Flying with a pet to and from Russia and Ukraine.

No direct flight either way. Two very different workarounds.

Russia: a two-leg cabin route via a hub. Ukraine: overland through Poland.

For Russia, the cabin route still exists, just not in one hop. You fly cabin on a Western or Gulf carrier to a hub Aeroflot still serves — Istanbul, Dubai or Delhi are the usual ones — then connect onto Aeroflot for the Moscow leg. Aeroflot is genuinely pet-friendly in the cabin (8 kg under the seat, or up to 15 kg if you buy a second seat for the carrier), so each leg is a cabin leg. It's two tickets, two pet bookings and two sets of paperwork, but it works.

For Ukraine, there is no commercial flight at all — every Ukrainian airport has been closed to civilian traffic since the full-scale invasion began. The route people actually use is to fly into Poland and continue overland: train or pet-friendly coach from Warsaw or Rzeszów across the border. It's slow and the crossings are unpredictable, but it's the real answer.

Fly to a hub, then take Aeroflot in

Istanbul, Dubai or Delhi are the practical connecting points.

No Western airline flies into Russia, so the cabin route is built around the network Aeroflot still operates — around 17 mostly non-Western destinations, including the UAE (Dubai), Turkey (Istanbul), India (Delhi, Mumbai, Goa), China, Egypt, the Maldives, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other former-Soviet states. The trick is to reach one of those hubs on a carrier that takes cabin pets, then connect onto Aeroflot for the Moscow leg.

From the UK or Europe, the cleanest options are Istanbul (Turkish Airlines carries cabin pets out of most of Europe, and the Istanbul–Moscow hop is about three hours) or Dubai (Emirates and others reach Dubai, and Aeroflot runs the roughly five-and-a-half-hour Dubai–Moscow leg in the cabin — notable because Dubai is cargo-only on arrival for most other airlines). From Asia, Delhi works the same way, about six hours into Moscow.

Aeroflot's cabin allowance is one of the more generous around: a carrier under the seat with a combined weight up to 8 kg, plus the option to buy a second seat for a carrier of up to 15 kg on the adjacent seat — useful for a dog that's just over the usual cabin size. Rigid carriers can be up to 44 × 30 × 26 cm. Reserve the pet space at least 36 hours ahead, and note that brachycephalic (flat-faced) breeds are banned from the cabin.

Because these are two separate through-tickets, the pet allowance and fee are charged on each leg, and you'll re-clear check-in at the hub. Confirm both pet bookings by phone a few days before you travel — sanctions and route changes mean Aeroflot's schedule shifts more than most.

The Rosselkhoznadzor chain

Form No. 1 on the way out, Form No. 6.1 on the way in.

Russia's veterinary authority is Rosselkhoznadzor (the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance), and its paperwork runs through a specific exchange at the airport border-control desk. The underlying requirements are familiar: an ISO microchip, recorded both in the pet's international passport and on the veterinary certificate, and a rabies vaccination that is at least 30 days old and no more than 12 months old at travel. Up to two pets per person can travel without an import permit; three or more needs a Rosselkhoznadzor permit arranged in advance.

Coming into Russia, you travel on a health certificate (or international passport) showing a clinical exam by an official vet within five days of travel — some Russian carriers and airports accept up to 14 days, but five is the safe assumption. At the border, Rosselkhoznadzor reissues your foreign certificate as Russian Form No. 6.1.

Leaving Russia, the chain is different. You first obtain Russian Veterinary Certificate Form No. 1 from the State Veterinary Service within five days of departure; then, at the airport border control, Rosselkhoznadzor exchanges it for international Form No. 5a, free of charge. Leave time for that swap on the day. If your destination has its own import certificate — the EU especially — you'll need that issued in parallel at the same vet visit.

A breed note that applies in both directions: wolf hybrids, and Savannah and Bengal cats less than five generations from a wild ancestor, are not permitted under the standard rules.

The titre test and the three-month wait

This is the step that needs the most lead time — plan it first.

