Good books about the war in Ukraine abound, but few describe the tragic plight of its pets as well as does the Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets’ new War Diary. Belorusets was in Kyiv when Russia invaded her homeland, and her book is a day-to-day journal of the 41 days that followed.
She doesn’t focus exclusively on the much-loved pets left behind when their owners had to flee–on foot, by car, or by train–and couldn’t take the animals along. But she shows a keen sensitivity to the harm the war has done to the estimated 100,00+ pets left homeless by the war: the starving cats, the dogs traumatized by rockets and explosions, the zoo animals killed by Russian soldiers.
In my latest story for @Medium, I write War Diary and about Patron, a bomb-sniffing dog who has helped find and defuse more than 200 explosive devices in Ukraine. He’s proof that if the Ukraine war has had too many canine victims, it’s also had a great dog who’s become a national hero.
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