Ukraine evacuates horses

By : AFP

Date: 24 December 2025 8:32pm WAT

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With a generous handful of hay and some firm nudges, stud farm workers in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region coax a bay horse onto a lorry that will evacuate the animal to safety.

The danger for the stud farm has been creeping closer for months, with Russia pounding the region with air strikes that kill civilians and pose a mortal threat for the animals.

The state-owned stud farm currently houses 130 horses, some of which had already been evacuated from elsewhere in Zaporizhzhia or from the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine’s central east. “We are currently transferring the horses at this stud farm to other stud farms in Ukraine,” director of the state-owned enterprise “Horse Breeding of Ukraine” Vitaliy Brovko told AFP.

At the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022, the farm’s stables were hit with a missile, leaving one horse wounded and others traumatised. “They didn’t go into the stables for two weeks, and day and night, they ran to the stables, turned around and ran back,” Mykhailo Sych, a branch director at the “Horse Breeding of Ukraine” told AFP.

The threat has been looming ever since. “There have been cases where horses had miscarriages from stress,” the horse farm worker Oleksandr Konyakhin told AFP. “Now there are no strikes, only explosions can be heard, and the horses have gradually gotten used to it,” Konyakhin added.

Animals have suffered along with people throughout the almost four-year war, with Russian strikes hitting stables and zoos.

In October, a Russian drone attack sparked a fire on a farm in Ukraine’s northeast. The blaze killed some 13,000 pigs.

A month prior, seven horses were killed in the Kyiv region during a large-scale Russian attack which hit an equestrian club. “Ukrainian animals have once again become targets of Russian missiles and drones,” the Ukrainian foreign ministry said on X condemning the attack in September. “The world cannot stand aside while a terrorist state takes lives –- human or animal -– every single day,” it said.

Zoos across Ukraine have been damaged throughout the war, with one attack killing a ram in the Odesa zoo in June.

In the Zaporizhzhia stud farm, the evacuations continued, with over a dozen transports already carried out. “If the situation worsens, we will evacuate the entire stud farm,” Vitaliy Brovko said.

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