Guilty Without Guilt Animals In War. And People Behind Them Ukraine, 2014 – Olena Zheldak   © Copyright 2026 Olena Zheldak

Ira has always been much more active in animal rescue than I will ever be. I am restless in writing PR-texts, helping financially, or administering the account of Ira’s shelter on social media. However, my personal contribution has always been limited to animals I can accommodate without external assistance. Sometimes, it meant bringing a 500-gram, 1.5-month-old kitten found hundreds of kilometers away from Kyiv to a rented flat and hiding it from the owner, until she grew too big and forced my family to spend all our savings to buy a small flat of our own. To bring another 500-gram, 1.5-month-old kitten found hundreds of kilometers away from Kyiv to our new home in Irpin a year later. These two rescued souls did not let me give up when surviving in Irpin during the first days of a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, and were an integral part of our escape. I could never imagine leaving any member of my family behind, irrespective of the number of their limbs and the level of general fluffiness.

Ira is lucky to have a more spacious property and a never-ending desire to use her private patch of land to accommodate as many animals in need as possible. As such, she used her private patch of land to organize a private animal shelter, which grew each year, with so few lucky enough to find a new home and so many to stay in her shelter forever. It is a sad fact that there will never be enough good hands to make the streets of Ukrainian cities and villages free of stray, abandoned, betrayed cats and dogs. Nevertheless, as if unwillingly aiming for a Nobel Prize in Physics, Ira continually challenged the fundamental laws of this natural science. She never walked by a dog, hit by a car and left to die on the roadside, or a cat-mom, taken to the field with her newborn kitties. Somehow, she managed to find a place for everyone in her shelter. Her love for animals and unimaginable strength when it came to saving an innocent life seemed to move the physical boundaries of her land, let alone her physical and psychological abilities as a human being.

In 2014, Ira’s shelter began accommodating a new type of pain and grief – the animals miraculously saved from the battlefield. Cats and dogs with gunshot wounds, suffering from the aftermath of artillery firing and PTSD, lost or left by their owners fleeing from the war that started knocking on the first doors in Ukraine, formed a new group in the shelter. They required more care and attention, tons of patience and love. Ira gave all of that and more. Eight years later, those who could recover from their injuries and adapt to a new life gave back to their new mom. They unmistakably warned her of the oncoming shelling, which was crucial in the rural area with no air raid sirens or alternative means of informing, at least in the beginning of a full-scale invasion.

In February and March 2022, Ira quickly became the only inhabitant of her village. People ran away, leaving everything behind, with many villagers abandoning their animals as well. At the time, Ira already had almost two hundred animals under her care. A dozen or two in the vicinity would not make much difference. The main problem was finding enough food for all of them. And Ira started grinding grains manually so that she could cook some porridge for the dogs. And Ira walked around the village, although the artillery fire was coming closer every day, and left dry animal food for the scared, hiding animals to find it in between the shelling. And Ira called everyone and asked for help, but no one would come, or could come. People were fleeing from Kyiv and the Kyiv region. Ira stayed.

More than once, Ira left big bags with food open on the territory of her shelter because she was not sure she would be alive the next day, so great, loud, and close was the battlefield to her village. Ira feared for her life, as any normal person would, but the fear of leaving her animals hungry was much bigger. That fear woke her up every morning, sent her down the streets with the remaining bags of food, and gave strength to her hands when grinding grains. She even learned to drive on her own to search for food in the nearby villages and cities where she could not get on foot.

When we met in the summer of 2022, Ira laughed when telling me how she was afraid to crash in the car during her first drive, or how she could not find any sedative to sleep for at least several hours at night, or how her hands were cracking up when she became an involuntary miller. She laughed, but not because it was funny. She laughed because they all survived together – she and the animals she took responsibility for, and never betrayed.  

