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This is one of my occasional posts about life in the middle of the war in Ukraine.
OLEKSANDRO-SHULTYNE, Ukraine – The bombing started at night. Rockets rain down. On one street, every house exploded, scattering bricks and debris.
At dawn, the medics who were in the village came out of the basement, looking for casualties. Instead, he saw four older villagers, all seemingly unhurt, leading a cow wounded by shrapnel. Medical personnel decided to treat the animal.
“We have been used to the human dose and do not know how much painkiller to inject, but figured out roughly,” said Volodymyr, a combat medic in the Ukrainian Army, who asked to be identified only by first name in keeping with military rules. “After that, we extracted all the shrapnel we could find and treated the wound.”
Farmhouses spread across Ukraine. In frontline villages where most of the residents fled because of the war, those who stayed behind often did so because they did not want to leave their dairy cows, a very valuable animal, often considered a member of the family.
Cows are included in religious celebrations. Their milk provides a source of income. Visitors will struggle to find a cow in a Ukrainian village whose family won’t name it. The animal also has a special meaning in a country that remembers the Holodomor, a famine designed by Joseph Stalin 90 years ago, said Olena Braichenko, founder of Yizhakultura, an independent project on Ukrainian gastronomic culture.
Breakups can be heartbreaking. Tetyana, a 53-year-old woman who fled a village near Bakhmut last May, left three cows behind. “It’s been almost a year. Sometimes I think of letting go, but then I remember the cows and cry,” he said by phone from the Zhytomyr region, where he now lives. Like others interviewed for this article, he asked that his full name not be used for safety reasons.
“I ran to the neighbors asking to take my cow, but no one wanted to,” he recalled. “I ran to the butcher, asking him to cut my throat because I couldn’t do it myself, but he refused.”
“I just left him tethered, she added. “I knew I couldn’t release him because it would destroy someone else’s garden.” Her village, Vasiukivka, remains under Russian control, and Tetyana doesn’t know what has become of the animal.
The medical officer who treated the wounded cattle in Oleksandro-Shultyne was named Buryonka, or Brownie. Buryonka suffered a concussion and multiple shrapnel injuries. For two days, he could barely stand. The paramedics treated him with antibiotics, and on the third day, he was finally on his feet.
He and four other cows whose barns had burned were taken to the yard of the abandoned house, where medics tended to the wounded soldiers. Now the cows are also taken care of. BT allowed some families to evacuate, knowing their livestock were in good hands.
Buryonka is still very weak but gives milk again. Her owner ran to a nearby village but still returned to feed Buryonka and four other cows, giving some to soldiers and other villagers while keeping some for herself.
Zina Richkova, 71, one of the neighbors who helped save Buryonka, also lost her barn in the shooting. He has three hens and one rooster, who now lives with him in the kitchen.
“With him, I have someone I can talk to,” he said. “I don’t want to kill them. If I hear a rooster singing in the morning, it means I’m still alive.”
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