THE DEAR ONES by Alina Pichugina
March 2022. It was reported that the Russian military shelled a dairy farm in Anisiv. At the moment of the explosions, at least 204 cows and calves were kept on the farm; at least 60 were newborns. They all died. According to the source, the shelling continued for two days. One person was killed and two were severely injured, losing limbs. After the attack, the farmer could not move or bury the bodies of the killed animals for a long time because damages needed to be calculated first. Images published by Suspilne News show the destroyed farm – a copper arch formed by broken and hanging bars. Below it lay shaded white bricks, broken metal plates, and sand. The side of the farm retained parts of its walls and ceiling, but inside, only debris, covered with soil. Other images show the bodies of killed cows. One looks wholly burned. Next to a white brick building that appears unharmed, black and white cows lay on their sides – they are still recognizable.
I am an archivist. An archivist is neither historian, nor storyteller. I document animals’ lives amid human armed conflicts – current and past. If you were to visit the digital archive I have been working on for the past year, you would find these lines about the shelling of a dairy farm in Ukraine there, among other animal and human stories, from different times and places.
I started archiving without much thought, and no real plan. It was the early months of 2022. At that time, like so many other people, I was reading the news about the assault of Russia on Ukraine incessantly. The personal and public accounts of the unthinkable violence and cruelty inflicted on people every day, with such cynicism. I struggle to find words to write this, it seems; human language (or at least my human language) is not suited for speaking of unspeakable. Contemporary Ukrainian journalists, artists, directors, authors, and poets (and many of them are and were killed in this war) did and do find ways to speak – so please do read and watch them. In the conventional records of this war, we will use some of the heaviest words we know from history and present of human violence – filtration camps, abduction of children, shelling of maternity wards and hospitals, sexualized violence, shooting of humanitarian convoys, torture, murder, attempts at destroying a culture by killing those who engage and inspire it, and by attacking places where the culture and memory is preserved. The list of documented war crimes committed by the Russian military and officials in Ukraine is so long. And it is, horribly, growing still. People’s private, precious lives attacked, then captured on film by strangers, later to be seen by other strangers, like me, who often have the luxury of another, much calmer life to return to. And in the midst of it, Ukrainian people, fighting for and recording their own histories. And histories of those they care for.
This war has been called the most documented war in history. I do not know if that is true, but I can say with certainty – during no other conflict, for a combination of reasons we can and cannot explain, had so many animals been documented side by side with people. And this is how this archive began.
I remember one day hearing a report about a horse stable being set on fire by the Russian military in Ukraine. I remember someone said that the horses screamed as they burned. I remember that people wept for these horses. I remember thinking that these horses have been loved. I wanted to know how they used to live, I wanted to know them by their names. Even today, I don’t know why. Maybe because I got used to trying to learn and remember the names of people harmed by the invasion. Maybe because I thought that if the victim has a name, the aggressor must be named too, eventually. Maybe then, there would 150 be some accountability for this, too, one day. Or maybe it was because I was worried that if I do not identify them for myself, I will forget them over time, too. I have no way of telling what it was now. These horses were mourned like members of the community, they knew local people and local people knew them. I started searching. Though I did not find their individual names, a fragment of their collective story is stored in the archive today.
2014. Reks is a black and brown, medium sized dog. At the beginning of Russian invasion in 2014, he was shot on an occupied territory. He lost sensation in his legs and could no longer go to the bathroom on his own. After that, people gave him up to a shelter in Kharkiv, where he lived among other animals for eight years until the fullscale invasion by Russia in February 2022. He and other dogs spent two months under the occupation with minimal provisions and without heat or light. The shelter windows were destroyed by shelling, but the dogs managed to survive. Volunteers evacuated them from Kharkiv in May.
A very thin dog is meeting a Ukrainian soldier, her tail is wagging. The soldier speaks gently to her, saying, ‘Do not be angry’. At first, he appears concerned with how skinny she is – her bones are showing through her skin. Then he seems to notice the ‘Z’ cut out on her nose – a militarist symbol of the Russian invasion. He swears at those who did this to her. Then he says kind words to her and asks what her name is. He calls her, gently, Masya.
