For more than a week, an Indian doctor in war-torn Ukraine has been holed up in a basement at home with his pet big cats – a black panther and a jaguar. Girikumar Patil, who bought the two cats from the Kyiv zoo, says he will not leave home without his pets. He has lived for over six years in Severodonetsk, a small town located in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. After the war began, Mr Giri, who is single, has been stepping out of his cramped basement only to buy food for his cats – the male jaguar is 20 months old and the female panther is a six-month-old cub – after the curfew ends early in the morning. (The jaguar is a rare hybrid between a male leopard and a female jaguar, he said.) So far, Mr Giri said he had bought 23kg of sheep, turkey and chicken meat from neighbouring villages at prices four times higher than normal. “My big cats have been spending nights in the basement with me. There has been a lot of bombing happening around us. The cats are scared. They are eating less. I can’t leave them,” Mr Patil, 40, told the BBC. “This is the second war I am living through. But this is scarier.”