Volunteers abroad may fall outside workers' compensation
Two days before a drone strike killed him near Kramatorsk, Canadian animal rescuer Jesse Adams posted that a drone had hit a house down the road from his team and another had flown directly over them.
The founder of Vancouver Island’s RainCoast Dog Rescue Society died on October 25 after a first-person-view (FPV) drone struck the windshield of a vehicle loaded with rescued animals, according to Animal Rescue Kharkiv.
Adams had returned to Ukraine this summer and was working in the Donbas region with Animal Rescue Kharkiv to evacuate animals and the owners who refused to leave them behind.
Close calls near Kramatorsk
In one of his final posts, on October 23, Adams described a mission to help a family near Kramatorsk, where some of the most intense fighting of the war is currently underway.
“A drone had hit a house just down the road from us,” Adams wrote. “Another had flown right over top of us as we moved to find cover.”
Other evacuation crews near Kramatorsk have also faced drone strikes. On October 21, an FPV drone burned through the armoured capsule of a Proliska Humanitarian Mission vehicle, which the group said was its 120th attack since February 2022. All crew members survived.
“An enemy FPV drone attacked our vehicle, which had just been loaded with rescued animals,” Animal Rescue Kharkiv wrote in a statement on October 27. Doctors at a local hospital performed resuscitation efforts and emergency surgery, but Adams did not survive.
The Aid Worker Security Database recorded 907 aid workers killed, injured or kidnapped worldwide in 2025, a record the UN attributed partly to armed drones. Of those, 350 were killed.
Duty of care across borders
Global Affairs Canada told CTV News that consular officials are in contact with local authorities, but privacy considerations prevent further disclosure. Ottawa advises against all travel to Ukraine and warns that consular services there are severely limited.
The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety says employers that send workers abroad are responsible for assessing destination risks and taking precautions to ensure their safe return.
Security risks abroad affected a Canadian employer in January, when gunmen abducted 10 workers from Vizsla Silver’s Panuco project in Sinaloa, Mexico. Some of the workers were later found dead.
A record of front-line missions
Adams founded RainCoast in 2014 and made at least four trips to Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. He previously helped rescue nine lions from an abandoned zoo in Odesa, and UK-based charity War Paws said RainCoast helped a local veterinary clinic evacuate hundreds of dogs and cats from Afghanistan in 2021.
“Jesse knew the risks. He knew every mission could be his last,” War Paws said. “He always said that he’d rather die doing what he believed in than live a life and do nothing,” said longtime friend Luisa Skolik.
Volunteers outside the safety net
The terms of Adams’ work with Animal Rescue Kharkiv have not been made public. In BC, volunteers are not automatically covered by WorkSafeBC, which typically covers paid workers, according to People’s Law School.
National fatality data rely on accepted compensation claims. A 2026 report by Sean Tucker and Anya Keefe counted 1,042 such claims in Canada in 2024, and it cited research that suggests the true toll is likely ten times higher once unfiled claims and non-covered employment are included.
The Ukrainian-Canadian Cultural Centre of Vancouver Island said Adams was motivated in part by his Ukrainian heritage. Animal Rescue Kharkiv, one of dozens of organizations that posted memorials, wrote, “There are hundreds of animals alive today because of him.”
