Cork man and his dog return home after helping to recover bodies in Ukraine

Padraig O'Keeffe with his dog Cooper, who travelled to Ukraine

A Cork man who joined the French Foreign Legion as a teenager before working as a security expert all over the world has completed a two-month search and rescue mission in Ukraine with his specially trained K9 rescue dog.

Padraig O'Keeffe, from Kiskeam, and his canine companion Cooper, spent more than 60 days searching through rubble in Ukraine in the hope of finding survivors or bodies for burial.

Mr O'Keeffe fundraised for the mission with donors contributing in excess of €14,000 to his GoFundMe page.

During his two months in Ukraine, Mr O'Keeffe and Cooper conducted more than 30  searches and recovered two cadavers as well as a substantial amount of soft tissue at various sites.

"We have also invested in the community kitchen and school, the horse rescue shelter, the Vostomel Animal Shelter, and the apartments at Gorenka," he said. 

"We have invested in a number of volunteers who have given their all since the end of February in assisting their fellow Ukrainians. With all that, the funding has run dry and what is left will get us home."

Padraig O'Keeffe and Cooper before they left for Ukraine.

One of his last endeavours involved scouring the site of a Russian armoured column which was destroyed where they had set up camp.

"The fatalities had been removed but we took the opportunity to sweep the area as we had come across small items of charred human remains.

"I was shown photographs of the location after it had been hit. It was horrendous. Material and human remains were scattered across the site. "

Mr O'Keeffe said the work was "arduous and gruelling" and that he and Cooper often worked in 32C heat.

He admits that he felt compelled to help and couldn't ignore what was happening in Ukraine.

"I wanted to help in any way that I could and felt that our training and experience could be of immense use to teams searching for survivors and recovering bodies from bombed-out buildings.

Like many people, I have watched in horror at the devastation unfolding in Ukraine and it was eating me up inside.

Mr O'Keeffe served in the French military in the early 1990s with deployments to Cambodia and the Balkans. He has also worked in Iraq, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Kurdistan, Benin, and Ghana in a private security capacity.

He first came across K9 rescue dogs in 2010 while working in Haiti in the role of protected service for the BBC and the European Commission Humanitarian Organisation after a massive earthquake hit the country.

There he saw first-hand the work undertaken by the international search and rescue teams, in particular, the Urban Search and Rescue Dogs and their handlers.

Mr O’Keeffe later trained as a K9 handler in the US and had his own German Shepherd called Mambo for a decade. The pair worked on various missions including the aftermath of an earthquake in Italy seven years ago.

“While Mambo was trained to locate live human scent under collapsed structures, he had a nose for locating the dead and he is credited with recovering six bodies from the rubble in Italy. We also helped search and rescue missions in Ireland, helping to recover another three fatalities.

In 2020, when Mambo approached the end of his career, Padraig travelled to Greece where he was paired up with Cooper.