09/25/2025
A scientist is saving Ukraine's hamsters—in the middle of war
Mikhail Rusin is perhaps the world's greatest hamster champion.
The European hamster is bigger and feistier than the varieties more commonly found in pet stores. They are also critically endangered.
In February 2023, as cruise missiles hit cities from Kherson to Kyiv, Mikhail Rusin lost heat and electricity in his home in Ukraine’s capital for almost a week. Overnight lows were around 14 degrees Fahrenheit. It was yet another hardship of the war, and while he worried about himself and his family, he was also concerned about his hamsters at the Kyiv Zoo. The hamsters were in sparse cages in a dark room, hibernating. Despite being generally tolerant of the cold, if their body temperatures dropped too low, they might not recover.
Rusin, a 41-year-old biologist who heads up the zoo’s European hamster breeding program, just might be the biggest champion for these critically endangered rodents, which are native to 23 countries from France to Kazakhstan.
European hamsters are not to be confused with pet hamsters, which are native to Syria and Turkey. For one, they are much larger, weighing three times as much, and feistier. Imagine a pet hamster “but it’s the size of a guinea pig, with a really bad temper,” says Julie Fleitz, a hamster expert with the French National Centre for Scientific Research. When provoked, they’ll stand on their hind legs to fight. Not much scares them. “They can jump on dogs and other larger predators,” says Rusin.
But for all their tenaciousness, these hamsters struggle. The IUCN, which accesses the extinction risk status of animals around the globe, lists the European hamster as critically endangered. And in Ukraine, the species is in the Red Book, the country’s list of vulnerable and rare animals.
Because of their dwindling numbers, Rusin breeds the hamsters as part of the zoo’s conservation program and then releases them on the Tarutino Steppe, a large, open grassland in southwestern Ukraine near Odesa.
Remarkably, since 2020, Rusin has released hamsters every year—throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and then the war, which started in 2022. During the same time, Rusin has seen friends go off to fight and come back injured. He’s witnessed the debris of intercepted Russian drones hit the zoo. And he lost his income for half a year in 2022 when the zoo—still reeling from the effects of 2020’s dismal ticket sales—lost visitors again, along with the revenue they bring, due to the war.
And yet, through it all, he has continued his work with the hamsters. “Some people think that we are wasting resources now [on hamsters],” he says, rather than spending the conservation money on military drones. But he doesn’t see it as an either-or situation. Nor do the many hamster-saving volunteers he’s inspired. Amid the war, he says, “this is where I find my inner peace.”
Hunting and habitat loss led Ukraine's hamsters to the brink. Now, they face a new threat: war.
Even without the wartime challenges, orchestrating a wild European hamster resurgence would be no easy feat. The Red Book notes that there are only a few thousand of the hamsters left in Ukraine.
They’ve populated the region since the last ice age, but by middle of the 20th Century, half a million were harvested each year for their fur. Then, monoculture, or the farming of single crops, robbed the hamsters of their food diversity, particularly in Eastern Ukraine. When the hamsters woke from yearly hibernation, they found ploughed fields, nothing to eat, and few places to hide from predators. Nowadays, much of the habitat they had left there has been destroyed by war.
Their range, which once extended from France well into eastern Russia, has also decreased dramatically—by 94 percent in France, and by 74 percent in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine, says Fleitz. When the hamsters perish, the environment suffers. Hawks, foxes, polecats, and other predators rely on them for food.
In 2019, Rusin was asked to head up the breeding program at the Kyiv Zoo, after the zoo’s director heard about a similar program in Germany and wanted to replicate it. When the zoo reached out, Rusin was the only PhD in Ukraine focused on the hamster. Within a year, COVID-19 hit. That spring, “we had a lockdown, and it was forbidden to move through the city,” Rusin says. He had to obtain a government permit to go to work and feed the hamsters.
Then, two years later, Russia invaded Ukraine, expecting a quick victory. Instead, the war has raged for three years, with nearly one million Russian troops and half a million Ukrainian troops dead or wounded, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. More than 1,600 civilians have been killed across Ukraine. Russian missiles and drone strikes continue to target Kyiv, decimating infrastructure and killing civilians.
Rusin’s hamsters ended up surviving that brutal winter of 2023, even though their zoo building often lacked indoor heat. But the following summer, blackouts and stifling temperatures hit Kyiv, as more missiles rained down from Russian attacks. In early July, the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital was hit in a strike that decimated the ICU and the oncology and surgery units, injuring 10 children and killing two adults, including a doctor.
A kilometer away at the zoo, the scorching summer spelled disaster for the hamsters. “The facility that we had at the time was not prepared,” Rusin says. It was “without ventilation, without electricity, without air-conditioning working.” Temperatures soared to 90 degrees Fahrenheit on some days.
Many hamsters at the zoo became hyperthermic and died, so Rusin’s team transferred the survivors to a cool unfinished basement nearby until they were ready for release. But soon, Rusin’s team had to evacuate there, too, straining the hamsters’ little bodies further. “Hamsters are very prone to stress,” he says, “and several heart attacks occurred with the hamsters.” For Rusin, it was a heartbreaking blow—especially when he and his colleagues were taking such risks to conserve these species.
Every year, Rusin’s work grows more urgent. Many hamster populations have disappeared in eastern Ukraine, where most of the military action has occurred. “There were some cases of hamsters falling in the trenches,” Rusin says. “And then we had, for example, cases when the military hanged hamsters and other wild animals. People unfortunately are cruel very often, especially in the war.”
