Ukrainians have identified the man who stole raccoons and other animals from the Kherson zoo before Russia left, his story illustrates the not always happy fate of those who supported Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

We are talking about Oleg Zubkov, the director of the Yalta Zoo and the private Taigan Zoo in Crimea.

Zubkov published a longer video of the “evacuation” of animals from the Kherson Zoo on his YouTube channel under the title “We are in Kherson! Catch 7 raccoons in 7 minutes.”

But the other day, a 30-second clip became popular on social networks, showing how an unknown person takes a raccoon out of a cage for evacuation together with Russian troops who left Kherson.

The video caused a flurry of jokes on social networks: some noted that the raccoon “fights with all its might, like a Ukrainian warrior”, others joked that the animal would be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war or appointed president. pro-government government.-Russian from the Kherson region in emigration.

Some of the jokes were a bit darker, with some netizens commenting that the Russians had taken the animals to slaughter and were eating them.

Who is Oleg Zubkov, the man who filmed the theft of animals from Kherson

Zubkov’s biography is interesting, because he was a deputy of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in the 2000s, before the illegal annexation of the peninsula by Moscow in 2014.

At the time, he openly supported the Russian annexation of Crimea, but later found that his business suffered after joining Moscow due to corruption, bureaucracy and other reasons.

Zhubkov also complained in an interview in 2017 that the number of visitors to his zoos had dropped by 70% because most of them were Ukrainians.

After all, he constantly complained about corruption in the peninsula under the leadership of Russian authorities, which resulted in him being involved in more than 100 lawsuits.

Zhubkov even went so far as to say that he did not feel like a person in Russia, and stated in a 2018 interview that life was better in Ukraine and that he regretted supporting Russian annexation.

In August of this year, he was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison over an incident at his lion park where one of the animals bit a Russian guest.

“I was surprised to see him on the video because I thought he was in prison, but Zhubkov was released at the end of October by a court order,” said Volodymyr Tretyak, a Ukrainian researcher at the Technical University of Vienna who specializes in mass. media. media and informatics.

Tretyak, who became famous after the start of the war in Ukraine on February 24 thanks to analytics published on his Twitter page, says that less than two weeks after his release, Zhubkov was already posting videos from Kherson on his YouTube channels.

“It is interesting that after his release from prison he immediately found a job in the newly occupied territories. A typical thing in our Russia,” Tretyak concludes.

Follow the latest events of the 264th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.