The Animals They Could Not Leave Behind: A Family from Kupiansk Starts Again

By Matthew Parish

Friday 25 September 2026

There is never quite enough time for an interview close to the front line. Conversations that might ordinarily take an hour are compressed into minutes. People keep an ear open for what is happening outside. Plans change quickly and the requirements of security take precedence over journalism.

So it was when the Lviv Herald met a couple originally from Kupiansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, while delivering humanitarian aid. They now live in a small rural community in the region, having fled their home with a car filled not with possessions but with animals. Their story is partly one of displacement, partly one of the strange transformation that war imposes upon ordinary lives and partly about the creatures that people leave behind when they run.

Before the war, their existence in Kupiansk was unexceptional. There was work and there was home. They enjoyed sport and the countryside. In winter there was skiing; in summer there was the river. The landscape around Kupiansk, with its chalk hills and protected natural areas, was something they loved but perhaps did not entirely appreciate until it became inaccessible.

“We have a really gorgeous river,” they recalled. “Simply amazing nature. Our river is beautiful. We have a protected area with chalk mountains. It’s very beautiful.”

Then came the reflection familiar to so many Ukrainians who remember the ordinary pleasures of life before February 2022: “We didn’t even know then how rich we were.”

Kupiansk fell to Russian forces in the opening days of the full-scale invasion. The speed of the occupation was itself bewildering. Like millions of Ukrainians, the couple had not really believed that such a war could happen until suddenly it had.

“We didn’t believe it at first. How could it happen so suddenly? Our city was literally occupied in the first few days.”

They remained there through more than six months of Russian occupation and were still there when Ukrainian forces liberated the city in September 2022. Liberation, however, did not mean that Kupiansk became safe. The city remained close to the fighting and over subsequent years the danger returned with increasing intensity.

During this period something else was happening. As people departed, their animals remained.

The couple had always liked animals. They had previously brought homeless animals into their home, but nothing on the scale that followed the invasion. War altered the relationship between humans and animals in Kupiansk because evacuation repeatedly separated the two. People fled and cats and dogs appeared in the streets. Some were abandoned deliberately, but others had owners who had left believing that they would return within days or weeks.

“Throughout the war, animals kept coming, people kept leaving,” they explained. “Mostly they were animals from our street where we lived. Someone left, abandoned the animals and they came to us.”

Their home gradually became an improvised refuge. They fed the animals and, when travel became possible, began taking them to Kharkiv for sterilisation. They would collect a group, load them into a vehicle and make the journey to the city, trying at least to prevent the population of homeless animals from expanding uncontrollably.

There was no grand plan to establish an animal sanctuary. It simply happened because each individual animal presented an immediate moral problem: somebody had to do something.

One of them was a cat they call Goosebumps.

She arrived during winter desperately hungry and already in poor health. “I thought she wouldn’t survive, she was so starved,” her rescuer recalled. “She came and stayed with us. We fed her, nursed her back to health, loved her.”

Goosebumps survived. She is still with them.

Other animals arrived through soldiers and volunteers. A friend involved in evacuations would collect animals encountered while taking civilians out of dangerous areas and then telephone with a familiar proposition: “Yana, you’ll take the animals.”

Refusing was almost impossible.

“I knew if I refused, they would die there,” she said. In some evacuated areas scarcely any civilians remained. Domestic animals were left to survive among explosions, ruins and packs of other hungry animals. The distinction between a pet and a stray could disappear within days.

The military also brought injured animals. Some cats had spinal injuries. Others had been discovered trapped inside apartments after their owners evacuated. Soldiers would contact the couple and ask them to find a particular building, sometimes having to gain access through a window to rescue an animal locked inside.

The owners had often made the same tragic miscalculation.

“They didn’t think they were leaving forever,” Yana explained. “They thought they’d just go away. Now all this will end and they’ll come back.”

But the war did not end.

Eventually the danger reached a point at which the couple themselves could no longer remain. They had been preparing mentally for evacuation for some time but, like so many residents of front-line communities, waited until almost the last possible moment. Most of the people around them had already gone.

What finally persuaded them was a drone.

One evening a drone appeared to be pursuing their vehicle. The encounter came close enough, they recalled, that the car was nearly destroyed. By the following morning the argument about whether to remain was over.

“We decided to pack everything,” they said. “No one knew where we were going. We were driving and didn’t understand where we were going.”

By then they had 25 cats.

The practical absurdity of evacuating 25 cats in the middle of a war did not alter the decision. The animals were packed into the car. Personal possessions were not.

