Lifting Ukraine
In the southern Ukrainian city Mykolaiv, Anna Kurkurina has developed something of a reputation. It’s midweek, 10 a.m. at Grand, a powerlifting gym and fitness center. As she sets down an enormous barbell, the muscular 57-year-old lets out a quiet, satisfied laugh. She’s just curled 55 kilograms (121 pounds), the equivalent of two window air-conditioning units.
It’s a stunning weight that draws stares from some and admiring glances from those who know Kurkurina, a regular presence at the gym. Her trainer offers praise and a high five, but she shrugs it off. She is here to work.
Kurkurina’s phone rings, one of more than 150 times it will demand her attention that day. The caller, desperate, has found a badly injured dog and doesn’t know what to do. Could she help?
The call ends, and Kurkurina resumes her workout, a grueling routine of chest, back, and biceps exercises. In between reps she attends to the phone; its alerts haven’t stopped since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
An hour later, as Kurkurina exits the gym energized and focused for the day ahead, an elderly woman intercepts her. Distraught, the woman has more than 20 war-orphaned cats in her small apartment, but no money for food or litter. Could she help?
Later in the evening, as Kurkurina stacks large bags of dog food, a van stops in front of her home. The side door opens and a wheelchair-bound man dressed in a camouflage top rushes into a lengthy appeal. He’s taken in more than 10 dogs abandoned during Russia’s bombardment of Mykolaiv. His income isn’t enough to feed all the new mouths. Could she help?
Something of a celebrity sans vanity or a desire for fame, Kurkurina cuts a striking figure. A three-time powerlifting world champion, she is one of the strongest women in the world, a label that’s bolstered by at least 14 world records.
Following Russia’s invasion, Kurkurina dedicated herself to rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming cats and dogs found roaming the region’s war-torn streets. Now she is known for more than just her physical strength. She’s known as someone who will never say no when called upon for help.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was bound to upend life in Mykolaiv, a strategically important port city on the Black Sea. In order to project its power into Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Russia needs to control this body of water; the assault on Mykolaiv aimed to render the city uninhabitable. Airstrikes have leveled residential and government buildings, the city’s clean water infrastructure was destroyed, and electricity remains unstable.
After Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, a nationwide spirit of volunteerism emerged across Ukraine. This ethos evolved into a movement known loosely as the “volonteri,” an informal network of helpers that is a central force in Ukraine’s fight for freedom and identity.
Kurkurina is more than just a symbol of this social crusade. In a time of war, she’s one of many citizens who have built networks of mutual aid and horizontal cooperation that have proved more effective and reliable than Ukraine’s battle-worn government institutions.
“What can I tell you? People here, we cannot just sit and wait,” Kurkurina says. “We must make our own contribution to [the future of] our nation.”
Efforts like Kurkurina’s are key to her country’s survival. “Volunteers are the most powerful part of Ukrainian civil society,” said Volodymyr Zelenskyy on International Volunteer Day in 2022, when the Ukrainian president recognized people protecting the country’s most vulnerable inhabitants. “Saving animals,” he said, “is also saving souls.”
Kurkurina manages the steady deluge of phone calls and text messages like it’s a full-time job, one she does atop the hands-on heavy lifting of daily animal rescue work. She often wedges her phone under her chin while feeding a menagerie of strays. Messages about animals who have been injured, abandoned, or neglected ping her phone at all hours.
More than just an animal lover, Kurkurina is a realist with a plan. “Right now, my job is reducing the number of stray animals,” she says. This is as much a math problem as it is an ethical dilemma. When there are fewer animals, they eat less food and require fewer trips to the vet.
Kurkurina’s first priority is to collect and distribute food. In these efforts, she pulls from a trove of supplies stored at her home and calls upon local volunteers and her online network, which consists of more than 1 million followers across YouTube and Instagram combined, to raise money. If funds aren’t available, Kurkurina reaches into her own pocket to purchase what’s needed for people and shelters alike.
