After a number of months of fitful sleep, Chada awoke in February, not removed from the Kyiv airport, to a damaged energy grid, a scarcity of provides, and hovering meals costs. Her blond fur was matted, her claws overlong, her homeland hanging by a thread.
The whole lot—from human and animal lives to Ukrainian historical past and heritage—was at stake. Her companions, Myhasyk, Lyubochka, and Synochok amongst them, awoke at about the identical time, to the day by day blare of air raid sirens and a way of rising emergency.
As Russian forces pressed forward within the southeast, close to Bakhmut, and indiscriminate missile and drone strikes brought about civilian casualties, platitudes echoed within the halls of the US Congress.
The newly minted Speaker of the Home of Representatives, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), was equivocating on the destiny of an important help bundle for Ukraine. To his proper was a mob of MAGA legislators, threatening to oust him for any divergence from Donald Trump’s isolationism. To his left was a transparent majority of legislators, railing in opposition to Johnson for abandoning a key ally and destabilizing Western democracy.
A bear in the course of the evacuation in early March 2022.By Maryna Shkvyria/Save Wild.
Whereas Johnson had eagerly opted for the political crucible during which he discovered himself, the residents of the White Rock Bear Shelter had not chosen a lot of something. They’d merely succumbed to the torpor of hibernation, then woke up to a rustic on the brink.
Years earlier, Chada and her den mates had been free of the tawdry world of circus enslavement and roadside sights, the place that they had been caged and compelled to carry out. By sheer happenstance, they landed beneath the knowledgeable care of a married zoologist couple, Yegor Yakovlev and Maryna Shkvyria.
Shkvyria, chief zoologist of the Kyiv Zoo, had spent 9 years learning the conduct of huge carnivores, together with bears, lynx, and wolves, within the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine, an space that was lengthy closed to folks after the nuclear reactor catastrophe in 1986.
The White Rock shelter moved to its current dwelling within the Kyiv space in October 2020, beneath the umbrella of the charitable fund Save Wild. Right here, the bears loved common veterinary care and enormous pure enclosures, the place they may forage for strategically scattered meals, starting from eggs to fruit and nuts.
