THE FIRST TIME I spoke with Olga Shpak, I made the mistake of beginning by asking for some basic biographical information. "I used to be a scientist," she said, not sounding bitter, only a bit nostalgic. Now, she clarified, she's a war volunteer.
Shpak built a storied career studying Arctic and sub-Arctic marine mammals as a researcher at Moscow's prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Her work inspired some of Russia's most significant whale conservation measures over the last decade, including protections for bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk, an Alaska-sized body of water on the country's Pacific coast. But in February last year, just as Vladimir Putin prepared to invade her home country of Ukraine, Shpak was forced to flee, leaving Russia and its whales behind.
"There were relatively very few projects in Russia aimed at actually protecting marine mammals, rather than exploiting them," says Phil Clapham, a retired whale biologist and a friend of Shpak. "And with Olga's loss to the war, they lost one of the absolute-probably the best one of all." Today, Shpak is working near the war's front lines, helping nonprofit aid groups supply civilians and soldiers with everything from underwear to tourniquets to wood-burning stoves. When we spoke, bomb sirens blared, a numbingly routine occurrence. "To do science you have to concentrate," she said. "You have to kind of put your brain in a certain mode. And that switch is broken."
This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Mother Jones.
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This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Mother Jones.
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