Among the many war-related injuries reported, there were the regular stories of animal and human life. The joy of reunion, the tenderness, the laughing, the everyday courage, the worry about what’s to come. There was also the everyday cruelty, the regular poverty, the regular inability to pay for the vets, regular death of old age, regular abuse, regular diseases, regular car accidents. I remember one very vividly still, seemingly unrelated to the war, so it did not make it to my Excel sheet (I never fully understood the line between what counted and what did not.) It is a video of an older woman, in a headscarf with flowers, holding on to her dog, large with thick fur, likely poisoned by someone. She is holding him and calling his name – Vanya, Vanya, Vanechka. Pulling his body towards her chest, as it convulsed. Vanya.
May 2022. It is reported that all minks bred at the farm in the Kharkiv region died after the shelling by Russian army. This farm was affiliated with a mink farm in Góreczki, Poland. Two years earlier, an investigation was published revealing the conditions and practices minks were subjected to at this farm. The number of minks farmed and killed is unknown.
February 2022. A baby tiger was born in this zoo as the morning shelling began. It was the first day of the fullscale war. The baby was named Mir (Peace). His pictures appeared on the zoo’s Instagram page for two months – mostly showing him drinking milk from a bottle. He was temporarily displayed for the zoo’s visitors when he was a little older than a month old. His fate today is unknown.
In the single full year that I have been working on this archive, to date, I have recorded stories and fragments of stories of many but not enough animals. All this is possible because of the tireless and courageous labor of people on the ground, who risk and lose their lives trying to support those trapped in the zone of conflict. The archive barely touches the surface of what really is happening across these lands. It is the very nature of the archive, of all archives, to hold more than one human can tell and see at once, but to hold it, nonetheless. Technically, an archive is a place where records are preserved as evidence. The word can be traced to Greek origins; arkhe¯ means beginning, the first place. An archive is not a final object or text; an archive is a beginning – it exists for the future. Unlike a book or essay, an archive lives relatively obscurely, mostly unseen in its full detail. There is never an expectation for a single person – such as you, reader – to go through an archive like this in its entirety. It functions like a collective memory transcribed for someone else, some other time, perhaps for some other reason. One thing is certain – it fully depends on the person using it to reckon with the stories it holds. The first archive I have ever seen or used was the one of people repressed by the Soviet Union forces. I saw many faces that day – the ones I would never know of otherwise. I do not remember their names, but I do remember what some of them did before their repression and execution, where they lived before, how old they grew to be. This realization that one individual life is history, and history is one individual life, and that there is a place where this can live on for anyone to learn – this really impacted me. This dignity and presence that each of these people had, the self-sufficiency of their stories, their seeming immortality.
February 2023. This cat lived in Lyman. Her story is unknown, but, according to the source, she seems to be suffering from a disease that has spread among the freeroaming and abandoned cats of Lyman. Some of the symptoms include balding and numerous wounds of unknown origin. Many cats die of this disease. The volunteers feed the cat outside. She then jumps into the transportation crate. She is evacuated and receives medical help.
March 2023. The employees of the Ukrainian national nature park “Tuzlivski Lymani” reported the first sight of a pod of dolphins since the fullscale Rus 152 sian invasion. These were the first dolphins choosing to return to the waters of Black Sea after hibernation despite the hostilities. In earlier months, dolphins and other aquatic animals have been reported to be killed and injured by the warfare and resulting pollution.
