About a week after the attack on the Nova Kajovka dam, the situation remains alarming in the Kherson region and surrounding villages. THE SPANISH has spoken with sasha todorchukfounder and CEO of UAnimalsto find out first-hand at what point the rescue efforts are.
“The panorama is terrible; after this crime committed by the Russians, the water has destroyed everything in its path. It is very dangerous for people, for animals and for nature. It is very difficult for our evacuation teams work there because the Russian Army keeps bombing the city“, Explain.
What happened this Sunday confirms his words: three people have died and another 10 have been injured by the bombardments and attacks by the Russian Army against the city of Kherson, as reported by the governor of the region.
Sasha Todorchuk, founder and CEO of UAnimals.
EE
The Russian Army fires on the evacuation boats. “The situation is very complicated, so we talk to the Ukrainian soldiers so that they advise us where we can go to rescue animals and people. And even then, sometimes it is impossible,” Todorchuk recounts through video call.
The organizations that work on the ground are not only fighting against the level of water and the attacks of the enemy, try to expedite evacuations to get everyone safe in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. It does not seem that it will be imminent, but the Zaporizhia power plant, the largest in Ukraine, is concerned, as the level of the dam it needs for its cooling has dropped drastically.
[Desde Jersón, donde Rusia ahoga y bombardea a sus víctimas]
As if this were not enough, Todorchuk also tells that “another problem is that some areas are covered with minesso if the water has reached those areas we can’t work either, because it’s extremely dangerous.”
UAnimals Right now he has 12 cars in Kherson to carry out rescue work “and we work to evacuate all kinds of animals: pets, domestic animals and wild animals.” They also have buses with medicines to help both people and animals. They supply food for pets and offer shelters. “In this situation you have to leave the animals’ food safely, so that it is not washed away by the water. And the logistics to supply this food is very difficult to organize,” he points out.
Image of evacuations in the Kherson region carried out by UA Animals.
UA Animals
“We tried to do our best, but I would also like to say that what happened with the attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam is really ecocide. Because the Russian Army knows exactly what it is doing. The Kherson region was very rich in wild nature and wild species. And ecologists are warning that the region’s animals may disappear completely because of this situation,” Todorchuk denounces. “It is an ecological disasterbecause if wild species disappear there will be many problems”.
Lack of drinking water
The CEO of UAnimals He explains to EL ESPAÑOL that there are also many difficulties with drinking water, which is why “we are contacting Ukrainian companies to help us with the supply. Not only for the animals, but also for the people who live in Kherson” .
[Jersón, zona cero de la voladura de la presa: “Sólo conquistando Moscú pararemos a los rusos”]
Sasha is also grateful for the help that is coming to them: “We are receiving money to be able to work, we have a team of 12 people in Kherson. And we couldn’t do it without money because we need the cars, the equipment, etc. That’s why we ask the people of Ukraine and all over the world to help us through Patreon or PayPal, or directly through our website”.
And he acknowledges that it is “very moving” because “sometimes they write to us telling us that we are true heroes, but the truth is that we are both heroes because without your donations, we could not do anything.”
farm evacuation
The Kherson region is an agricultural area where there are many farms where many cattle farmers worked until now. From UAnimals They have evacuated cows, pigs, sheep, chickens… and even horses.
“There are so many farms in the region and we are trying to help them and rescue them from those places. And because we work with different types of animals, we face different problems. For example, with those people who have pets, they want to run away with them. So we we make the effort to evacuate them together,” says Todorchuk.
UAnimals evacuation work in Kherson.
UAnimals
Regarding farm or domestic animals, sometimes it is a big problem to rescue them because the owners are no longer in the place, so Todorchuk’s organization must make sure if they can evacuate them or not. For this, they have designed a system: “Through our social networks we inform the population of Kherson that we are working in the area and we ask them to leave the doors of their buildings and their farms open so that we can rescue them.”
Pets and wild animals
As if this were not enough, there is an even more complicated type of evacuation: that of wild animals. “We started evacuating animals in February 2022 and we have carried out a lot of evacuations in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, both of pets and domestic animals and also wild animals,” says Todorchuk.
[Objetivo Zaporiyia: Ucrania avanza al norte de la inundación para colarse en la línea defensiva rusa]
“Right now in our wild animal center in kyiv we have 10 lions, tigers, leopards, raccoons and other animals from some small zoos. Sometimes we find ourselves in terrible situations. We have come to some zoos where the animals were dead because of the bombs. Only one lion survived and we managed to save it,” he says.
Sometimes they have come across even “completely surreal situations”. In the Donetsk region, in the occupied territories recaptured by the Ukrainian Army, “We found in a zoo animals that the Russian Army had skinnedthey had removed the skin.
Sasha doesn’t think they did it “to eat their meat or anything like that, they just had their skin removed as a trophy.” “I don’t know if they did it just for fun, maybe they thought it was really cool to have a lion’s skin as a trophy in their homes,” she says.
And he elaborates on his explanations by pointing out that since the large-scale war began he has seen truly horrible things: “In the Borýspil region we came to see chickens hanging on a clothesline. They were hung up alive and died because they couldn’t move and had no food or water. They didn’t eat them, they didn’t need food, they just killed them.”
Image of chickens hung alive by the Russian Army on a clothesline in Borýspil.
UAnimals
“I think they do it because they can and that’s it,” reflects Sasha. “The Russians say that there are a lot of Nazis in the Ukraine, but they also kill a lot of animals and I don’t think the animals in Ukraine are in favor of Hitler. So I don’t understand why they do this,” he laments.
Through UAnimals Sasha Todorchuk and the rest of his collaborators try to take the evacuated pets to shelters located in other regions: Mikolaiv, kyiv, etc. “If they are abandoned animals, we look for them a new family and a new home. And if those animals have owners, we return them to them.”
For domestic and farm animals, they have shelters in the kyiv region and in Lviv. And if it is about wild animals, they have a center near kyiv. “There we take care of them and we contact centers in Europe and Africa to be able to transport them and keep them safe,” he concludes. Because right now, in Kherson, not even animals can live in peace.
