Igor Vysotsky is 23 years old. He has been passionate about beekeeping for most of his life, having started at the age of ten. Until recently, he lived in the village of Kostobobriv—just one kilometer from the Russian border—where he tended to eighty beehives. Eventually, the Russian shelling took its toll, and with only a couple of pensioners remaining in the village he realized he could stay no longer.
Leaving one’s home is always painful, but evacuation is a very special kind of relocation experience: no removal vans or help from a professional company; no opportunity to pack up furniture and belongings, imagining how they will look in your new home. During an evacuation, you can take only documents and the bare essentials. Evacuees often do not know where they are going or how long they will be staying there.
Igor Vysotsky did not wait to be evacuated. He made his decision to leave in time to avoid having to abandon everything. He made preparations and relocated—along with all his bees—to the village of Veresoch, 220 kilometers away.
To transport his eighty hives, he had to make multiple trips back to his home village. He could have moved to Western Ukraine, far from the front line, as many displaced persons have done. He chose to remain in his home region of Chernihiv.
Moving an apiary to Western Ukraine on his own would have been extremely difficult. Furthermore, he did not know how his bees would handle such a long-distance move or whether they would easily adapt to a different landscape, climate, and—ultimately—different sources of pollen.
Volodymyr Malykhin, from the village of Drobysheve in the Donbas, had no chance to evacuate his bees at the start of Russia’s full-scale offensive. Russian forces bombed his home and his apiary, killing all his bees. He relocated to Zaporizhzhia and established a new apiary on Khortytsia—a protected island, practically in the center of the city on the Dnipro River.
Another beekeeper from the Donbas, Serhiy Mazhan, managed to save his apiary and transport it to the Kyiv region, where he now resides.
Few people realize that Ukraine’s Donbas region has long been renowned not only for coal mining and heavy industry but also for the production of honey. Beekeeping was a long-standing tradition among the region's inhabitants. Russia’s aggression brought a bloody end to this ancient practice. Like millions of people, the bees of the Donbas became either victims of shelling or they became refugees.
The exodus from the Donbas—ravaged by artillery, drones, and missiles—was not limited to humans and bees. Wildlife of all kinds sensed the need to escape as natural habitats were destroyed or as the entire natural environment was made uninhabitable.
The natural world is rarely mentioned in reports on war casualties. Yet Ukrainian environmentalists have been documenting the Russian army's environmental crimes, which multiply with each passing day of the war, just as for nearly five years international military lawyers and their Ukrainian counterparts have been gathering evidence of Russian war crimes.
The war has wiped the well-known Serebryanskyi Forest from the face of the earth. It is a protected area on the border of Luhansk and Donetsk regions spanning some 30,000 hectares.
No large mammals remain in the area. Elk, wolves, wild boars, and foxes have migrated westward, away from the war. Small animals were simply incinerated, as were the trees. Even the ground cover, home to insects and small rodents, has been destroyed. Nature will eventually bring life back to this place, but the ecosystem will be a completely different one.
As early as three years ago, farmers in Western Ukraine began reporting unexpected wolf attacks on livestock facilities, farms, flocks of sheep, and grazing cattle. Prior to 2022, such incidents were rare, but from 2023 onwards, the wolf population in the Carpathians and the nearby region surged. The situation compelled local authorities to call upon hunters, so that they might cull these predators.
There has been no official explanation for the sharp increase in the wolf population in Western Ukraine. Many people—hunters included—immediately understood the reason. The wolves had traveled a thousand kilometers or more to get as far away from the war as possible. Other animals have made similar journeys. Birds also fled the combat zone. Since their relocation caused no problems for farmers, the direction of their migration remains unstudied. All that is known is that the areas which the birds left behind have seen a massive surge in mosquitoes and other insects that bite.
It is likely that many animals from the damaged areas ended up in the so-called Chernobyl Zone, a restricted, still-radioactive territory from which the human population was evacuated in 1986. Since the late 1980s, a unique, almost otherworldly ecosystem of flora and fauna has emerged within the Chernobyl Zone. It spans 2,600 square kilometers, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Feral cows and horses, surviving in the wild far and from human contact, can still be found there today.
Recently, a Russian drone sparked a new fire in the Chernobyl forest, causing radiation levels to rise once again. However, the first sharp spike in radiation since the 1986 accident occurred in the spring of 2022, when Russian forces passed through the Zone on their way to “seize Kyiv.” Russian soldiers dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches within the zone. Having failed to capture the Ukrainian capital, the Russian army retreated into Belarusian territory along the same route it had taken to arrive, moving through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
In the spring of 2022, during the first mass evacuation of residents from frontline villages and towns in the Donbas, evacuation protocols forbade those fleeing the war from taking their dogs, cats, or livestock. Some evacuees left pets behind with tears in their eyes. Others refused to evacuate altogether rather than abandon their animals. Many residents of Donbas villages and elsewhere chose to evacuate on foot, bringing their animals with them. Some reached safety, while others perished alongside their beloved pets. There is footage on YouTube showing Russian drones killing an elderly woman and her goats on a country road leading to Kherson.
Feral pigs became a common sight in the war zone, feeding on the bodies of soldiers killed in combat.
When the plight of abandoned dogs and cats reached a critical level, dozens of animal welfare volunteers ventured into the "gray zone"—abandoned villages near the active combat areas. Risking their lives, they gathered abandoned dogs and cats and transported them to safer frontline regions. From 2023 onwards, numerous shelters for abandoned animals sprang up in these areas. An entire logistics network emerged, comprising small transit shelters and larger, permanent facilities capable of housing hundreds of animals.
