On a farm in northern Ukraine, a frightened heifer limps after having her hind leg amputated with shrapnel, an ordeal reminiscent of the high price paid by animals in war.
A four-month-old calf survived a bombing that almost completely destroyed a farm in the village of Malaya Rogan, 25 km southeast of Kharkov (east), and killed almost a third of the animals there.
This is a “nightmare night” experienced by 62-year-old farm owner Lyubov Zlobina. region.
“I’m holding on to this little survivor, but I’ve given her antibiotics twice, and unfortunately her wound is still bleeding and she’s not getting fat anymore,” Zlobina says as the sound of bombs is heard in the distance.
“It can be fixed if we can remove the splinter, but for the operation we have to go very far and we can’t,” she says. Her husband, who was a driver in Afghanistan in the Soviet army, showed AFP on his mobile phone several videos taken on the night of the tragedy.
“When we left the basement, we scattered in all directions,” says 57-year-old Nikolai Zlobin, “because the straw immediately caught fire. The explosion decapitated a cow that was giving birth to her young.
