Dirty and injured but happy: the brigade that helps abandoned pets in the war in Ukraine

Khotin (Ukraine)Tanja Kriniuk is emphatic and not very talkative. "If you see a drone, drop your bike and hide under a tree," she tells me as she refills my backpack with dog and cat food. We're in Khotin, a village in eastern Sumi, devastated and ravaged by the numerous Russian attacks of the past year. There's hardly anyone left in this village that once housed eleven thousand people, with its lake, small Orthodox church, and houses with unpaved roads. I ask about the helmet and vest. She invites me to put them on if I want, but both she and Victoria, another activist and journalist, leave them in the van. It's too dangerous to travel through the village by vehicle; we'd be too easy a target, and as the evidence shows, you have to travel light to cycle fast. A bulletproof vest isn't much use when these flying devices, which can reach speeds of over 150 kilometers per hour, are hitting you.

We began our route on the main street, where a large net is supported by several wooden beams. These anti-drone nets are becoming increasingly common.On the roads in the east, here they are full of holes that any FPV can get into. First-person view. Small drones with cameras. where, on the other side of the forehead, someone with goggles and a remote control is busy smashing and exploding them. The internet allows us access to one of the town's cracked schools. There, the teachers' jackets still hang like a teacher's glasses on the desk. The children's lockers, open, lead to a room with cots piled high with rubble. The hallways are littered with shattered glass, utensils, and school supplies. The plants are withered, and the place is full of boxes of humanitarian aid hastily dumped, probably during a mass evacuation when the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region began. Tanja opens the classrooms, documenting everything with her phone. In the distance, a buzzing sound arrives. Someone might mistake it for a car, or even a bicycle, or the buzzing of a bee. Victoria raises her finger to shush us. It's a drone. The device flies by, observing the building as we wait in a darkened hallway. We're not of interest to it. The flight continues, searching for something more valuable. More than 3,400 schools like this one have been destroyed in Ukraine, according to the World Bank.

We rode up the main avenue and arrived at a factory that used to produce pipes. The bike wheels rolled over scrap metal and insulating material, and the metal of the factory's roof scraped as if it were about to collapse. We continued on, and Tanja asked us to stop for a moment at her brother's house, in the middle of an open field. She wanted to take some photos for insurance. She asked us to take the same route she was taking because of landmines. Some may have been planted, others dropped by drones or projectiles. There are small ones, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, like the PFM-1, which contains 37 grams of liquid explosive. Tanja has no fear of death. "I have a van, I have food, I have a stable nervous system, and I'm not afraid; I do it because I can," says this volunteer from Sumi, who combines her altruism with a job as a saleswoman. Every three weeks, she visits villages like this, a few kilometers from the front lines, because of her unconditional love for animals. And these villas are located in the well-known killer zone, An area dotted with deserted villages where anything that moves is shot down from the air and annihilated. Victoria and I stayed a few meters away while Tanja visited the house. That vibration again. It's coming from far away but getting closer. We looked at each other, knowing our camouflage was ridiculous because many FPV drones and Mavic reconnaissance drones have high-definition cameras and can locate you from hundreds of meters away. Victoria commented on how sophisticated it was to identify them: "If they're coming from this direction, they're Russian; if they're coming from that direction, they're Ukrainian." Tanja had told us that wearing press credentials could be worse and that we'd be just as much of a target. We left without taking the same shortcut, walking through wild vegetation, and arrived back at the factory. We saw a couple of dogs and took out the bags of feed. Victoria and Tatiana approached, opened them, and left the food on the ground. Any surveillance device could see us, but we didn't feel anything, only the artillery fire in the distance. Suddenly, two soldiers appeared. One little guy in flip-flops with a Kalashnikov, and the other in uniform with a big gun. The dogs are his; they're called Chewbacca. and Drone. The dark humor of these lands is ideal for these situations. The animals enjoy the feast. A black dot approaches from the horizon:Devis, devis"Look, look!" It looks like a bird gliding. The soldiers, as we were already starting to back away, told us: "They're ours." It's a Baba Yaga, an enormous drone typically used for agricultural purposes, flies overhead and continues on its way to release its cargo at a Russian location, just under eight kilometers away. In Slavic legends, Baba Yaga is a witch who eats children or aids heroes. They are also known as Vampires because they are highly active at night and are a nightmare for the Russians.

