The big bear loved the gray monkey.

He stood in front of his cage and talked to him like a small child: "My darling," he said softly and then even more tenderly, "my beautiful".

The monkey, a real and magnificent Hamadryas baboon, first looked lazily and bored to the left, to the right and then stretched his arm out of his cage, but said nothing.

The bear, a plump man just 28 years old, one of the youngest commanders of the Ukrainian army and paratroopers, pursed his mouth almost like a girl for a selfie and sent his favorite monkey four, maybe five, air kisses into the cage.

Didn't get any back.

Naturally.

Anna Prizkau

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The bear was called Bear because everyone in the Ukrainian army has nicknames instead of names.

That is why the shaman and the hunter accompanied the bear to the zoo that day.

It was August, the air as warm as tea.

The ground was steaming.

Salty pearls lay on our lips - sweat.

That was in late summer 2016, when the war in eastern Ukraine took a short vacation.

No, wrong, not this war, only the soldiers, the paratroopers of the 95th Brigade.

And no, it wasn't really a holiday either.

The bear and his comrades were stationed at the Chongar checkpoint on the Azov Sea.

At that time, soldiers who had fought hard in the East for a long time were sent there to rest.

Starved?

euthanized?

You could touch Crimea, it was so close, tourists slept by the sea and everyone ate chebureki.

Scouting instead of shooting and tactics instead of shelling.

"Like a holiday, right?" said the phoenix, who was guiding me across the military compound at the time.

Why am I telling this?

Probably because it was the most beautiful summer day in the world.

And also because it is now very likely that the magnificent baboon and all the other animals in that zoo have died.

Because the area has now been taken over by Russians.

Because it's war.

Perhaps the animals at the sea starved like ostriches in a deer park near Kiev.

Or have they been put to sleep?

And that in time, before the bombs and soldiers came?

Yes hopefully.

On Tuesday, Oleksandr Feldman, director of the Kharkiv Zoo, spoke about his animals in a video on Telegram.

He could still save very few, he said.

The Russian bombardment hit its premises, almost all enclosures have been destroyed.

If no help comes, all the big animals will have to be put down soon, he said, meaning the lions, the tigers and the bears, real bears.

Visiting the zoo was almost like therapy

The paratrooper bear wrote just two words Wednesday, writing, "All well." He spoke and wrote little even before that dark Thursday in February when the aggressive war began.

And like all friends who are now protecting Ukraine who are soldiers, we had agreed that I should just look at that little light on Facebook Messenger, not send nervous questions every day: "As long as it's green, everyone is online and alive.

It's all ok."

Yes, remembering a zoo now seems wrong in the days when the pictures from Butscha hit you.

Yes, the life of a monkey is absolutely irrelevant at the moment and in Ukraine.

But still I can't forget the day at the zoo with the shaman, the hunter and the bear and all the other paratroopers.

Before they were allowed to go to this checkpoint on the Sea of ​​Azov, they had days when they had to take care of more than a hundred wounded and had also seen a lot of dead people in the Donbass - and every visit to the zoo was almost like therapy for them, the shaman said at the time, said: "While animals are sometimes violent and must defend their territories, they are never cruel as humans are cruel.

And to know that, that's nice.” After that we went to the two lion cubs, they were sleeping in the heat.

I took a little lion in my arms and lifted him up, but he was heavier than I thought, it pulled in my back, every movement hurt now.

Then the bear came into the lion's den, straightened me with a hard jerk and as quickly as if he were an orthopaedist.

"All right," said the bear without a question mark, that was and is his favorite sentence.

Isn't it ridiculous to think of those monkeys, those lion cubs, I said Wednesday night into my laptop, which lit up the bathroom and face of the journalist from Kyiv, who had also been to the zoo at the time - on this most beautiful summer day of the World.

Then she said, not quite seriously, with a smile: "No!

The animals that are dying now are somehow Ukrainian too.

Or not?” We laughed loudly and briefly.

Then the sirens sounded over Kyiv.