I’m the strongest woman on the planet; I urgently need pet food at the lowest price

When the war started, nobody knew whether Mykolaiv would be captured or not. My goal was to bring the maximum amount of food into the city so the animals wouldn’t go hungry. I say on Instagram to my followers: “We urgently need pet food.” And someone gives me a Polish phone number. I call it, and a woman answers in Ukrainian: “Come.”

I’d never dealt with logistics or delivery in my life. I needed to find a truck — my brain was on fire. It was March, and I was bringing in the first five tons of pet food.

Now I have two regular food suppliers: a Romanian and a German. One sends two tons every month, the other — seventeen tons.

At first, like before the war, I helped shelters. Then came the realization that it’s unfair to help shelters that have their own bank accounts and web pages, and not help a grandmother who doesn’t know what YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram is. Now we help both.

In early March, a follower sent me a screenshot from a magazine with a photo of a dog from the settlement of Luch (a settlement on the border of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts — S.P.). It was covered in burns. The photographer snapped a photo and left — the dog stayed.

I packed up within an hour, called friends, and the four of us drove out in a beat-up Zhiguli. On the way — lots of checkpoints. We tell them we’re going to rescue a dog. The soldiers tap their temples at us, and we keep driving.

What I saw in that village — I’d never seen anything like it in my life: a herd of cows walking toward you, mooing in pain because they hadn’t been milked. Hundreds of purebred dogs and cats lying on the lawn, houses all bombed out, people cooking food on bonfires by the apartment entrances.

I don’t know how we found that dog — it was a miracle. A sweet little grandmother had taken her in. She cried: “Will you really cure her?” — “Grandma, do you think I drove here under shelling just for nothing?”

No medicine had been delivered to Luch — the grandmother had been sprinkling ash on the dog’s wounds. That dog was the beginning of my understanding that it’s not just the city that needs help, but also the villages that are under fire.

The most devastated villages are not the ones captured by the Russian army, but those that ended up in the gray zone. The Russians shoot at us, we shoot at them, and the villages are in between.

Right now, everyone has rushed to help Kherson. Kherson needs help, but why do you drive past destroyed houses — doesn’t your heart ache?

If these houses aren’t covered with roofs and the windows aren’t sealed now, by spring people will have nowhere to return to. Everything will be flooded. It’s been a week since they were liberated — why is nobody helping them? We were the first.

It’s scary to drive out to the villages myself, but without it, I wouldn’t get any help. I arrive and film — showing that the village is gone, the animals are living skeletons — and I bring food to these places. The local grandmothers have push-button phones — what are they going to photograph for me?

I’ve been to the most devastated villages in Kherson Oblast. In Posad-Pokrovske, 33 people remain (before the full-scale war, the village had several thousand residents — S.P.). Out of sheer stupidity, we brought medicine, portable stoves, and food for people. But we didn’t bring bread, damn it. And I drove there a second time, because people can’t live without bread.

The military brought me to Kherson on Tuesday, November 15, as soon as the city was liberated.

Trucks weren’t allowed in due to security requirements. Whatever I could fit in my car trunk, that’s what I distributed to people. They looked at me with distrust for a long time. One grandmother says: “We don’t take Russian humanitarian aid!” I say: “Grandma, here’s a loaf of bread — read it, it says 'City of Mykolaiv' on it.”

I continue running my social media in Russian because I don’t know how to speak Ukrainian. I love it dearly, but I went to school in Rostov Oblast. I enrolled at Donetsk University, where I never heard a word of Ukrainian. Then I was sent to work in Mykolaiv, where nobody around me spoke Ukrainian either. Now people tell me: learn it.

How about I learn the language, and you go to the villages for me? I don’t think I bring the country any less benefit by speaking Russian. My whole life I’ve defended Ukraine and never once brought it shame.

Before the war, I wanted to get a gold play button — a million YouTube subscribers. The war started, some Russians unsubscribed, and 850 thousand remained. But many still watch and write: “Thank you, Anya, we don’t believe the propaganda — we can see what’s really happening there.”

Now I force myself to film online workouts because I need the money. I only visit the gym to train our soldiers and police officers. I don’t charge them. All the rest of my time goes to the animals.

I use my fame everywhere. When there were no food deliveries, I found out there was an excellent factory near Odesa. I called and said: “I’m the strongest woman on the planet, and I urgently need to buy pet food at the cheapest price.” They signed a contract with me for the biggest discount.

People from all over the world help me. One Pole told me: he took out a bank loan, bought a minivan and groceries, and drove across Ukraine handing things out. I nearly fell over and asked: “How do you get through the checkpoints?” — “I just tell them right away: 'Russian warship, go f**k yourself'” — and they let me through everywhere.

I would never have forgiven myself if I’d left Mykolaiv. Lots of fans from different countries wrote to me saying they have a house, they’d give it to me, I’d want for nothing. But how can I help animals sitting in Poland or Africa?