Even zoo animals are giving Russian invaders a tough time.
Russian soldiers viciously wrestled Ukrainian zoo animals into cages and vehicles in the course of the retreat from town of Kherson, video shows.
“While retreating from Kherson Russians stole animals from the local zoo,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs, said on Twitter.
A person seen grabbing a raccoon by its tail within the clip — which had received almost 400,000 views by Tuesday morning — was Oleg Zubkov, the owner of Taigan Lion Park, a personal zoo in Russia-controlled Crimea, the Washington Post reported.
Zubkov, whose jacket featured the name of his zoo, is seen fighting the animals within the brazen display of looting in a since-deleted YouTube video.
“We’re in Kherson. Oleg Zubkov catches raccoons with BARE HANDS!!!” the headline said before the clip was removed, in line with the paper.
He and his assistants reportedly made off with seven raccoons, two female wolves, peacocks, a llama and a donkey from the Kherson Zoo.
In one other video, Zubkov was seen unloading the 2 wolves at his zoo, telling Russian TV crews that his motion was a “temporary evacuation.”
“It’s going to be a lot better for the wolves here: large territory, Crimean sun, and besides, after the quarantine, they’ll get a male,” Zubkov said, the Washington Post reported.
“It’s been their dream to live here,” he exclaimed, adding that the animals could be returned to their original zoo after Russia takes back Kherson.
“For us it is a humanitarian mission. These animals don’t have any zoological value for us. We’ve our own wolves. We’ve 75 raccoons. We could make canned raccoon meat,” he said in a poor attempt at humor.
“Sorry, but seriously, we’ve got a number of raccoons, but we took these animals to maintain them alive and in order that residents of Kherson could be blissful to see them alive again. The animals are in good hands,” Zubkov added.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted certainly one of the videos and issued a stern warning concerning the zoo caper.
“The occupiers stole every thing from Kherson: paintings from art galleries, antiquities from museums, historic manuscripts from libraries. But their most prized loot was a raccoon they stole from a zoo,” it captioned the clip.
“Steal a raccoon and Die,” the ministry added.
Zubkov said Russia’s designated leader in Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, made arrangements for him to travel to Kherson to remove the animals.
In 2021, the self-described Lion Man was convicted of negligence after certainly one of his big cats bit off the finger of a 1-year-old boy in 2021, in line with the newspaper.
He served two months of a 27-month prison sentence.
On Monday, Ukrainian soldiers shared emotional reunions and signed autographs following the Russian retreat in Kherson.
Ukrainians could possibly be heard chanting “Kherson is Ukraine” — a repudiation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shotgun annexation of the province — while taking to the road with blue and gold flags.
