The 98-year-old woman fled Russian-occupied Ukraine, walking almost 10 kilometers alone, wearing flip-flops and a cane, having already been reunited with her family after being separated while fleeing to safety.
Lidiya Stepanovna Lomikovskaya and her family decided to leave the front-line town of Ocheretino in the eastern Donetsk region last week after the entry of Russian troops and increased fighting.
The Russians are advancing into the region, attacking Kyiv’s depleted and out-of-munitions forces with artillery, drones and bombs, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
“I woke up under fire – it was so scary,” Lomikovskaya said in a video interview published by the National Police of the Donetsk region.
In the chaos of the match, Lomikovskaya was separated from her son and two daughters-in-law, including Olga Lomikovskaya, who had been wounded by shrapnel days earlier.
The younger members of the family took secondary routes, but Lydia wanted to stay on the main road.
With a cane in one hand and balancing on her slippers, the elderly woman walked all day without food or water to reach the Ukrainian positions.
Describing her journey, the 90-year-old woman said she fell twice and was sometimes forced to stop to rest and even fell asleep along the way before waking up to continue her journey.
“One day I lost my balance and fell into the bushes. I fell asleep for a while and moved on. And then, the second time, I fell again. But then I got up and thought to myself: I need to move on, little by little,” Lomikovskaya emphasized.
Pavel Dyachenko, acting press secretary of the National Police of Ukraine in the Donetsk region, said that Lomikovskaya was rescued when Ukrainian soldiers spotted her walking along the road at night.
They handed her over to the White Angels, a police group that evacuates citizens living on the front lines, who then took her to a shelter for displaced people and contacted her family.
“I lived through that war,” the elderly woman said, referring to World War II.
“I also had to go through this war, and in the end I was left with nothing,” he added.
Lomikovskaya emphasized that the Second World War was not like this: “Not a single house burned down. But now everything is on fire.”
In the latest twist in this “adventure,” the chief executive of one of Ukraine’s largest banks announced on Tuesday on his Telegram social media channel that the bank will buy a house for an elderly woman.
“Monobank will buy Lydia Stepanovna a house and she will definitely live in it until this abomination disappears from our land,” assured Oleg Gorokhovsky.