Next, Kurkurina focuses on helping injured animals. After an artillery shelling, people throughout the region contact her when they find injured animals. Kurkurina either conducts the rescue herself or sends a volunteer and vehicle, whichever provides quicker care. After that, she ensures that each animal is rehabilitated and rehomed.
Her final priority, Kurkurina says, is probably the most important: sterilizing as many animals as possible.
Before the war, street animals were neutered by volunteers. But as the war ravaged much of Ukraine, many people fled or were killed by Russian aggression, sometimes leaving behind their unsterilized pets. When a village is destroyed, animals start multiplying fast.
“My biggest dream is to visit a village one day and not see any stray animals,” Kurkurina says. “Not because they’ve all been killed, but because they’ve all been spayed and neutered. Once that happens, the population will decrease on its own within 10 to 20 years.”
Kurkurina has always had an exceptional love for animals. The tale goes that when she was brought home as a newborn baby, the family cat climbed into her stroller and slept with her at night.
When she was growing up, her family’s house was full of animals and her parents encouraged Kurkurina’s tendency to bring home strays. She credits this early acceptance as foundational. “My parents understood that I was unusual and allowed me to live the life I wanted,” she says.
By the second grade, Kurkurina knew she wanted to work with animals. To do that, her mother said, she’d need to study hard and go to college. This proved to be fateful advice. At university, Kurkurina joined a conservancy group on her first day and spent the weekends throughout college protecting wildlife from poachers.
After graduation, she moved to Mykolaiv for a job as a teacher, but her heart wasn’t in teaching — she wanted to work with animals at the city’s zoo. “I went to the zoo and practically begged them to take me in,” she says. “I was even willing to muck animal enclosures day in and day out if that’s what put me in contact with my beloved animals.”
As she continued teaching, Kurkurina became a zoo technician, recognized for her singular ability to connect with the zoo’s inhabitants. She was given the responsibility of caring for Chucha and Donya, a pair of Himalayan brown bears, two wolves named Ray and Ruta, and Elle, an orphaned lion cub.
Elle was the materialization of a childhood wish. At the zoo, a lioness gave birth to, and then rejected, a cub. After zoo staff struggled to keep it alive by artificial means, Kurkurina jumped at the opportunity to raise the cub. “Every person has a wild dream,” says Kurkurina. “Mine was to have a pet lion.”
“In Donbas, horses were used to pull carts of coal out of mine shafts,” Kurkurina says, referencing the region in eastern Ukraine. “Those horses spent their entire lives going back and forth between the mines and the outside world. Many people remind me of those horses — they have no idea what’s going on around them.”
After ten years of school and working at the zoo, Kurkurina felt like one of them, too. She began to crave change; she needed to do something different.
Kurkurina remembers the moment in 2006 when she recognized her next pursuit: “There was a TV program where a woman announced that she was the strongest woman on the planet. And I thought, ‘I could do this.’”
Already, she had spent significant time in the gym and had become passionate about weight lifting; a decade earlier she had begun amateur weight training and by 1998 was leading workouts in a rented semi-basement, formerly a day care, that she had converted into a gym space. “I carried bricks myself to build a fitness room,” she recalls.
Kurkurina taught herself anatomy and developed women’s exercises on her own. The equipment was improvised. Classes were two hours long, and there were six sessions per day. “I have no idea how I managed to survive,” she says of those years juggling teaching, zoo work, and fitness classes. “But everybody says I was a good coach.”
Kurkurina, at 40 years old, found a coach and began training with one goal: to become a world champion. “I wanted to show people that everything is possible at any age,” she says.
The sport of weightlifting has two divisions: amateurs, who cannot use steroids, and professionals, who may. Kurkurina openly uses them. “The choice was mine,” she says. “I was in my 40s and allowed myself to change my life in the way I wanted…. It was done under a doctor’s supervision, as it should be.” Kurkurina wanted to make her figure look more masculine, she says. “That’s not possible without hormones.”
