Murka is a timid little cat who lost a rear leg to Russian artillery fire in a frontline village in Donetsk. She still won’t allow herself to be petted by the Ukrainian soldiers who tended her wounds and saved her life. But as she is a stray and no longer able to hunt efficiently, she is dependent on them for food. And so Murka has become a ghostly, hopping presence on the margins of their field kitchen. The soldiers make sure she doesn’t go hungry.
Another cat, Dusia, was abandoned when her civilian owners fled the Russian advance and is now under the care of a fire support company of the frontline 41st Brigade. Meanwhile, a tabby called Pixel has a new home in a bunker she shares with doting artillerymen. Roman is an infantryman whose leg was shattered by machine gun fire in the summer fighting of 2022. We meet him in a psychological therapy unit at a military hospital in Kyiv. He tells a feline story from his own brigade.
‘A friend’s unit had a situation in which they forgot their cat,’ says Roman. ‘It happened during the usual chaos of rotation out of a forward position. But when they realised their mistake, they travelled 100 miles back to the same frontline location. It was actually something like a combat mission to retrieve their cat.’ He pauses to reflect on this extraordinary level of dedication. ‘Just to pick up a cat.’
I ask why his friend’s unit went to such trouble and risk. ‘Because the cat was by then a family member,’ Roman replies. In war, you don’t leave family members behind. Murka, Dusia, Pixel and thousands of other former domestic pets are emblematic of the shattered communities that now exist across large swathes of Ukraine. The legacy of Putin’s invasion in February 2022.
