The two-week-old calf was, in a way, another victim of the war.
A smallholder farmer named Galina Korovaytseva had left it tethered in her yard late last month in Urzuf, a village on the Sea of Azov about 50 kilometers west of the frontline between the government of Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists.
When she came home, just before dark, she found it had been killed by wolves, which had devoured its insides. “My husband was still at work,” Korovaytseva said. “We always put [the calf] inside at night. But they came and ate it.”
More than 10,000 people have been killed in the more than four years of fightingin eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. An estimated 1.6 million more have been displaced. The economy has been devastated. And there's risk of environmental damage — contamination of the soil and air from destroyed factories, flooded coal mines, landmines and exploded military ordnance.
But for the country's once beleaguered wildlife, the war has been a godsend. Because of the ongoing fighting, there's no systematic monitoring of the region's wild animal population. But local residents, soldiers, rangers and environmentalists agree: The area is undergoing an unintended — and unexpected — rewilding.
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