For some of the animals – especially the ones people consider companions – there are more detailed stories told by the people who care or cared for them. Of course, these are not fully the animals’ stories, they are rather the recollections of their human families, volunteers, shelter workers, activists, and sometimes strangers. The stories record human sight, human senses. For many animals – for most, really – the stories are even briefer than that. These animals’ lives are made too short or too hidden for anyone to document a thing. Consider farmed animals. Even in times of peace they usually live terrifying lives until their planned, violent deaths. During armed conflicts, they are particularly vulnerable. They cannot escape their cages and they cannot hide. They cannot feed themselves in their enclosures. While it is similar for other animals in captivity, farmed animals can suffer a greater risk of attack. Viewed as a resource and part of infrastructure, they are sometimes targeted by military forces. Destroying the farms, killing farmed animals before their slaughter, making their dead bodies unavailable for consumption, is one of the ways some conduct military assaults.
November 2023. The forced shutdown of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station led to the cooling of the surrounding water, where many warmwater species lived. It was estimated that up to 125,000 fish died from the temperature drop. The power station was again forced to shut down in May 2023.
December 2022. According to the source, the Ukrainian military found a donkey in a destroyed village of Donetsk region. The donkey looked weak, exhausted, and frightened. Her hooves were twisted into knots. Volunteers evacuated the donkey and offered her medical and nonmedical care. They soon realized she was a member of a donkey family they had evacuated from Yampil Zoo earlier. Volunteers believe the donkey managed to escape the zoo, fearing the explosions, and found shelter in a neighboring village thirty kilometers away from the destroyed zoo. In this village, some abandoned barns still had hay that she has likely been eating. She is now reunited with the rest of the surviving donkey family.
An animal on a farm is not usually identified by anything but the number on their ear tag, and their death is usually reported in financial units. In Ukraine, at just one farm and in one instance, four million individual chickens died, primarily from starvation and dehydration. Sources say that after a military attack on a local power plant, the automatic feeding system at the farm shut down. The factory farm was also reportedly cut off from feed supply during the Russian occupation. Several news outlets across the world reported on this – you can still find that one picture – millions of the chicken bodies, feathered and recognizable, are piled into a tall hill. In that image, some of the birds are still, reportedly, in the very cages they spent their lives inside. No outsider would ever be able to see this many chickens together alive (four million, a megapolis, a country), nor would most people want to – these captive birds are made invisible to us most of the time.
Wild animals are also mostly unseen while they are alive, but they too suffer the consequences of armed conflicts. Dolphins and other aquatic creatures are injured and burned by the marine artillery, forests are burned, water levels and temperatures change with the forced shutdowns and attacks on dams and infrastructure, chemical compounds spread, constant air strikes disorient. Wherever possible, I have included these instances in the archive.
Yet, the archive cannot be used for making statistical claims. It is skewed by the very ways in which we value and devalue animals. Those who can be identified as companions have not only longer stories written, but there are also more of them. Animals identified as farmed, by the numbers alone, are more numerous, but there are precious few details of their lives, and no names. Besides, many impacts of conflict cannot be seen or measured, at least not by a stranger. Behind each fragment of the archive, there are animals and people who carry on the burden of what had happened – unrecorded.
December 2022. Three cows, a bull, and a calf survived locked in a stable for an unknown period without access to water and food. In the video published by Vetmarlet Pluriton, local women go from one abandoned house to another, checking on the animals left behind. The camera follows them into the backyards and sheds where animals had been locked – cows, pigs, dogs, calves. The woman behind the camera describes the severity of the cows’ condition – they appear so weak and malnourished that they can barely walk or stand. Their bones and seemingly inflamed joints are visible through their skin. The voice behind the camera breaks as it begs people not to leave their animals behind because they are dying of hunger. “Look, she has not drunk. She has not eaten. Anyone needs a cow? Come pick them up,” cries the voice. “At our own risk, we are letting them free. Sue us, do what you like. There is a little calf here with them. People, what are you doing?”
