Lydia Lominowska sits on her bed in an emergency shelter and talks about her escape from her village of Otscheretyne in eastern Ukraine: “I ran and ran,” says the old woman. “Walked, kept running.” She escaped the Russian attackers on foot at the end of last week – despite her 97 years.
“I suffered so much, God, I was so tired!” The words come out of her slowly and calmly. You have to ask questions out loud; Lominowska is a bit hard of hearing, but tough and determined. She wears a pink cardigan over her flowery dress, a strand of gray peeks out from under the colorful headscarf, and her small blue eyes stand out from her wrinkled face.
For days, the Russian army had been bombing the small village of Ocheretyne, which was once home to 3,000 people before the war. The front has been close for a long time; the former industrial town of Avdiivka, which the Russians took in February, is almost 20 kilometers to the south.
Lominowska was still one of the few in the village to hold out, but on Friday she too decided to leave – at the last minute. She left her house in the town center, left everything behind and set off. “I didn’t see anyone, I just heard shots. I didn’t know where or who it was,” says Lominowska. She ran through ruins, past corpses. “One soldier was lying there, already dead, at least he was covered up. And the other was just lying there.”
“Almost the entire village was in flames,” says the old woman. “Today I heard that the Russians have already taken half of it. I don’t know what’s going on there.” Using an old board as a stick, Lominowska simply kept walking along the road to Pokrovsk, a city more than 30 kilometers away. “I don’t have a watch, I don’t have anything. I walked for a long time. I walked and walked without turning around,” she says. “I just heard the shots. I thought they were shooting at me, but there was no one there.”
“I ran and ran, I suffered so much,” Lominowska repeats again and again. After several hours on the deserted road, a car finally approached. Two Ukrainian soldiers stopped. “‘Grandma, where are you going?’ Then I said: I’ll run as long as I can and then I’ll fall into the meadow and sleep,” she describes the moment of rescue. “The soldiers gave me two sandwiches, and I ate one of them. I somehow didn’t have the strength to eat anymore.” The military called the police and the officers eventually took Lominowska to Pokrovsk.
“She ran about ten kilometers,” said Pavlo Diachenko, regional police spokesman. Otscheretyne has now been destroyed. Things don’t look any better in the surrounding villages. “The enemy bombardment just doesn’t stop,” says the police officer. “A few people are still in Otscheretyne. We don’t know how many, nor whether they are dead or still alive.”
