KYIV — A woman who braved checkpoints and dodged shelling to care for abandoned pets during Russia’s occupation of her hometown is now warning about the recent flooding’s devastating impact on the region’s animals.
Iryna Tutyun told NBC News that it was “difficult to cope” with the number of animals in need of help after huge swaths of the southern city of Kherson and its surrounding area were inundated following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam Tuesday.
“I still have about 30 dogs and a dozen cats in my care. Every morning I go to them, feed them and see if everything is OK with them,” Tutyun, 43, said, adding that some of the animals had been injured.
On a wider scale, experts are also warning that the impact on the region’s wildlife could be “catastrophic,” as millions of fish have already washed up dead and other animals and plant life likely have been affected.
Tutyun said she had also heard of goats, chickens and other animals being plucked from the waters that spilled from the reservoir behind the dam, which was 150 miles long and around 14 miles wide.
Both Ukraine and Russia have traded blame for the destruction of the vast dam in a Russian-controlled area on the front lines of the war. Tutyun said the massive spill is the worst thing that has happened to Kherson, which was taken by Russia days after President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in February 2022 and then liberated by Ukrainian forces in November.
Tutyun said that after the invasion she “went through Russian checkpoints, sometimes under the watchful eyes of machine guns,” to feed the animals and has been looking after them ever since.
Elsewhere in Kherson, the Kazkova Dibrova zoo said in a Facebook post Tuesday that a pair of monkeys, Anfisa and Charlie, and a pony named Malish, were among 300 animals killed by the flooding. A mule, a parrot, a crow, a groundhog, guinea…
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