At that same time, volunteers began looking for new owners for these animals, sharing photos and information about the dogs and cats on social media. Certain environmental NGOs took a more active role in relocating the abandoned animals. They retrofitted buses and minibuses to transport the dogs and cats, taking the rescued animals to other cities while announcing in advance, via social media, the venues for “pet adoption” fairs, where people could choose a displaced dog or cat to make their own.
I witnessed the arrival of one such bus in Kyiv. Dozens of residents had gathered at Kontraktova Square in the historic Podil district. When the bus arrived, volunteers explained the process for selecting an animal. The residents lined up. After choosing a cat or dog, they registered as the new owners, providing their phone numbers and addresses so that the volunteers could, if necessary, verify that the new owners were treating the rescued animals responsibly.
Abandoned pets and livestock became the responsibility of volunteers. The state—often with volunteer assistance—focused on evacuating animals from zoos and eco-parks located in combat zones or in cities that had been under regular missile fire since the start of the full-scale invasion. Kangaroos, alpacas, raccoons, and other small animals were transported in minibuses, on the seats of ordinary passenger cars, and in other vehicles not designed for such purposes. They were taken to zoos in central and western Ukraine. The Cherkasy Zoo, for instance, took in many of them.
Large animals, especially predators like tigers, lions, jaguars, and bears, were transported in cages on large trucks. They were sedated before the journey. Due to a lack of available enclosures in safer Ukrainian zoos, these animals were ultimately transported to Europe. The Poznań Zoo in Poland took in the largest number of animals, providing a refuge for more than 250 former residents of Ukrainian zoos.
During the spring and summer of 2022, many animals perished due to shelling or stress. Several volunteers who were evacuating them from dangerous areas also lost their lives.
In October 2022, the Ukrainian army liberated the settlement of Yampil in the Donbas region. There, amidst the ruins, soldiers discovered an abandoned private zoo containing dozens of animals that had died from starvation or shelling. Amid the ruins of the zoo, they found a Himalayan bear that was barely alive and suffering from shell shock. They named him "Yampil." The military handed him over to volunteers from the "White Rock" bear sanctuary near Kyiv. From there, he was transported to Belgium for treatment and rehabilitation. Later, a new enclosure was built for him at the Five Sisters Zoo in Scotland, near Edinburgh. Transported there in January 2024, the bear died in July of the same year.
A story with a happier ending unfolded in June 2024 and involved the rescue of two beluga whales, Plombir (Ice-cream) and Snezhka (Snow white), who were evacuated from the Kharkiv Zoo. First, they were taken to Odesa in specially prepared water tanks. There, veterinarians examined the animals and cleared them for further transport. They were moved to Moldova and then flown to Valencia, Spain, where they now live in the local oceanarium. The entire journey from partially bombed Kharkiv to sunny Valencia, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles, took thirty-six hours. Initially, keepers familiar to the whales stayed with them in Spain and gradually the whales adjusted to their new surroundings. They now feel right at home in the Valencia oceanarium.
Around the same time, dolphins from the Kharkiv Aquarium were taken to the NEMO Dolphinarium in Odesa. The dolphinarium remains operational and hosts dolphin shows three times a day. Although visits are sometimes interrupted or rescheduled due to shelling and air raid alerts, the facility continues to operate and entertain thousands of children who are living under daily bombardment in Odesa and the surrounding region.
The Black Sea was always considered a paradise for dolphins. Vacationers loved watching how they fearlessly swam up to the beaches along the Odesa and Crimean coasts. Some lucky individuals even managed to get photos taken while practically "hugging" the dolphins. But all of that was before the war.
The Black Sea is now a hellscape for dolphins and other marine life. Ivan Rusev, a leading ecologist at the Tuzlivski Lymany National Nature Park, estimates that at least 80,000 dolphins have perished in the Black Sea since the war began. The primary cause is water pollution from toxic substances released whenever Russian missiles destroy massive storage tanks at Ukrainian Black Sea ports. The tanks contain gasoline, diesel, sunflower oil, and various chemicals destined for export.
In addition to pollution, dolphins are dying due to the regular detonation of drones, sea mines, and missiles in coastal waters, as well as the military's extensive use of underwater radar equipment (specifically sonar) designed to detect enemy ships and submarines. Low- and medium-frequency military sonar systems jam the dolphins' own echolocation capabilities, leaving them unable to navigate the water. This disorientation causes them to beach themselves or make panicked, rapid changes in depth; these changes prove fatal.
"Kalibr" cruise missiles Russia regularly uses to strike Ukraine also cause many deaths among the dolphin population. These ship-launched missiles fly at extremely low altitudes over the Black Sea, and the acoustic shock from their jet engines kills or disorients millions of fish as well as dolphins.
While patrolling the reserve’s 44-kilometer coastline, Ivan Rusev regularly finds dead dolphins. Their bones have been gathered at several locations within the reserve. Recently, Rusev announced plans to create a pantheon dedicated to Black Sea dolphins that have perished during the war. The reserve’s management has confirmed these plans.
It is not yet known whether monuments to other wildlife will be erected in Ukraine, but after the war I would certainly build memorials to the bees and horses killed by shelling and a separate monument to honor Ukraine’s burned forests.
It remains impossible to fully grasp or quantify the damage inflicted on Ukraine’s natural environment by Russia’s aggression. Even after the war ends, it will take several years to understand the scale of the environmental catastrophe caused by Russia’s war.
Andrey Kurkov is a commentator and journalist reporting on Ukraine for the international media. He is also the author of more than 20 novels, including Death and the Penguin, an international best-seller.
Illustrations by Kennan Institute Creative Director Jude Schroder.