The Pavlohrad-based canine unit Antares has become one of the most visible examples of that effort. A recent profile of the Ukrainian canine unit described how trained dogs and civilian volunteers search for remains and missing people in a war where formal recovery work can be slow, dangerous and emotionally punishing.
Ukraine rescue dogs carry the search beyond the blast site
For families of the missing, recovery is not only a forensic process. It is the difference between years of uncertainty and a funeral, a grave marker and a place to mourn. Dogs trained to detect human scent can move through collapsed buildings and damaged terrain faster than people in some conditions, helping teams narrow vast search areas and direct rescuers to places where remains may be hidden under concrete, soil or debris.
The scale of the need is immense. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported in August 2025 that more than 154,200 cases of people unaccounted for remained open from both sides of the front line in the Russia-Ukraine war. The organization said most of those cases involved combatants killed or missing in action, and that every request represented a family left in limbo, according to the ICRC’s report on Ukraine’s unaccounted-for cases.
Earlier in 2025, the ICRC said the number of documented missing people in the war had risen sharply to about 50,000, more than double the figure from the previous year. About 90% were service members, the organization told Reuters in its report on missing people in the war.
A mission that has grown over years
The work of Ukraine’s rescue dogs did not appear suddenly. In March 2023, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty documented Antares as a volunteer canine group based near Dnipro that was already searching for the living and retrieving the dead after Russian strikes. The report, “Ukraine’s Four-Pawed War Heroes,” showed how a team originally built for civilian search-and-rescue work had been pulled into the brutal demands of war.
That same month, Worldcrunch, translating reporting from Livy Bereg, described former canine athletes being retrained to search through ruined homes and liberated areas, including places where unmarked graves might be found. The article, “You Can Tell By The Bark,” helped establish the dogs’ role as part of a longer wartime recovery effort rather than a single act of battlefield heroism.
By February 2024, Scripps News reported that Antares founder Larysa Borysenko and a mostly female team of handlers had located about 400 victims of Russian attacks. Borysenko told Scripps, “We do it completely with our own hands,” and said burial rituals matter because families need a way “to accept, to grieve.” The Scripps News profile of Borysenko and her search dogs underscored how the teams provide dignity to the dead and closure to survivors.
Why closure is so hard to deliver
Even when remains are recovered, identification can take months. Ukraine has had to build wartime systems for DNA, forensic records and family outreach while the fighting continues. The International Commission on Missing Persons said Ukraine needs victim-centered case management, expanded forensic capacity and reliable DNA systems to help families understand and trust the identification process, according to an ICMP conference summary on missing persons from Ukraine.
Forensic teams also face a crushing backlog. In Odesa, one of Ukraine’s identification centers, Le Monde reported in February 2026 that thousands of bodies returned from Russia and occupied territories were awaiting examination or identification, with DNA often the only path to restoring a name. The report on the slow identification of Ukrainian soldiers returned from the front showed how recovery, science and family notification form one long chain of care.
That chain often begins with searchers and dogs entering places others cannot easily go. They may not end the grief of war, but they can change its shape. For a family waiting by the phone, one discovery can turn absence into proof, proof into identification and identification into a burial.
More than a rescue story
The story of Ukraine rescue dogs is ultimately a story about memory. The dogs do not decide the war’s outcome, and they cannot erase the violence that created the missing. But with each search, they help restore one of war’s most basic human rights: the right of families to know what happened to the people they love.
As Ukraine continues the long work of finding, identifying and returning its dead, the handlers and dogs of units like Antares have become quiet witnesses to the country’s grief. Their work offers no easy comfort. It offers something harder and more necessary: answers.
