After several months of fitful sleep, Chada awoke in February, not far from the Kyiv airport, to a broken power grid, a shortage of supplies, and soaring food prices. Her blond fur was matted, her claws overlong, her homeland hanging by a thread.

Everything—from human and animal lives to Ukrainian history and heritage—was at stake. Her companions, Myhasyk, Lyubochka, and Synochok among them, awoke at about the same time, to the daily blare of air raid sirens and a sense of growing emergency.

As Russian forces pressed ahead in the southeast, near Bakhmut, and indiscriminate missile and drone strikes caused civilian casualties, platitudes echoed in the halls of the US Congress.

The newly minted Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), was equivocating on the fate of a crucial aid package for Ukraine. To his right was a mob of MAGA legislators, threatening to oust him for any divergence from Donald Trump’s isolationism. To his left was a clear majority of legislators, railing against Johnson for abandoning a key ally and destabilizing Western democracy.

While Johnson had eagerly opted for the political crucible in which he found himself, the residents of the White Rock Bear Shelter had not chosen much of anything. They had merely succumbed to the torpor of hibernation, then awakened to a country on the brink.

Years earlier, Chada and her den mates had been freed from the tawdry world of circus enslavement and roadside attractions, where they had been caged and forced to perform. By sheer happenstance, they landed under the expert care of a married zoologist couple, Yegor Yakovlev and Maryna Shkvyria.

Shkvyria, chief zoologist of the Kyiv Zoo, had spent nine years studying the behavior of large carnivores, including bears, lynx, and wolves, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine, an area that was long closed to people after the nuclear reactor disaster in 1986.

The White Rock shelter moved to its present home in the Kyiv area in October 2020, under the umbrella of the charitable fund Save Wild. Here, the bears enjoyed regular veterinary care and large natural enclosures, where they could forage for strategically scattered food, ranging from eggs to fruit and nuts.

But when the so-called Russian bear invaded from the north, the real bears’ lives became a blur of quick escapes, tranquilizer darts, midnight drives, and harried help from international animal-welfare groups. And then came the long winter of Speaker Johnson’s obfuscations.

Johnson—himself the willing prisoner of a political circus—of course knew nothing of their plight. It’s a wild story of survival and change that shows how, even in the darkest ursine hours, a small light of hope can flicker.

While Johnson’s office had no comment on the bear sanctuary, a spokesperson pushed back on the notion that the Speaker had delayed aid for Ukraine, noting that the process moved more swiftly in the House than in the Senate, even at a time when Congress was passing other vital legislation, including a funding package to keep the federal government operating.

Back in July 2019, when Speaker Johnson was still an obscure cub legislator—struggling to ban abortion nationwide and blaming school shootings on women’s reproductive freedom—Chada was brought to White Rock. She had spent seven years languishing in a dank cage amid parking garages in the suburbs of Kyiv, after being discarded there in 2010 by the circus that exploited her. Nearly blind and suffering from tooth decay, she was moved in 2017 to a private zoo, where she spent another two years.

At the White Rock bear shelter, her rescuers immediately recognized her value: She was a rare Tien Shan, or Himalayan, bear, with only 300 remaining in the wild. There, she embraced a new life—splashing water from a pool, playing with a tire swing, and enjoying her favorite foods: strawberries, cheese, and dried dog food.

It was a less elaborate setup than the Noah’s Ark creationist theme park in Kentucky that Johnson, back in 2015, had argued should be supported with $18 million in tax incentives. But for bears who’d endured a lifetime of abject cruelty, it was heaven.

Then, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin invaded, and soon fighter jets streaked overhead. Within four days, a Russian infiltration team had been spotted at a train station less than half a mile away.

Shkvyria and Yakovlev had to save not just themselves but also seven bears in a war zone, two of them cubs. “It was awful,” says Yakovlev. A group of helpers coalesced: veterinarians, musicians, motorcyclists, and volunteers from the Domazhyr bear sanctuary in Lviv Oblast, to the west.

The bears were nervous, and the anxiety of their human caretakers only made it worse. As medical supplies dwindled, the cubs, each weighing more than 260 pounds, had to be loaded into vehicles with minimal sedation. It was a dangerous undertaking, and one of them awoke while being loaded on a stretcher. “I put them in the crate,” Yakovlev recalls of the effort, smiling. “Teenagers. They had no choice.”