The two soldiers invited us to visit houses where they knew animals were hiding. Abandoned pets. Stepping inside was like imagining the escape. Medications strewn across a sofa, drawers open, a lifetime's belongings scattered on the floor, and the front door unlocked. We entered several homes without success. We didn't find any pets.

The small soldier stops before an apple tree and picks apples. Sweet, refreshing, a perfectly natural act. We're flanked by garages filled with abandoned farm machinery, axes, and everything else you could possibly fill a warehouse with tools from rural life. "Drone, drone!" one of the soldiers calls. We're on high alert for a second before realizing he's calling his dog. He invites us to visit the factory, which is littered with bits of drones scattered all over the area. He gives me a souvenir: a small, rough, black chip that pricks you when you touch it.

We arrived at a house with a lot of roosters and cats. Tanja had already used up some envelopes on the way, but we were well-prepared. The cats didn't hide. The house was messy, full of clothes. Children's drawings hung on the wall, like one of a soldier with a rifle. "Who knows what happened here," one of the soldiers said. We couldn't take anything; the only thing we had was an abandoned tourniquet. You never know when it might come in handy to stop bleeding.

Alerted by the commotion of our presence, more dogs and cats appear, animals terrified for months by the noise of the bombs, many of them locked in a house and lying on their owners' sofas waiting for their return. Tanja has a contact for the only elderly family who haven't left the village, but without cell service we can't reach them. We ride down without pedaling alongside a majestic lake. Again, an abandoned street, dogs appearing out of nowhere, and mats of feed that the activists leave out so they can all eat at once. Distributing food to hungry dogs is quite a technique to keep them calm and composed. some They don't gobble up each other's rations. But they're calm; each one eats their own. Brutish, wounded, some lame, others content, they all have in common that most still wear their collars. The BM-21 Grad rocket launchers remind us where we are. One, two, three, almost ten detonations from somewhere in the Sumi Oblast. Tanja disappears, and Vika and I hear a loud explosion. It could be a KAB, guided bombs they're dropping on the Russians with Soviet ammunition. Its sound is like daylight flashing, making the windows rattle. We squeeze between two brick walls, while Vika looks up at the sky again. Her gaze is unsettling, but they also seem like bold eyes, wise from the accumulated sadness of so many years of anxiety, of sleepless nights among a generation of young people who have grown up in the midst of war. As a journalist, she'll never experience anything like this, and that's why she has to do the job.

Tanja, wearing shorts and a Mickey and Minnie Mouse t-shirt, has found the farmhouse. A woman with gold crowns hugs us and gives us a kiss. We give them more supplies for their pets, and she proudly shows us her vegetable garden. Shells, like tiny black dots, glimmer above Khotin. These people, despite having been evacuated a few weeks ago, have returned. They are resilient and won't leave their homes even without electricity and next to a war front unlike anything seen in Europe since 1945. It is estimated that almost 52,000 people from 202 villages in the Sumi region have been displaced. We say goodbye with a tight hug. The drone again. We throw our bikes to the ground with the food and hide among the corn as we feel this melody of terror ripple across the plains surrounding us. Chornozem"Black soil" in Ukrainian, which with its fertile abundance has brought as much prosperity as calamity to this part of Eastern Europe. We reached the van and returned along an easy-to-follow road, driving under the nets to the town of Sumi, about twenty-five kilometers away.

This conflict has claimed thousands of lives and scarred the land with mines and craters. And among that legacy, it also leaves us with the unforgivable confusion of the trembling of a bee or the breeze with the flight of a drone. kamikaze.