SOCIETY
The famous landscape park in the Kharkiv Region was destroyed by Russian artillery and rocket fire in the very first days of the full-scale invasion. Russian forces killed several of the ecopark’s employees and hundreds of animals, destroying nearly all of its buildings. Three years later, however, the park is once again welcoming visitors. A correspondent for The Insider visited the park and saw why, despite the best efforts of its owners and volunteers, the scene still bears the scars left by the first days of the war.
The highway, which once connected Moscow and Simferopol but has fallen into disrepair since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, runs into a checkpoint almost immediately outside of Kharkiv. The structure is a fortress made of concrete blocks, with only a narrow passage left for the occasional cars traveling from the border villages to the city and back.
A large blue road sign before the checkpoint lists the destinations along the highway: Belgorod 68 km, Moscow 740 km. In the thick summer greenery right next to the checkpoint, just a couple of meters from the sign, a turnoff to the bypass road is hidden.
The road, paved with old concrete slabs, runs past burned-out houses, cars riddled with shrapnel, and trees broken by artillery fire. After a couple of kilometers, there is a large clearing overgrown with thick grass, marked by a sign indicating that this is the parking lot of the Feldman Ecopark.
Before the full-scale invasion, the ecopark was one of the main tourist gems of the Kharkiv Region — and all of eastern Ukraine. Every day, free buses running from multiple Kharkiv metro stations delivered thousands of visitors, who came to see the animals, especially rare ones.
More than 2,000 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish lived on a territory of 140 hectares. The ecopark regularly hosted concerts, festivals, sporting events, and children’s parties. Expansion and modernization were a continuous effort, with more and more new animals and plants appearing. The park’s owner, millionaire and Verkhovna Rada MP Oleksandr Feldman, regularly announced the new arrivals on billboards across Kharkiv and in commercials on regional TV channels.
Detractors say that Feldman used the park to whitewash his less-than-spotless reputation. He had been overly clumsy in currying favor with fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych, and he had helped build the massive Barabashovo market — a venue strongly associated with cash-in-hand dealings and extortionate takeovers. He had declared “gifts from his mother” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and served as an MP for Viktor Medvedchuk’s openly pro-Russian party, Opposition Platform — For Life (OPZZh).
If Oleksandr Feldman indeed launched the ecopark to bury all his sins somewhere between the spacious capybara enclosures and the alpaca pastures, his bet definitely paid off. At least for Kharkiv residents, Feldman has long been associated primarily with the ecopark rather than with political opportunism or murky business dealings.
Feldman Ecopark opened in the summer of 2013. The businessman did not pay much heed to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its implausibly deniable invasion of the Donbas. He did not openly condemn the occupiers or even support a single parliamentary resolution labeling Russia as the aggressor. For this, in February 2022, the Russians “thanked” Feldman with a barrage of fire that rained down on the park in the very first days of the full-scale invasion.
“The park is gone,” Feldman said in a trembling voice on April 5, 2022, after another massive Russian strike, adding that the animals would either have to be evacuated from the damaged, shelled enclosures, or else euthanized.
Charities and individual volunteers stepped forward to evacuate the animals, including extremely dangerous ones such as lions and tigers. In April and May 2022, under relentless shelling, hundreds of animals were transported from Feldman Ecopark to zoos and shelters across Ukraine. During the evacuations, six employees and volunteers were killed by Russian fire in the park. The youngest victim was only 15 years old.
One of the alleys in Feldman Ecopark features a memorial poster on the events of those days: “199 days straight under enemy shelling, six fallen heroes — volunteers and staff — more than 300 animals killed, 90% of buildings and enclosures destroyed.”
The park lay in ruins until the fall of 2022, when the Russian occupiers were driven out of the Kharkiv Region. In November, the first animals were brought back, and in the summer of 2023, part of the park was reopened to visitors. Finally, in the fall of that year, Feldman Ecopark was officially declared operational again. Today, it is also a real-life museum of the Russian-Ukrainian war. A faded billboard at the entrance — still in Russian — offers tours to visitors.
The inscription in Russian from before the war angers the park’s visitors
“That sign is just old, made before the war,” snaps the elderly guard (also in Russian) at complaining visitors.
