A chimpanzee that fled the Kharkiv city zoo on Monday was persuaded to return by a zoo worker who wheeled him back on a bicycle.
Zoo staff in Ukraine’s second-largest city struggled to convince Chichi, who had been wandering the streets and a nearby park, to return to the zoo with them.
But when it started to rain, she ran to a guard who put a yellow jacket on her. The couple hugged before Chichi was placed on a bicycle seat.
Footage of the incident brought a rare moment of joy to a frontline city bombarded daily by Russian forces.
The zoo’s director, Oleksiy Hryhoriev, confirmed to Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne that the animal is safe back at the zoo.
At the beginning of the war, Chichi had been evacuated from Feldman Ecopark, an outdoor frontline zoo in the Kharkiv region.
The city of Kharkiv also faced daily shelling, with buildings blackened by bombs in the northern and eastern parts of the city. Hundreds of civilians were killed and injured.
The city center, where the zoo is located, has been hit less often since the main administrative buildings were destroyed in March. But last week at least four civilians were killed when a rocket hit the center.
Kharkiv regional authorities, who have the grim task of announcing the daily death toll, said Tuesday a woman had been killed in the east of the city. Local website Kharkiv News reported that two other women and a man were rescued from the rubble of a building in the city center.
A chimpanzee in its enclosure at Kharkiv City Zoo, where waterfall sounds are used to relieve animals’ stress under fire. Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesThough Chichi still lives in relative danger, she was fortunate enough to keep her former home at Feldman’s Ecopark alive. More than 100 animals died before they could be evacuated, according to the zoo’s owner, Kharkiv businessman Oleksandr Feldman.
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Feldman added that six people who volunteered to help evacuate the animals were killed.
A journalist from the German newspaper Bild documented this in May Killing of a 15-year-old volunteer who had come to the park with his parents and got caught in a Russian attack.
The teenager was taken to hospital under fire, although the journalist said he was already dead. While his parents mourned the loss of their son outside the hospital, some Ukrainian soldiers arrived with two Russian prisoners of war.