Less than two years after she started professional training, at the 2008 International Powerlifting Association World Powerlifting Championships in York, Pennsylvania — Kurkurina’s first international competition — she bench-pressed 109 kilograms (240 pounds) and took first place, becoming a world champion.
Kurkurina set four world records that day. “Two of them still haven’t been broken — I’m so proud of that,” she says. “And all this after turning 40. I’m living proof that you can transform your life at any age.”
That same year a local television station approached Kurkurina about hosting a fitness program. She leaped at the opportunity and hosted it for several years. With a cache of fitness videos from the program, Kurkurina created a YouTube channel and uploaded her first videos in October 2010. “People started writing in, and the feedback was positive,” she says. “One video even got 8 million views — I was shocked!”
Mixing fitness and animal activism, Kurkurina’s YouTube and Instagram accounts attract a large global audience. One group of viewers has had a profound and lasting impact on the world champion: families struggling with cerebral palsy.
The first to reach out to Kurkurina was a mother in Minsk, Belarus, who had used the videos to exercise with her severely disabled son, Stas Savchenko. After following Kurkurina’s exercises and a change in diet, Savchenko gained weight and began standing by himself.
Kurkurina began training Savchenko weekly via Skype, a routine that lasted for years, and followed the family when they moved to Poland. “I was moved to tears when Stas’s mother told me his only New Year’s wish was to see me in real life,” Kurkurina says. She traveled to Poland to meet them. “They were so happy! We biked around Poland together,” she says. “Stas was riding a two-wheel bicycle. Can you believe it?”
When Kurkurina posted videos about it online, people in Mykolaiv started bringing disabled children to her gym. As a result, she’s changed course and to this day devotes half her coaching time to kids diagnosed with cerebral palsy, at no cost to the family.
Kurkurina beams over her athletic accomplishments, but her proudest achievement is that her efforts have helped children walk. “When a mother brings in her kids who are crawling on all fours and then, after six months of exercise, those kids are walking — no, running — to me, the joy I feel is indescribable,” she says.
As helpful as the internet has been to Kurkurina, it’s also shown its ugly side. “When people leave comments on YouTube saying, ‘That’s a man, not a woman,’ I want to tell them I’m more of a woman than thousands of them combined. I never had a child of my own, but in a way, I’ve dedicated myself fully to children — children who will never give up. A woman’s main mission is protecting and prolonging life. I’ve given life to thousands of kids and tens of thousands of animals. I consider it my obligation.”
Kurkurina’s commitment to Ukraine’s most vulnerable women, children, and animals hasn’t stopped her from participating in recent competitions, but for many years she refrained from competing following the third serious injury of her career.
The first injury, in 2008, happened when two bench-pressing spotters couldn’t hold up the 90 kilogram (198-pound) weight. The bar fell on her throat. Determined to keep training, she pushed through the pain and subsequent inflammation, which also made it harder for her to breathe. Still, Kurkurina never went to a doctor and went on to win her first championship. “That training paid off,” she says. “I set four world records.”
Two years later, Kurkurina felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. Again, she refused to see a doctor. “I don’t trust them,” she says. “I treat my own injuries.” Eventually an X-ray revealed the shoulder was two-thirds dislocated. “I pumped it myself, and now all that’s left is a big scar,” she says. “Like before, I competed and set a few more world records.”
The third injury occurred in 2015 while Kurkurina was training for a competition in Australia. “When the Americans saw how much I could bench-press, they couldn’t believe it was a woman,” she says. “I was waiting for my chance to show them that, yes, a woman could do that!” With two months left until the competition she easily pressed 149 kilograms (328 pounds), a new personal record. She decreased the weight to 130 kilograms (286 pounds). But when she lifted it, her pectoral muscle audibly tore.
Plane tickets already in hand, Kurkurina tried to brush off the injury and went to the competition. Her first attempt — which was successful — was disallowed because she raised the bar too early. The second time, she picked up the same weight, felt a crunch, and knew it was all over. “Worst of all,” she says, “the championship was won by a girl who lifted 110 kilograms (242 pounds).”