“We loaded the car with just the animals and everything they had to wear,” they recalled. “We didn’t even have winter clothes, not even dishes.”

For approximately a month they searched for somewhere they could live with their extraordinary household. Money was limited and finding accommodation for two people accompanied by a small army of cats and dogs was hardly straightforward. Eventually they found an inexpensive house in a village in Kharkiv Oblast that, by comparison with Kupiansk, seemed safe.

They began again with virtually nothing.

There was little furniture and few belongings. Other people helped them through their first winter and gradually they adapted their new home for the animals. Yet what they have is still far from an ideal shelter. Sick and traumatised animals require warmth. Newly arrived animals need quarantine facilities. Veterinary treatment costs money and reaching appropriate clinics can require substantial journeys.

Some of the injuries they encounter are severe. At least five animals in their care have required amputations following wounds sustained during the war. They have dealt with injuries apparently caused by explosions and munitions as well as viral illnesses and the ordinary diseases that spread among populations of homeless animals.

The psychological wounds are harder to treat.

“All the animals still remember the sound of a rocket flying by,” they said. When a Shahed-type drone or another familiar sound passes overhead, animals hide. They become frightened and visibly stressed.

This is one of the less discussed consequences of a war saturated with artillery, missiles and drones. Humans may eventually learn to distinguish the significance of different sounds and to continue their daily routines despite them. Animals hear the same noises without understanding their geopolitical meaning. They know only that certain sounds have repeatedly preceded terror.

The couple have become accustomed to those sounds themselves. Asked whether their new home feels dangerous, they offered the peculiar recalibration of risk characteristic of people who have lived close to intense fighting.

Compared with Kupiansk, they said, it feels safe.

They remembered working outside there while shrapnel flew nearby. “I thought, I’ll probably go out a little later and work,” came the almost comic recollection. Bombs, drones and fragments of metal had become ingredients of daily life. Against that standard, their present village seems peaceful.

Yet it is not untouched by war. Farming, upon which communities such as this depend, has become dangerous. Fields have been mined and must be cleared. Drones can reach agricultural machinery. Farm buildings and warehouses may become targets because somebody operating a weapon remotely imagines that something of military significance might be inside.

For those who remain, agriculture nevertheless has to continue. The population that stayed through the beginning of the war has largely remained, the couple observed. Those who were going to flee often did so earlier. The remainder have become determined to endure.

The same stubbornness runs through the couple’s attitude towards their animals.

Perhaps the most remarkable story they told the Lviv Herald concerned an elderly dog. His family had left during the early period of the war and had been searching for him for roughly two years. By chance, they later saw one of Yana’s videos showing animals being collected.

One dog looked familiar.

The animal was by then extremely old, deaf and blind. His health was poor enough that an operation was necessary to save him. Yet the family recognised him from the video and, after two years of separation in wartime, dog and owners were reunited.

Recently the couple received photographs.

The old dog is still alive.

It is a small story measured against the enormity of Ukraine’s war. No city was liberated because an elderly dog found his family. No battle turned upon the survival of Goosebumps or upon 25 cats being squeezed into a car while their rescuers abandoned clothes, dishes and almost everything else they owned.

Yet wars are ultimately experienced through small things. A house left behind. A river remembered. Winter clothes that could not fit into a car because the cats occupied the available space. A frightened animal recognising the sound of an incoming drone. An elderly dog appearing unexpectedly in a video watched by people who had spent two years wondering what had happened to him.

Humanitarian aid delivered to communities such as this is therefore about more than boxes and supplies. It supports people attempting to preserve fragments of ordinary civilisation in places where war is constantly trying to destroy it. Sometimes that means keeping farmers working. Sometimes it means helping elderly residents who refuse to leave their homes. Sometimes it means providing food and medicine for animals whose owners have disappeared into the vast geography of Ukrainian displacement.

The couple from Kupiansk did not set out to become animal rescuers. War assigned them the role. They simply encountered one abandoned creature after another and repeatedly made the same decision: this one would not be left behind.

When finally they themselves had to flee, they applied precisely the same rule.

They took the animals with them.

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How you can help

Yana and Evgeny’s work continues, and caring for rescued animals requires a constant supply of food, veterinary treatment, medicines and suitable shelter. A fundraiser has now been established to support their small animal shelter in Gavrilovka and to help them continue caring for animals displaced, abandoned or injured during the war. Readers who would like to support their work can donate or share the appeal through ⁠their GoFundMe fundraiser.

In communities close to the front, relatively modest contributions can make a tangible difference. Supporting the shelter means helping Yana and Evgeny provide food, warmth and medical care to animals that might otherwise have nowhere to go.