“Charlyk is a monkey and Anfisa is his girlfriend. They died”: Close to 300 animals drown at Nova Kakhovka private zoo

According to the volunteers, the zoo’s owner had abandoned it some time ago. Local residents and volunteers brought the animals food and looked after the entire facility, which continued to work despite the cold weather and artillery strikes. The volunteers stressed that the Russian media reported false information about the rescued pets, as they only reported on the Kherson zoo without mentioning the private zoo in Nova Kakhovka. The owner of the Crimean zoo “Taigan” Oleg Zubkov took the animals from a naturalist station in Kherson, the volunteers explained, and no one evacuated the pets from Kazkova Dibrova.

“It wasn’t a zoo, but a private menagerie,” says a source interviewed by The Insider. “There were raccoons, ostriches, and monkeys. They say there was nothing there, but there was! There were two monkeys, green monkeys, both drowned. There were six raccoons, porcupines, ostriches, peacocks. There were a lot of them. They survived everything in a year and a half – the shelling and the bomb strikes... They survived everything. And here they drowned. There was a sudden flood at two in the morning, and no one had time to open the enclosures. Volunteers came [to the zoo] and tried to dive in, but there was a strong rush of water. They wanted to at least save the monkeys, but they couldn't. Their aviary is the first one near the gate, but they still couldn't reach it in time.”