The UAnimals community delivered food and medicine to places that even cars can no longer reach
From October 2025 to January 2026, volunteers from the UAnimals community conducted 24 feed distributions in the Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Kherson, and Mykolaiv regions. In total, they distributed 5,949 kilograms of food and 2,140 doses of antiparasitic drugs for animals.
The project was funded by our partners at Abri voor Dieren in the Netherlands. We thank them for their support.
Food and medicine were distributed to residents of towns and villages who care for large numbers of cats and dogs. Thousands of animals remain in the frontline territories — abandoned, evacuated from neighboring villages under shelling, those whom people were unable to take with them. Local residents feed and care for them, despite the constant danger.
Volunteers take food to places where most people do not go. Some villages are under constant shelling and cannot be accessed without an armored vehicle. Others are almost completely deserted. According to volunteers, up to 50 residents remain there instead of 1,500.
Volunteer Marina Velytchenko traveled to villages in the Sumy region. According to her, most of the people who remain in Horile are elderly, and they take in dogs from neighboring villages under fire — from Bachivsk, Ulanove, Esmani, and Pustogorod. They are happy to shelter the animals, but there is nowhere to find food there.
In Khodyne, a drone hit a volunteer’s car. The local curator has not been driving there since the summer — it is the only thing he has left after the shelling destroyed his house, outbuildings, barns, garage, and even the horse paddock. Now, food is delivered through relatives in a neighboring village, and from there, the man transports the bags by bicycle. He does this after dark because he is not allowed to ride during the day.
“Shalygine is my greatest pain. The village is incredibly large, with 1,500-1,700 residents, but only 50 people remain, and they don’t even live there. They come in groups every few days because the situation is terrible. Houses are burning down, and the streets where we transported animals just two or three weeks ago are now burned down, with not even walls left in some places. I delivered some of the feed myself and gave some to people who walked to the most remote streets and fed the animals there,” says Marina.
In Studenka, Sumy region, traveling through open areas is literally deadly. Drones target everything — cars, mopeds, people. The military categorically forbade the volunteer from going there. She gave the feed to two local men who rode their bicycles along side roads to the village almost at dusk and fed the animals.
In the Zaporizhzhia region, volunteers last visited Ternuvate on December 4. They broke through the FPV drones and dropped 7-8 bags of feed, simply cut open — it is impossible to drive there anymore, even the military does not go there.
“Look, I’ve put a map here to make it clearer for you. Tsyrkuny is the first point after the ring road. Then comes the Slobozhansky forest belt. But the part with the forest belt is already half occupied. Mali Prokhody, Lukyanci, and Marahovets are all deeply occupied,” says another volunteer from the Kharkiv region who delivered feed to the villages of Lyptsi and Slobozhanske.
We are infinitely grateful to the people who care for animals in such difficult conditions. We thank every volunteer who delivered feed under the drones. Every resident of the frontline villages who feeds animals, despite everything. You are saving lives.
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