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Lions at Feldman Ecopark in Ukraine were transported from their Kharkiv location as the zoo worked to evacuate large animals affected by shelling during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Video posted to Facebook by Kharkiv politician Oleksandr Feldman shows lions in cages at Feldman Ecopark in Kharkiv Oblast. Evacuation efforts were underway as the zoo pled for financial donations to support the efforts.

“Transporting lions is not an easy task,” Feldman wrote in his post. “Especially when animals have been under stress from shelling for more than a month and, in general, from the fact that their calm and measured life has changed dramatically. But we coped with this, the main thing is that we safely left the shelling zone and neither people nor animals were injured.”

It was not clear where the animals were being sent, but Feldman Ecopark wrote in a post, “A large number of Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, Dnipro residents, representatives of many other cities and countries offered their help – it is simply impossible to list them all.”

On April 5, the zoo had said shelling had devastated the zoo and that if the animals could not be evacuated, they would be put to sleep.

“It is unimaginably painful to talk about this, but the main priority now is the lives of people,” the zoo wrote on Facebook. “We also urgently need to evacuate other animals still remaining on the territory of the Ecopark and surviving animals that can be taken out.” Credit: Oleksandr Feldman via Storyful