On March 4, the first truck, with five bears, drove for more than 24 hours straight. “The roads were overcrowded, there were a lot of problems with petrol, and it was very hard to move,” Shkvyria recalls.

At the Domazhyr bear sanctuary near Lviv, one of the bears, Synochok, who had suffered an infection from a tranquilizer dart, underwent two surgeries. Volunteers arrived and transported three of the other bears to safety in Germany.

Ukraine went on to surprise the world with its courage and resilience. In June 2022, as fighting raged in eastern Ukraine, the four remaining White Rock bears were trundled back to their home near the Kyiv airport.

Though they resumed their pool-splashing and salmon-snacking, life was not as it had been. Two of their caretakers had joined the army. Amid ceaseless attacks on the country’s power grid, the White Rock staff had to cobble together a backup electricity system. The price of fodder and gasoline was climbing. But there was comfort in togetherness, with Lyubochka and Myhasyk roughhousing in their shared enclosure.

Before becoming Speaker, Johnson also found his companions and distinguished himself as a MAGA loyalist. He used his credentials as a constitutional lawyer to argue that the Republican-led House could vote against certifying the results of the 2020 election, on the basis of what he called “constitutional infirmity.”

After the Russian invasion, he parroted the Trump isolationist line—that aid would be better spent at home. He received an F grade from the Republicans for Ukraine advocacy group, though it eventually upgraded him—to a D.

And then, on October 19, with the House of Representatives in chaos after Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster, President Joe Biden proposed emergency aid for America’s allies, including $61 billion for Ukraine. Calling the need for aid an “inflection point in history,” Biden gave an impassioned Oval Office address and outlined Russia’s “sick” offenses, from kidnapping children to slaughtering civilians en masse.

Six days later, House Republicans landed on the least objectionable, furthest-right person they could find to lead them: the obscure Louisiana representative who’d spent years denouncing homosexuality as a deviant and “dangerous lifestyle.”

At that point, the bears started getting sleepy. At Trump’s behest, Johnson went on to torpedo an elaborate border-security-for-foreign-aid compromise and allowed Congress to recess without a vote on the aid, while still proclaiming emptily that Ukraine had to prevail.

As the bears dozed, Ukrainian troops suffered battlefield setbacks and ammunition ran perilously low. The “colossal waste of time” in delivering US aid allowed Putin to “attack, ruin infrastructure, rampage all over Ukraine,” former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko said recently.

It took a massive pressure campaign—from CIA director Bill Burns sharing harrowing intelligence of Putin’s war aims to Ukrainian Christians describing the depth of suffering in the country—to force Johnson out of his hibernation den. Finally, on April 17, his voice edged with emotion, he told reporters, “History judges us for what we do,” adding, “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.” His decision to take the principled stand, after six months of waffling, earned him plaudits and comparisons to Churchill.

With desperately needed anti-armor rockets and artillery shells now arriving from the US, the White Rock staff are leaving nothing to chance. “We have emergency plans for every case,” says Yakovlev. “Missile attacks. Drone attacks. We try to be optimistic.”

Beyond saving individual bears, they are aiming to shift the retrograde culture that led to the animals’ captivity in the first place. “We will be happy if people never support cruel practices,” says Shkvyria, adding, “You can adopt Ukrainian bears and be part of animal welfare in Ukraine.” The shelter is currently open for educational visits. But if Russia prevails in its war, she adds, all these efforts will be lost: “We need the support of Western weapons.”

At the White Rock shelter, the bears still exhibit the scars, both physical and mental, of their previous confinement and neglect. Chada has now lost most of her teeth, though her diet and health have stabilized. Synochok still routinely raises his left front paw, the gesture he learned to make while in captivity when he wanted attention or food from his caretakers.

Less than a month after his purported Churchill moment, Johnson once again plunged willingly into the seamiest of political circuses. He arrived at Trump’s hush money trial in Lower Manhattan to show his support for the former president. Before a bank of microphones, he declared the proceedings to be a “travesty of justice.”

As Shkvyria well knows, animal degradation has a long half-life. “It is possible to take a bear out of a cage,” she says, “but it is extremely difficult to take a cage out of a bear.”