LA TIMES

BY NABIH BULOS

ZELENYI HAI, Ukraine — 

There once was a farmer with 10 sheep, a beekeeper with 41 hives (and a turtle) and a cook with 62 pheasants and peacocks. And they all lived peacefully in the fields and meadows of a place called the Donbas.

But then Russian invaders came from the north and east, and rockets rained down around them, and the farmer, beekeeper and cook prepared to leave their homes, joining millions of other Ukrainians in an exodus that has become the largest migrant crisis in Europe since World War II.

With their owners getting ready to go, where could the sheep, the bees (and the turtle), the pheasants and the peacocks go?

The answer was the Green Grove, a farm and fromagerie in a bucolic corner of the Ukrainian countryside that has become an unexpected sanctuary for an ever-expanding stable of animals displaced by the war — and for some of the humans who couldn’t bear to part with them.

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