Evacuating Civilians From Ukraine’s Front Line in the Snow
Kharkiv: It’s still dark after 7 a.m. when we leave Kharkiv city to evacuate people from the frontline village of Hontarivka, a few hours’ drive east. It’s cold too: thick snow blankets the streets, and the roads are covered with treacherous ice.
Today’s evacuation team from the local Roza na Ruke organization is Sasha, Elizaveta, and myself. We’re going to pick up a mother and daughter, and their pets, and drive them to relative safety far from the front line.
As we leave the city we pass the graveyard where our friends Tigran and Slava are buried. Both were volunteers, killed while evacuating civilians from villages at the front line. We continue east towards Hontarivka, about 15 miles from the Russian border.
Mercifully, there’s little traffic as we get closer to the sound of shelling. Driving on slippery ice is hazardous enough without other vehicles. Our van occasionally slips off the road. When it suddenly skids and slides sideways, the only appropriate response is to whoop loudly until it comes to a stop. Over the course of the day, we have to get out more than a dozen times and push when it gets stuck in the snow.
Where possible, we drive over frozen fields rather than bounce along roads cratered by missiles and torn up from the weight of tanks. 
Over the last couple of years I’ve come to love this battered old Renault van. I’ve driven it thousands of miles to the frontline, along it and back again. Its windshield is badly cracked, it has no second gear, and none of the dials on the dashboard work. On days like this, there is ice on the inside windows.
But if this van survives the war it should be put in a museum, and schoolchildren taught how it carried hundreds of people to safety.
We have an assortment of crates in the back to carry the animals we’ll be bringing with the two women. Some people refuse to leave their homes on the front line without their pets, and so we will also be evacuating three dogs and eleven cats.
Near Hontarivka we’re met by local police, who guide us to the house where Marina and her daughter are waiting for us. It’s too risky to drive the van down the steep slope to where they live – it might never make it back up. So we wade the last few hundred yards knee deep through snow, carrying the animal crates with us.
There is the constant boom of explosions from nearby Vovchansk as we round up the animals.
The Russian army, specifically the 2nd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade, the 128th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, and the 82nd Motor Rifle Regiment, are about 10 miles up the road.
The dogs are fairly easy to coax into the crates, but herding cats is indeed as tricky as it sounds. Eventually, we get them all in, and make several trips back up the slope with the women’s belongings. A neighbor loads some of their boxes onto a small sled and heaves it up to the van.
We set out on the long road back, staring at our handheld drone detector to see if we are being tracked and targeted by the Russian military. Just before the mid-afternoon darkness falls, a dozen beautiful wild horses trot out into the road in front of us. It’s a hard road out of Hontarivka, as a dense fog mixes with the falling snow, reducing visibility to only a few feet.
We drive Marina and her daughter and their pets to a new home four hours to the west. It’s late at night by the time we get back to the city, and this is tiring, stressful activism. I’m only here helping local Human Rights Defenders with this work half a dozen times a year, but Sasha and his team are evacuating people virtually every day. Next week they will take the van to the front line again, risking their lives to bring more people to safety.
