EDMONDS, Wash. — One year ago, Dan Fine never could've imagined the horrors he would witness in Ukraine.
As he looks over video footage he brought back from the war torn nation he marvels at the devastation.
"This is a town the size of Edmonds," he said as he pointed to the screen at his Edmonds condominium. "There's nothing left. Can you imagine downtown Kirkland like this?"
In the rush to save their own lives as Russian forces invaded, millions of Ukrainians had to leave their dogs and cats behind. Countless are dead. The rest are sick and starving in the rubble.
"You open up a bag of dog food. The dogs and cats hear that noise and come out from the rubble. The sad part is they're still waiting for their owners to come back, and their owners are not coming back, or they're buried in that rubble," Fine said. "I'm not a crier, but at least one time whenever I'm over there, I break down and cry."
Fine and his friend Tana Axtelle traveled several times to Ukraine over the past year to help those animals any way they could.
"I mean we went over to walk dogs and it just snowballed from there," Axtelle said.
It snowballed into a nonprofit called the Ukraine War Animals Relief Fund. They work with Microsoft to sterilize, vaccinate and chip the animals on a large scale.
The pets are being put in a database that will hopefully help reunite them with their owners when the war is over.
So far, Fine's team of 15 people from the Seattle area have been able to rescue 4,000 animals.
"We've accomplished so much but there is an ocean more that we have to take care of," Fine says.
The group is working to raise $14 million to sterilize 400,000 dogs and cats to avoid a population bomb that could hit Ukraine with a plague of rabies.
"They're going to go into the woods where there is already an explosion of rabies, and mix with the foxes and wolves. The math is if we sterilize 400,000 of them we'll prevent 143 million puppies and 2.3 billion kittens," Fine said.
Meantime the group has enlisted another friend in the battle.
On Friday, Jeff Nichols, a father of two, picked up medic kits with bandages and tourniquets to take with him to Ukraine.
He's hoping to help in the rescue of an additional 1,500 animals.
"This is the worst disaster I'll probably ever see in my lifetime. I want to be able to tell my kids I saw this level of injustice and cruelty," he says. "If I have the means and the time, then I feel obligated to go."
Nichols is leaving Feb. 24, the war's one year anniversary. With no end in sight.
"I just don't know how there's gonna be an end to this," says Fine, "but at least we can help the animals while this is going on."