As the fighting intensified last week in Ocheretyne, right on the front line in the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk region, and the Russians bombarded Ukrainian troops with drones and bombs, Lidia Stepanivna Lomikovska and her family decided to flee together after two years of war.
That did not go as planned, because in the chaos of the departure the old lady lost her loved ones. Her younger relatives took the smaller field roads, while Lomikovska chose to stay on the main roads. She became separated from her son and two daughters-in-law, one of whom had been injured by shrapnel days earlier.
However, the brave woman persevered, and with a walking stick in one hand and a piece of wood in the other, she continued her journey. She walked for a whole day without food or water to reach the Ukrainian lines. “I woke up with shots being fired all around me, so scary,” Lomikovska said in a video released by Donetsk police.
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The woman said she fell twice along the way, and sometimes had to interrupt her journey to get some sleep. “One time I lost my balance and fell into the weeds. I fell asleep… and continued walking. And then I fell a second time. But I got up and thought to myself: I have to keep walking,” Lomikovska said.
Ukrainian soldiers eventually noticed Lomikovska as she walked along a road at night. They turned her over to the White Angels, a police force that evacuates civilians on the front lines. She was transferred to a shelter where she reconnected with her family members.
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Lomikovska survived the Second World War, but in her experience it was less bad than the war that has been raging in Ukraine for two years now. “Not a single house burned down here (in the Second World War, ed.). But now everything is on fire. I had to endure both wars, and in the end I have nothing left,” said the very elderly woman.
A small consolation for Lomikovska: Monobank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, will buy her a house where she can spend her old age, Oleh Horokhovskyi, director of Monobank, announced.
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