As for the tours, there is nowhere to book them, as the main administrative building still lies in ruins. A banner hangs on its shrapnel-riddled walls, wishing for “peaceful skies overhead.” The fabric of the banner is intact, so it must have been put up after the park’s reconstruction began.
The contrast between the intact fabric and the shrapnel-riddled walls it covers is striking. Equally noticeable is the inscription on the banner — it feels as though someone had carefully chosen a phrase spelled exactly the same in both Russian and Ukrainian.
Fragments of Russian rockets that fell on the park still lie in the grass, and the blue portable toilets are riddled with shrapnel. To reassure visitors, signs have been put up stating that the area has been demined and is safe.
Despite all the effort, visitors are not numerous — even with free admission and a resumed bus service from Kharkiv. Overall, the ecopark leaves a grim impression, with many enclosures in ruins, burned-out buildings awaiting demolition or refurbishment, and signs marking the sites where Russian rockets struck.
Younger children happily watch the goats in the open enclosures or run along the pond’s edge, trying to catch the attention of the swans and ducks. Teenagers and adults, however, seem weighed down by the frontline atmosphere — which, incidentally, is more than palpable in Kharkiv itself, a city shelled on a daily basis.
“The park seemed more spacious before, and the grounds looked bigger,” complains a teenage girl to her parents, who brought her to Feldman Ecopark a few times before the war.
The animal enclosures that once drew large crowds — like the one with the leopard or the Himalayan bear — receive no visitors for hours at a time. Even the park’s main attraction, a pair of recently born white tiger cubs, spend most of their time left to themselves. And yet they are the park’s primary source of income, second only to charitable donations.
Russian strikes have dealt significant damage to Feldman’s business empire, so park maintenance is becoming increasingly burdensome for the tycoon. For a modest fee of 500 hryvnias ($12), visitors can spend a few minutes with the tiger cubs — to play with them and take photos or videos. Groups of three are allowed in at a time, along with the cubs’ nanny and caretaker, who has been raising the young tigers after their mother abandoned them.
“Our animals have all gotten used to the shelling and explosions. Most of the rockets aimed at Kharkiv fly right over our heads. We all have an immunity to loud, frightening sounds here — even these little ones,” the nanny explains to visitors in fluent Ukrainian when asked why the tiger cubs don’t hide at the sound of the air raid siren that occasionally wails through the park.
Entering the enclosure, she immediately switches to Russian, jokingly promising to “spank their little butts” if the cubs bite her hands or legs. But overall, Russian here is slowly turning into a relic of the park owner's Medvedchuk-affiliated era. The new signs are now exclusively in Ukrainian, and Russian speech is heard much less often than before the full-scale invasion.
Middle-aged women carrying feed to the herbivore enclosures speak Ukrainian with each other and are happy to chat with the park’s patrons. They are refugees from frontline areas. One of them approaches a soldier in the promenade, asking whether he came to Kharkiv for the weekend from the Vovchansk sector.
“I’m from Vovchansk myself. I lived through the occupation there. We spent weeks in the basement with nothing at all, and whenever we went out to look for water or something to eat, the Russians would immediately start shooting. I don’t know how I survived,” she tells the soldier. He replies that he comes from another sector but that practically nothing is left of Vovchansk. He offers sympathy to the park employee on the very probable loss of her home.
“I already feel at home here,” she replies with a sad smile. “Maybe even better than at home. At least there’s no shooting.”
That last statement is a bit of an exaggeration. There have indeed been no massive bombardments of the ecopark since the spring of 2022. But Russian weapons still strike the territory from time to time. This past March, a drone attack destroyed several structures here and killed two goats. Before that, aerial bombs had been dropped on the park. This is why every air raid alert — and in the Kharkiv Region, they sound several times a day — should be taken seriously. Yet the staff and volunteers do not pay attention to the sirens and do not run for cover.
And the animals, just as the tiger cubs’ nanny said, pay no attention to the sirens either. Only the white tigress — an astonishingly beautiful creature that, for some reason, refused to nurse her cubs — freezes for a moment when the loudspeaker next to her enclosure begins to wail, warning of incoming missiles, planes, or drones. She stands still for a few seconds, as if listening to the siren, and then lies back down to sleep by the bars of her enclosure — the only intact one in this part of the ecopark.