a 98-year-old resident walked several kilometers to escape the Russian army

She takes small steps, but Lidia Lominovska, at 98 years old, has retained great strength of character. Friday April 26, she fled in slippers from her village in Donbass, which was stormed by Russian forces. She walked 10 kilometers alone for two days, amid chaos. “I was moving forward. All the houses were burned, the trees too and there was no one left. I got lost”, she says. When she heard shots, Lidia Lominovska said she was trembling with fear and that she fell several times from fatigue during her journey.

Lidia Lominovska is recuperating today with her granddaughter, about twenty kilometers from the front. The old lady is still very distressed. “I survived the Second World War and I had never experienced such horror”, deplores the nonagenarian. She was rescued by Ukrainian police on Saturday April 27, before being taken to an accommodation center. “Why all this misfortune, why? We had built this house with our own hands, I didn’t want to leave it”, laments Lidia Lominovska, whose house was destroyed. Russian forces are gaining ground in eastern Ukraine every day. Now they occupy a large part of it.