A day at Kharkiv Zoo ‘is like being back in peaceful times’
In a brief window between meetings and travel, I go to Kharkiv Zoo and meet families searching for harmony and normality in the chaos of war
On 11 July, the Russian military hit Ukraine’s Sumy region 225 times in one day. The day before, shells hit eight communities in the Sumy Oblast – while on 4 July, the day I arrived in Ukraine, Russia unleashed a bombardment of 268 shells.
Little wonder that 22-year-old Vitaly (not his real name), a former resident of Sumy who now lives in Kharkiv, wants to escape thoughts of war on his day off from his job in retail.
He’s come to Kharkiv zoo with his girlfriend and another friend. The three visit often. ‘I come because there is harmony here,’ he says. ‘It’s so peaceful, it is nature.’
‘You come here, to the zoo, you can get away from the war, there’s a normal feeling,’ he adds.
Kharkiv’s city administration has opened the zoo’s doors for everyone, for free, providing a sanctuary of calm and nature in a city that has been devastated by war. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, the city – 30 kilometres from the Russian border – has been devastated by war, facing shelling and aerial bombardment, while surrounding villages endured occupation, war crimes, and total destruction.
The region was liberated by Ukrainian forces in autumn last year. But the sirens have not stopped sounding and everywhere you go in the city, you see the scars of bombardment.
Windows that once gave homeowners and workers a view of Ukraine’s second largest city are boarded up with slabs of plywood, or criss-crossed with Xs of tape. In some buildings that have been ripped open by shells and rockets, the roof half-collapsed in a terrifying limbo, metal and wires hanging at uncanny angles, the empty spaces where windows should be gape open like screaming hungry mouths. Beyond them is the darkness of destruction, where shattered objects represent lives smashed to pieces.
The previous day and night, there were eight air raid alerts, the last one finishing at 4.18am. ‘We are all tired,’ the journalist Sasha Novosil had told me over coffee a few days before.
But in the zoo, for an hour or two, for men like Vitaly, that tiredness lifts.
Here, families can step away from the craters in the pavement; the cracked windows of the local McDonalds; the sandbags stacked around statues and fountains. They can find nature, harmony – a reminder of what a peaceful life once felt like.
The 5am thunderstorm with its claps that remind the residents of Russian rockets has cleared into blue skies and hot summer sun. Children are tucking into ice creams, milkshakes, or chips; one soldier in full army fatigues proudly carries his toddler on his shoulders.
‘We come here whenever we have free time,’ a young mother explains. She is with a friend, and their kids, and granny has come along for the day too. The children learn English at school and are keen to share their favourite things about the zoo.
‘I like the crocodile and the hippo,’ says one.
‘The jaguar,’ says another, quiet and shy.
‘And lions!’ says the third.
‘The children love nature,’ the mum continues. ‘They love all the animals.’
In the first month of the war, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 1 million people had fled Kharkiv, with just over 500,000 remaining in the city. Three of those who remained are sitting on a bench watching the hippo enclosure: mum, granny and daughter.
‘We like the zoo,’ the mum says. ‘It’s the calmness; calm here in the centre of the city.’
Coming to the zoo, she adds, ‘is like being back in peaceful times.’
I ask the daughter what her favourite animals are; which ones she likes to visit the best. Her grandmother laughs, ‘she loves all of them, she cannot choose,’ she says.
Slowly people are returning to Kharkiv. There’s a buzz in the creative pop-ups in the city; in trendy cafes young people tap away on MacBooks, drinking flat whites while listening to Arcade Fire and Beach House. But when you walk around, it is impossible not to notice how few children there are on the streets. Kharkiv’s children have become refugees, scattered across Ukraine and Europe, some leaving with mum or aunty, others finding foster homes or staying with grandparents and family friends.
It’s that absence elsewhere that makes the children’s presence in the zoo so potent. This is a city trying to return to its pre-full scale invasion reality. To once again be a place where children shriek and giggle and point and laugh, their high-pitched noise mingling with the hoots of monkeys and owls, and the calming music plays over speakers. One child is, as children always do, having a temper tantrum, his scream of rage met by the indignant and instantly-recognisable squawk of an affronted peacock.
One of the odder sights is a young hyena curled up against the glass front of its enclosure, a dog sleeping beside.
The zoo is highly-concerned about security. In February 2022, a second local zoo, Feldman’s Ecopark, was hit by five Russian shells. Both animals and people lost their lives. Mortar fire killed two team members on 8 March 2022; that same week, another employee was killed.
It was a huge loss to the community, and now this zoo takes in animals from other cities, offering them a place of greater safety.
All the creatures here have different personalities and reactions to the war. The camels, I am informed, are very casual about the air raid alerts. The bears, not so much. Apparently they dig holes to hide in when the siren whines.
The bear can seek sanctuary in its burrow, but when the staff recognise an animal is distressed by the frequent blasts of the air-raid siren they take steps to move them to a happier place where they can’t hear the noise.
Vitaly had said that coming to the zoo was a way of getting away from the war.
But as both the animals and visitors know, the conflict is never far away.
Walking to the zoo from my first and only meeting of the day, I went past the city’s administrative building, which came under fire on 1 March 2022 and where, according to data from the charity Action on Armed Violence, 25 civilians including one child were killed in the attack. The journalist Anna Chernenko was at the scene; she told me how she had seen the rescuers coming out of the building, their hands and arms covered in blood. ‘I did not know whether it was their blood, or the blood of the dead and injured,’ she said.
The relaxing music stops, an announcement cuts in. ‘If the siren sounds,’ the male voiceover calmly explains over the loudspeakers, ‘the nearest shelter is in the metro station’. As if on cue, the siren jolts us out of our peaceful day out.
But this is a city used to its wail. The zoo visitors keep on strolling, the hipsters in the cafe keep on tapping and playing their boardgames.