The EU sorts the rest of the world into countries it considers low-risk for rabies and countries it doesn't. Pets returning from a "listed" country need only a microchip, a valid rabies vaccine and a health certificate. Pets returning from a non-listed country need an extra step: a rabies antibody (titre) blood test, taken at an EU-approved laboratory, with the blood drawn at least 30 days after vaccination — and crucially, at least three months before the pet enters the EU.

Russia used to be on the listed side. It was removed from the EU's approved-country list in September 2024 (along with Belarus), which means the titre-plus-three-month-wait now applies to pets coming from Russia. Ukraine has never been on the list, so the same applies there. Some older airline and aggregator pages still show Russia as listed — that information is out of date.

No flight. The real route runs through Poland.

Fly into Poland, then continue overland by rail or road.

Ukraine's situation is different from Russia's, and it deserves to be said plainly: this is a country at war, and many of the people moving pets across its borders are leaving rather than arriving. Civilian flights stopped on 24 February 2022, when the full-scale Russian invasion began, and every Ukrainian airport has stayed closed to commercial traffic since. The European aviation regulator's conflict-zone advisory keeps Ukrainian airspace off-limits to airlines, currently extended to at least 31 July 2026. A Ukrainian government working group began planning a phased reopening in March 2026, but no flights have resumed, and nobody is putting a date on it.

So the route is overland, and in practice it runs through Poland. You fly cabin into Warsaw — LOT, Lufthansa and others carry pets there from across Europe — and then continue by train or pet-friendly long-distance coach toward the border. The rail line to Przemyśl, the Polish town closest to the main crossing, is the well-trodden path; from there, trains and buses run on into Lviv and onward. Polish State Railways (PKP) carry small pets in a carrier free of charge; larger dogs travel muzzled and on a lead.

The honest caveats matter here more than anywhere else on the site. Border crossings can take anywhere from a few hours to most of a day, and which crossings are open — and how they're operating — changes with the security situation. A realistic door-to-door time from London to Kyiv is around two days. Verify that your specific route and crossing are running before you book anything, and check your government's current travel advice for Ukraine, which will frame whether the journey should be attempted at all.

The standard requirements, in peacetime terms

Microchip, rabies, titre, certificate — with a few Ukraine-specific timings.

Setting the wartime concessions aside, Ukraine's ordinary import rules for a dog or cat are: an ISO microchip; a rabies vaccination given at least 21 days before travel (Ukraine recognises the vaccine's own validity period, including three-year vaccines); a rabies antibody titre test, with blood drawn at least 30 days after vaccination and more than three months before entry, showing a result of at least 0.5 IU/ml; and an international veterinary health certificate issued within 10 days of travel and endorsed by a government vet. For dogs, a tapeworm treatment is recorded 24 to 120 hours before arrival.

Pets entering with their owners don't need an import permit — that applies to commercial imports only. The familiar breed exclusions apply: wolf hybrids, and Savannah and Bengal cats less than five generations from the wild.

If you transit an EU country on the way — and via Poland you will — your pet has to satisfy that country's EU entry rules too, which since April 2026 means a fresh Animal Health Certificate for non-EU residents rather than an old EU pet passport. In effect you're meeting EU transit rules and Ukraine's entry rules on the same trip, so it's worth mapping both before you set the vaccination dates.

This is rarely a DIY journey

For most people moving long-term, a relocation specialist earns their fee.

For a short, well-planned cabin trip into Russia via Istanbul or Dubai, a confident owner can manage it alone. But for anyone moving long-term, moving a larger animal, or moving in or out of Ukraine, the realistic answer is a specialist pet relocation company. They handle the documentation, the routing through Turkey, Central Asia or Poland, and — the part that's hardest from a distance — the current ground intelligence on which crossings and connections are actually operating this week.

IPATA-listed shippers serving Russia and Ukraine exist but are limited; emailing three or four and comparing their proposed routes is a sensible first step. Expect international relocation through this region to run into the several thousands of euros, scaling with origin and the size of the animal. It's a lot — but so is the cost of a pet stranded at a border by a single mistimed certificate.