her mom escaped with nearly every seat in her car occupied by dogs when they fled Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, under heavy shelling in March 2022. 

“I put everyone in the car, then found gas,” she said. “It was hard, but thanks to Google, Google showed me some roads between villages where I could buy gas.”

At the time, Ernst had three dogs, but just as they were leaving she got a message that a couple she knew — her friends — had just been killed in their home by a missile strike. Neighbors could hear their two dogs inside the wreckage, whimpering.

“I found some people whom I paid to go get the dogs,” she said,  “because it was a problem to catch them. Not even the sister of the woman [who was killed] could grab them.”

Those two dogs, Juan, a Peruvian hairless, and Bella, a Mexican hairless, show signs of trauma.

“The male’s ear won’t stand up straight,” she said, “and we think it’s a result of stress.”

Ernst’s setup in Serbia is a far cry from her life back home where she worked as an ethnographer at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Here, she said, she hasn’t been able to find work. Not even as a dog-sitter.

“I want to try to sell my house in the village near Kyiv, because I need money to live here. I’m just trying not to panic.” 

For the moment, at least, Ernst was living rent-free. She and her pack were invited to Serbia by the cabin’s owner, someone Ernst knew from a dog group on Facebook. Ernst said that, as a Ukrainian, the isolated house suited her as she was trying to lay low.

Ernst said some Ukrainians in Serbia have been the target of insults by Serbs who back Russia. 

In a poll last year, two-thirds of Serbs said Russia was their most important ally. Nearly as many blamed the West for the ongoing conflict.

Ernst said she, too, has been called names in public, so she rarely ventures out from the little cabin. As much as she wants to go home, she said she will stay until she feels more certain that she, her mom and her seven dogs will be safe.