“For the Motherland I will fight to the last”, — the story of the border guard Nikolai
Mykola is a dog trainer. For more than 10 years, he has been guarding state borders paired with his four-legged partner Bari. He says that canology is his vocation, but he considers the defense of his state the greatest duty.
“In 2014, I went east for the first time. Our unit performed tasks near Mariupol. Even then, it was a Russian-Ukrainian war, although it was called ATO. We fought mainly with representatives of the “DPR/LPR”, but there were also a lot of Russians,” the border guard recalls.
According to Nikolai, now the situation is completely different, because we have to fight with a professional army, and the scale of the war covered the whole country. Therefore, protecting Ukraine is the duty of everyone and only in this way will we be able to overcome the enemy.
“At the time of the full-scale invasion, I was abroad, since I retired from the service in 2019. Seeing what was happening in Ukraine, I could not stay away and immediately decided to return and go to the combat zone. When I came to the East for the second time, I realized that this was not at all what it was in 2014. We were shelled from everything, and the cities there were completely destroyed and this became a new challenge. However, the most difficult thing was to lose my brothers,” Mykola shared.
Now the dog trainer is serving in Lviv region and is raising a new four-legged companion — Bari, with whom he masters skills in finding weapons and explosives.
Like all Ukrainians, Mykola strives to return to peaceful life and for this he is ready to fight to the end.
State Border Guard Service of Ukraine
