Ukrainian Masha Iefimova, who lives in Estonia, went on a mission two weeks ago to rescue her horse Vasya from Ukraine.
When Russia launched its invasion on February 24, Masha was determined to go back to Ukraine and get the 17-year-old Vasya. The mission to rescue Vasya and seven other horses from a small village near Kyiv took days of driving and involved sleeping in freezing stables.
“He’s quite calm today, but he was stressed for the past two weeks. I’m happy that he’s ok today,” Masha told news agency Reuters, out of the stables in Kalnikow, a small village in Poland near the Ukrainian border.
“He has some issues with his leg because of a lot of travelling, and last night he spent 18 hours in the car, and it was quite cold outside, but he’s ok today, so I’m very happy about this,” Masha said.
“He’s a very nice guy, very kind, very polite, well behaved, really smart, very kind to kids and all the animals, but of course, he’s been stressed for the past two weeks,” she added.
Masha said the journey was complicated and long: “I will feel happiness in a few days hopefully, but right now we just need to take some rest.”
“He deserves to have a good retirement and to have a good life because he’s a very nice boy. He’s not a sports horse, he’s a hobby class horse. He’s my pet, like a big dog,” the 37-year-old Masha said about Vasya.
Before the war, Masha said she had applied for EU documents to bring Vasya to Estonia and had been expecting to get him there in April.
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