As night fell over a nature park on the edge of Kyiv, children gathered around volunteers who opened cloth bags and released bats into the twilight, drawing cheers from spectators as the animals took flight.

The release was part of multiple events across Ukraine planned to coincide with spring, organizers said, with hundreds of bats freed late Saturday. Many of the animals had been rescued from war-torn areas in eastern Ukraine, where shelling has damaged or destroyed structures that bats use as shelters.

Volunteers and attendees described the moment as both conservation work and a respite after a winter marked by subzero temperatures, nightly Russian drone and missile attacks, and crippling power cuts. Some families treated the event as an outing after months dominated by disruptions, while volunteers prepared the bats by feeding them mealworms with tweezers before letting them go.

Anastasiia Vovk, a volunteer with the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, said the work mattered because the bats are on a red list of endangered animals and because preserving them is important. The charity said it has rescued more than 30,000 bats in total, including 4,000 bats last winter.

Oleksii Beliaiev, a 54-year-old Kyiv resident who attended with his family, said the war remained the main concern but that people needed something else as well. He described spending time volunteering for army projects in addition to running a small printing business.

Experts said the conflict has disrupted wildlife habitats and affected bats’ ability to survive, not only because buildings destroyed by shelling damage bat shelters, but also because explosions can terrify the animals. Alona Shulenko, who headed Saturday’s release, said that in winter bats hibernate and that if they are disturbed they can die, while their slow reproduction—one or two offspring per year—means populations recover very slowly.

Shulenko also said that as natural hibernation sites disappear, bats move into cities, including into cracks in buildings and on balconies, but that repairs or destruction of those places can kill entire colonies. She said the charity viewed the releases as necessary work that continues even while everyone is living in wartime, warning that if it stops, thousands of bats would die.

In total, organizers said all 28 bat species in Ukraine are listed as protected animals because of declining populations, and they noted the country’s place on an important east European migratory route.