Alyona was my other like-minded animal rescuer from social networks. Yet, unlike Ira, she never became my offline friend because the actual distance between our cities was just too big. Alyona lived in a flat in the suburbs of Kharkiv. On the 24th of February 2022, Alyona posted a short video with a dark sky above her building. The sky was so densely ripped with the shells that it was turning an early morning into a bright day. Alyona begged anyone watching her video to come for the cats living in her flat and save them if she were killed. I was petrified when watching that video over and over again. My reality was equally burning with artillery shots and street fights, with buildings set on fire and tanks roaming the streets around my residential complex in Irpin. Yet, I could not help returning to Alyona’s video day after day, especially when my family managed to escape to Kyiv after spending eight long days in a besieged city. Mostly because it remained the only sign that Alyona was still alive on February 24. I could not get in touch with her in any way after that.

One day in March, I was on my usual route to a supermarket in Kyiv, hoping to replenish food until yet another air raid siren would close everything to the visitors. My phone rang, and I saw an unknown number on the screen. «It’s me, Alyona!» At first, I could not even understand who it was, but it was she, my Alyona from the Kharkiv suburbs. She was alive! Moreover, she stayed in the middle of the ongoing battlefield because she had to take care not only of her own animals but also of the animals left in the streets, in the flats, and even in the abandoned shelters nearby. She was not alone. Two brave girls risked their lives to feed whomever they could find. By the time, not much food was left. The connection was terrible. She had to walk for hours to find a spot where her phone could catch a weak signal. After that call, we lost connection again for weeks.

Alyona and her animals were evacuated to the country that colored the sky above her building with the shells. She was evacuated by the army that turned her peaceful Kharkiv suburbs into ruins. Could she say ‘no’ to such an evacuation? Certainly. What would it mean to the animals under her care? Slow death from hunger. Before Alyona could return to Ukraine, she was told numerous times that she should have been more grateful to a merciful Russian soldier who risked his life to save her and her animals from the shelling. The thing I will never understand is that people reproaching Alyona for not being appreciative enough really meant it. They saw no cause-and-effect relationship between a «merciful» Russian soldier evacuating a woman with animals and the reason why the evacuation was needed in the first place. They truly believed Alyona should value the efforts invested in destroying her home, killing both people and animals in her suburbs, and then giving her a temporary shelter in the country that started that unjustified aggression.

When my family returned to Irpin in summer 2022, the entire city was a ruin. It was difficult to walk by the familiar streets and not recognize them. It was painful to pass by the house at the corner where I used to meet an old dog circling his home and greeting everyone. The house was burnt down. The family and their dog were gone. Did they survive and escape? I can only hope for it. I will also never meet a friendly dog living on the street near the forest. It was a street dog, but she was fed, loved, and even walked by many. Whenever someone went to the forest, she joined the company as a local guide whom no one could skip. On my return to Irpin, the dog was gone. So was my opportunity to walk in the beloved forest, now explosives-laden, trenches-abused, and polluted with remnants of Russia’s army rations.

In a cafe that reopened in my residential complex, albeit not for a long time, I heard another horrifying story, one of many told and concealed, remembered and forgotten. The woman working as an administrator in that cafe lived in the old part of Irpin, the one on the side of Hostomel that had suffered most severely from the war. She and her neighbors did not leave Irpin at all. A day before Irpin was liberated, her neighbor went to the upper floor of his private house to call the local street cats for feeding, as he did every day during the entire period of a full-scale invasion. And that was when his house was shelled, and the man was killed. No, he was not just killed. His body was instantly torn into pieces. A minute later, his wife rushed to the nearly destroyed upper floor and started gathering what was left of her husband with her bare hands, so great was her shock… 

Whenever I feel depressed after yet another horrifying night of shelling or twenty hours with no electricity, heating, or water, I think about all of them. Ira with her blood-torn hands and red eyes after sleepless nights amidst the war cannonade. Alyona, deprived of her home for good and forced to thank an occupier. The nameless dogs and cats, forever gone from the familiar streets. And the man, losing his life for having the mercy to feed the animals in the city, turned into the battlefield for no reason. Guilty without guilt. Animals in war and people behind them. 

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