March 2022. This was one the largest dairy farms in Ukraine. According to the source, the Russian military began strikes, killing one of the farm’s employees. The troops then occupied the area for a month. Three thousand cows, bulls, and calves were kept at the farm at the moment of shelling. It is reported that some animals died while eating from troughs. Animals also died from the shock waves and scattered mines. Some animals survived the direct impact but died later from starvation, injuries, and illnesses. Others survived and witnessed it all. A video shows a dead cow lying on her side. She is outside. A collar made of red fabric clings to her neck. The following closeup shows another cow’s face. Around her neck – a green fabric collar with long white stripes. She is laying on her side, on the wet grass. On her head, her short brown and white bangs are standing up. They are wet, too. The video follows a farm worker entering the building where cows used to be kept. Their brown heads are hanging down in the gaps of the iron fence. Their bodies lay on the floor on the other side of the fence. It appears as if they are the cows who were eating when the farm was shelled. A closeup of a cow’s ear shows a tag – 6131. Another cow’s ear – 4745. Sources say that surviving animals were evacuated to a farm in Poltava and then back to the original farm. A baby calf was born recently. The video shows him – shaking, still wet, with a white stripe down his face. He has a pink glittering nose. His breath is visibly warm against the autumn air. At the end of the video, the farmer stands among a farm full of cows. They are eating.
I met Bim on the Polish-Ukrainian border, in winter. He was among the animals who were brought from Ukraine by two Ukrainian animal activists. I was among people who were meeting them in Poland to bring the animals to the Polish shelter. At the checkpoint, Bim refused to walk, so I carried him to the car. He did not resist. He was heavy, like a small human. In the car, he sat on my lap and breathed into the window, making wet circles with his black nose. He was quiet the whole ride, attached to me with the safety belt. At the shelter, everyone, even the air itself, was barking. But not the animals that just arrived from Ukraine – they walked silently, without resistance, into their new cages and stayed there, looking at the strangers with flashlights. They were all adopted within a month. Bim now lives with me. If he were a human child, this whole story would be a crime, on many levels, and I often think of it.
Bim is now almost a year and a half old. He weighs 59 pounds, and I still carry him in my arms, when he needs it. He seems to feel calmer when held by me. I started training my core just to be able to give him that safety here and there. Like so many animals I met through 155 this work, Bim struggles with anxiety so severe that many “routine” things are difficult for him. He seems to have nightmares, too – he cries, in a voice I do not recognize as his. His vet once told me that when he wakes up, he may not always know where he is or whom he is with. Maybe it is his past he wakes up to, she said. Sometimes, he comes to sleep next to me on a couch, and if he awakes suddenly, with no detectable outside trigger, he can attack me – my face, hand, leg. He bites, leaving almost no mark on skin, and then sits down and gives me his paw. He sits like that – his hip to mine, his paw on me until I give him a thumbs up. It is our sign for “all is good.” He is partially deaf, like several other dogs I met through this work, and we use hand signs for most cues, it seems more comfortable for him than relying on human voice.
Bim resembles an Australian cattle dog – firm, stubborn in his posture. When he was still a puppy, people always assumed he was an adult dog. They said he had old eyes. Now that he struggles with anxiety, they suggest I should be firmer with him, maybe get a newspaper and hit him when he barks at people or dogs. But when Bim only started to struggle, people used to say something else. They said that it is normal, and that all he needed was love. Love was the cure. I do not think it ever was, even though it may have felt enough for me. His life did not begin and will not end with me. He had a mother, a sister, a community, and a rich past. He has seen things no one will know. He has his losses and his joy. He makes his own bed with his paws, he often watches the sky, he prefers to sit at a distance from others, he closes his eyes and bites his own paw when he enjoys my touch. He plays with ice cubes.
As I close these archival folders each day, I ask myself how the mental strain of living under human rule and during human war translates into something we can see or feel. If, years from now, no one is there to tell the stories of these animals, or at least list what we know of them, will anyone in the future know they existed? Suffered the devastation of war as living beings do? If even most of these species – bears, tigers, cows, chickens, and dogs – are gone from the Earth, as is statistically the trend for many other creatures, will then- humans want to know how they lived, and died? Whether any among us saw them at all?
Alina Pichugina is a pen name. The Russian author hopes to claim this essay and other work with her own name when it is safer for her and her family to do so. “The Dear Ones” is her first publication, excerpted from a longer work in progress focusing on animals in armed human conflict.