After several months of fitful sleep, Chada awoke in February, not far from the Kyiv airport, to a broken power grid, a shortage of supplies, and soaring food prices. Her blond fur was matted, her claws overlong, her homeland hanging by a thread.
Everything—from human and animal lives to Ukrainian history and heritage—was at stake. Her companions, Myhasyk, Lyubochka, and Synochok among them, awoke at about the same time, to the daily blare of air raid sirens and a sense of growing emergency.
As Russian forces pressed ahead in the southeast, near Bakhmut, and indiscriminate missile and drone strikes caused civilian casualties, platitudes echoed in the halls of the US Congress.
The newly minted Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), was equivocating on the fate of a crucial aid package for Ukraine. To his right was a mob of MAGA legislators, threatening to oust him for any divergence from Donald Trump’s isolationism. To his left was a clear majority of legislators, railing against Johnson for abandoning a key ally and destabilizing Western democracy.
A bear during the evacuation in early March 2022.By Maryna Shkvyria/Save Wild.
While Johnson had eagerly opted for the political crucible in which he found himself, the residents of the White Rock Bear Shelter had not chosen much of anything. They had merely succumbed to the torpor of hibernation, then awakened to a country on the brink.
Years earlier, Chada and her den mates had been freed from the tawdry world of circus enslavement and roadside attractions, where they had been caged and forced to perform. By sheer happenstance, they landed under the expert care of a married zoologist couple, Yegor Yakovlev and Maryna Shkvyria.
Shkvyria, chief zoologist of the Kyiv Zoo, had spent nine years studying the behavior of large carnivores, including bears, lynx, and wolves, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine, an area that was long closed to people after the nuclear reactor disaster in 1986.
The White Rock shelter moved to its present home in the Kyiv area in October 2020, under the umbrella of the charitable fund Save Wild. Here, the bears enjoyed regular veterinary care and large natural enclosures, where they could forage for strategically scattered food, ranging from eggs to fruit and nuts.