“I walked, walked (…) I suffered so much”: Lidia Lominevksa, 97, walked alone nearly 10 kilometers to flee her village of Otcheretyné, bombed and then invested by the Russians in the east of Ukraine.
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Dressed in a pink sweater over a floral dress, the frail but resilient nonagenarian is a little hard of hearing, you have to speak to her loudly.
Sitting on a bed in an accommodation center in Pokrovsk, where AFP met her, she slowly recounts, in a calm voice, her journey in the middle of the chaos.
She left Otcheretyné on Friday, a village of around 3,000 inhabitants before the war, located a dozen km north of Avdiïvka and heavily hit by bombs in recent days.
Russian forces now control most of it After a rapid advance and the conquest of other villages in the area.
Lidia Lominevksa fled her house in the center of the town on foot, without taking anything, after a bombing.
Corpse
“God knows who bombed. I didn’t see anyone, I just heard that something had been fired. I don’t know where it was, or what it was,” the woman with small blue eyes, a lock of gray hair protruding from a colorful scarf, told AFP.
She then crosses her almost ruined village, passing by the corpses of soldiers.
“I’m walking, and there’s a soldier lying there, already dead, at least (his body) was covered. And the other one was lying there, but he wasn’t covered,” she continues.
In the locality, “everything was almost on fire. Today I heard that they [les Russes] had already taken half of it. I don’t know what’s going on there. They set it on fire. They burned so many houses.”
Photo Genya SAVILOV / AFP
“I suffered so much! But you know, I was walking and there was no one there. I just heard the shots. I thought they were going to shoot me while I was dragging my feet,” she says.
Using a piece of board like a cane, Lidia Lominevksa will then advance on the small road which leads to Pokrovsk, about thirty km west of Otcheretyne.
“I don’t have a watch, I don’t have anything. I walked for a long time. I walked and walked, without turning around,” describes the almost centenarian with a wrinkled face.
“I walked and walked and I was tired (…)Oh my God! I was going, I was going and I was going,” she repeats, sometimes thoughtfully.
“Grandma, where are you going?” »
After several hours of walking alone on the road, she finally came across two Ukrainian soldiers in a car, who stopped near her and came to her aid.
“Grandma, where are you going?” I said: ‘I’ll go as far as I can, then I’ll fall into the grass and spend the night there,’” the old lady said.
“The soldiers gave me two sandwiches. I ate one. Somehow I didn’t have the strength to eat anymore,” she says.
After feeding the old woman, the soldiers called police officers who took her back to Pokrovsk.
According to Pavlo Diatchenko, police spokesperson in the region, the nonagenarian “covered a distance of around 10 kilometers on foot”.
According to him, her village Otcheretyne is now destroyed and she must be one of the last people to have left it.
“A few people are still there, but we don’t know how many, or who is still alive or dead.”
The situation in the surrounding villages is also very difficult, because “the enemy bombings do not stop”, specifies the police officer.
Heavy Strikes
On Sunday, heavy and incessant strikes targeted the area and plumes of gray smoke rose into the sky, AFP saw from the small village of Vozdvyjenka, 8 km to the northwest.
Two residents of this locality were evacuated in the morning by members of the dedicated police unit, called the “White Angels”, according to spokesperson Pavlo Diatchenko.
Three other civilians hastily left the almost deserted village, after loading furniture and other belongings into a small truck, AFP noted.
Since the fall of the fortress town of Avdiïvka in February, the Ukrainian army, in dire need of ammunition, has been on the defensive after the failure of its major counter-offensive last summer and is facing a resumption of Russian initiative.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Oleksandr Syrsky, admitted on Sunday that the situation on the front had “deteriorated”, with Russian troops, superior in weapons and soldiers, having achieved “tactical successes” in several areas , at the cost of significant losses in equipment and men.
