AP PHOTOS: Ukrainians fleeing war ‘can’t leave’ pets behind

Piles of abandoned clothes and other personal items scattered along the corridors leading out of Ukraine. Running from Zaporizhia, Lyudmila Sokol, a gym teacher, said that the more people carried their things away, the more difficult it was, so they left them behind. in the south.

But their pets stay by their side.

Everywhere in the midst of migration More than 2.3 million people fled the Russian invasion They are the pets people can’t leave behind: birds, rabbits, hamsters, cats and dogs.

People fleeing from the outskirts of Kyiv huddled together under a ruined bridge, took a little baggage and left their cars on the road. But their pets stayed with them.

A woman carried her dog across an impromptu bridge over the Irpen River in the middle of the evacuation. Another at a train station in Poland petted her orange cat from nose to nose.

A young girl wrapped in an aluminum blanket hugged her two Chihuahuas near her as she crossed into Medica, Poland.

And in Seret, Romania, a young mother helped her young child drink from a paper cup as she cuddled her white Chihuahua. Nearby, a Maltese puppy peeked out of a plastic bag filled with toothpaste, shampoo, and hand lotion.

An elderly woman possesses her fluffy white dog, who has arrived in Romania, and collapses to exhaustion in a ballroom that has been turned into a refugee shelter.

Victoria Trovimenko said that she felt a duty to protect not only her family, but also her pets.

She told The Associated Press from Zoom, days after the war began, that the 42-year-old had not originally planned to leave Kyiv.

But as rockets and explosives fell, she thought about her duty to protect her 18-year-old daughter, her 69-year-old mother – her dog Akira and her cat Galileo.

She bought train tickets to head west, and ended up in Prague. She said that she arrived in Hungary for the first time, and was grateful to have Akira by her side for protection.

“I can’t leave dogs or cats. I have to take responsibility,” she said.