Kurkurina returned to Ukraine in need of immediate medical care, but she couldn’t afford an operation for months. Doctors ultimately said her chances for a full recovery were low, that she’d be disabled and would likely never lift again. “I told them I’d find that out for myself,” she says.
After years of intense rehabilitation, Kurkurina returned to competition in November 2023, winning several awards at a powerlifting tournament in Lutsk, Ukraine. “I can already set new world records lifting to the biceps alone,” she says. “After the war ends, I’ll show everyone who Ukrainian women are. We’re unbreakable. Toughness is a part of our mentality, our life.”
“After the war ends, I’ll show everyone who Ukrainian women are,” Kurkurina says. “We’re unbreakable. Toughness is a part of our mentality, our life.”
Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine left Kurkurina, like many Ukrainians, in shock. “A fear stuck in my heart for many days,” she says. “It was impossible to believe that fraternal people so vilely attacked us.”
But focused on animal welfare her entire life, Kurkurina quickly realized what this meant for Ukraine’s other inhabitants. “When the war came … I understood that the number of homeless animals would increase,” she says. “There are many thousands and not enough humanitarian aid.”
Kurkurina’s survival instincts and social media celebrity collided when she reached out to her followers to ask for aid. A woman who followed her training videos on YouTube wrote to her and said she had told people in her small German town that Ukraine needed help. They had collected 10 tons of pet food to donate. “That’s how it all started,” Kurkurina says.
Today the powerlifter’s home serves as a temporary shelter for cats and dogs waiting for adoption and as a makeshift depot for donated supplies. Bags of dog and cat food stacked 10 high line the front walkway. Kittens lay sprawled on couches and curled up on the floor. Before Kurkurina prepares her own meals, she feeds the animals and does much of the tedious, veterinary care herself. She bathes a paralyzed dog in her personal shower and applies medicine to the infected eyes of a kitten in her living room.
Kurkurina is frequently asked how many animals she has. In the fog of war, the answer fluctuates. “I have 2 to 4 dogs, usually disabled or injured,” she says, “and 8 to 15 cats with me at any given time.”
The feline figure varies because she started with three, but sometimes people send their cats to stay with her. Other times they just abandon them on her doorstep. If they’re injured, Kurkurina will nurse them back to health and then match them with a family. “It’s a carousel of cats,” she says.
Kurkurina resists becoming attached to the animals, but her dogs, war rescues Jack and Rudik, are exceptions. “Both look at me with those eyes — you know the kind — that say, ‘I don’t need anybody but you,’” she says.
Both dogs have suffered broken bones — Jack from a missile strike, Rudik from a car hitting him — had operations, and were nursed back to health by Kurkurina, who would like to adopt them out, despite the animals’ devotion. “By finding them forever homes, I’m freeing up space to take in even more animals, who also require love and care,” she says.
Kurkurina’s routine in helping those in need mirrors the dedication and discipline she has honed while weightlifting. Each day is a variation of responding to reports of animals in trouble, delivering food and medical supplies to besieged villages, and teaching fitness to scores of women who have been among her most loyal animal rescue volunteers.
What might seem like overwhelming chaos to an outside observer is a space in which Kurkurina moves both selflessly and effortlessly. And she does it with a smile that’s seared soft crows feet into the corners of her eyes.
Most evenings Kurkurina arrives home just before dark. She prepares dinner for the animals and then returns outside, either with a plate of dessert, a carton of fresh berries, or a handful of kittens. Neighborhood children wait in Kurkurina’s driveway, an informal meeting place where all are welcome. Kurkurina plays with the kids, checks in on elderly neighbors, and then visits friends. Conversation — talk of war, family, and the mundanities of daily life — stretches into the night.
“It’s nice to imagine a world where nobody’s killed, everybody’s happy, and nobody’s calling daily to tell me somebody’s abandoned five puppies or a cat with kittens,” Kurkurina says. “I’d probably call that heaven.”
For more information on Anna Kurkurina’s animal rescue efforts, click here.