Volya’s luck

This is one of 2 blog posts I will write about Volya this month. The second one, on her birthday celebrations, was planned, this one just happened after I saw a tweet.

Volya is enjoying her cardboard cake scratching – bed thingy. I will write about this in another post. I will just say that she is sleeping and doing her manicure on it every day since we got it, which is over a month at this point. On the day I took this picture, I saw the tweet that prompted me to write this post. Please read, comment, and share Nate’s tweet.

For most it was a sad reminder of what is happening in Ukraine. For me it was much more than that because of two things: the city of Orikhiv and the last picture in the tweet.

I mentioned when I talked about Volya’s story that she was from Orikhiv. I also said, when we left Ukraine that Volya was not a cruelty case, that she was never abandoned. The only cruelty she faced was the russian aggression. They destroyed her home and took her away from people who loved her, who might or might not have survived.

Now Orikhiv is a no-go zone for volunteers, who were risking their lives to bring supplies and evacuate animals and people as far back as 2024 or even earlier. Now only soldiers give some food to the animals which didn’t die, yet. I should point out that any activity outside the terribly dangerous war they are fighting adds another layer of risk. russian drone operators can see the animals and that they are fed and they can wait for the soldiers to come to give more food before attacking. This is a war in which running a generator for heating or charging a power station means the soldiers can be detected from the fumes it gives out. Any Ukrainian soldier who is topping up a food-pipe for stray animals is putting his or her life in additional danger.

This is the last picture and the cat below looks exactly like Volya. It could have been her, it’s possible that this cat might be one of her siblings or a family member.

Was Volya lucky?

In a way she wasn’t lucky, because her home was destroyed and her family and everybody around her were suffering immensely. She lived through a trauma that should have never happened and that would have never happened if the countries who forced Ukraine into giving up their nukes would have reacted when russia, one of the guarantors, attacked Ukraine in 2014. It was a failure of the other 2 guarantors – US and UK – followed by a failure of UN, followed by a failure of Germany and France, followed by a failure of OSCE, all followed by all the international failures starting in 2022. Her people could have been safe and happy and she would have had the same name she was given as a kitten, she would have heard the same language [most likely russian], she wouldn’t have had to be evacuated and kept in quarantine. All that was possible if the countries above would have just kept their promises.

In another way she was, because she was evacuated and taken to Lviv, where she received medical attention, and from where I got her. She is now living in the UK, enjoying the cardboard cake scratching – bed thingy, demanding her wet food lunch, sleeping on the bed and perching on top of me or my husband during the night if she fancies that. She watches TV and plays with her 75 toys. She likes to go out once in a while and look at the buildings and people or trees. She likes to go out in the garden on a leash.

She might be lucky because she’s not in that picture.