Russian Mother Credits Ukrainian For Stranded Daughter's Return

Drozhzhino, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Nov, 2024) When Ukraine's army launched a surprise incursion into Russia in August, three-year-old Darina Gridina and her great-grandmother, 78, became stranded behind the frontlines.

Darina was staying there while her mother, Anastasia, looked for work in Moscow -- but the shock offensive forced her to spend months living under Ukrainian control in a half-destroyed school complex in the town of Sudzha with her elderly guardian.

Reunited last week as part of a rare agreement that saw 46 civilians returned to Russia by Kyiv, the family credits a Ukrainian man with helping bring Darina back to her mother.

"I am hugely thankful to him," Anastasia, 21, told AFP in an interview outside Moscow.

Darina was nestled in her arms, holding a plastic toy horse.

Anastasia refers to the man as a Ukrainian "war correspondent" called Alexei, but AFP is aware that he serves in Kyiv's armed forces.

With direct contact across the frontlines impossible, Alexei acted as a go-between for Anastasia and Darina while they were separated.

"Alesha would come ... He would show us a video of Nastya (Anastasia)," silver-haired great-grandmother Tatiana Gridina told AFP, using an affectionate Russian version of Alexei's name.

He would download videos from Anastasia to take them and show Darina, then send others back to the distressed mother.

Tatiana said how Anastasia was constantly crying in the videos, desperate that she was not able to speak to her daughter directly.

Then, after four months apart, Alexei contacted Anastasia with a request for a different kind of video.

He wanted Anastasia's consent for Darina to be taken to the Ukrainian city of Sumy -- so that she could travel on to Russia through Belarus and be reunited with her mother.

She agreed.

"If he didn't take them out, they would not have left," Anastasia, the mother said. "He was the first to help."

Tatiana said Alexei tried to convince others from occupied Kursk villages to make the same journey.

But "people are scared", fearing reprisals, she said.

Ukrainian troops took those who agreed to Sumy, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) across the official border between the two countries. From there they were brought to Belarus with the help of the Red Cross before crossing into Russia.

"When she saw me, she said 'mummy' and smiled," Anastasia said, recalling the moment she first saw her daughter again.

The ordeal has left a serious mark on Darina.

She struggles to sleep, "scared that she will wake up and nobody will be there," Anastasia said.

Tatiana said the semi-destroyed complex of buildings where they stayed became a centre for around 100 people displaced from neighbouring villages.

"One wing was completely destroyed, another was left, we lived in rooms there," she said, sharing a rare first-hand account of life inside the Ukrainian-occupied part of Russia.

But Sudzha, the main town Ukraine has seized, was still far safer than the surrounding villages.

Tatiana and Darina had been in the village of Kazachya Lokna at the start of the incursion, but were moved when the Ukrainians started building trenches right around their house.

Life in Sudzha had ground to a standstill and all the shops were "destroyed", Tatiana said.

The 78-year-old would go to the abandoned market, where there were still some items, to look for clothes for Darina.

"When I would walk there, the roads were covered in glass from damaged buildings," she said.

Conditions in the dormitory were tough.

"The military gave bread, canned meat and tinned food," the pensioner said -- just enough so that "we didn't starve".

Whoever was able to would cook for themselves, but the gas had been switched off.

"There was no electricity. In the evening we sat in the dark," she said.

"I had a children's prayer book with me and we would pray for the war to end quicker."

Now far away in the Moscow region, Tatiana was asked if Ukrainian soldiers treated her respectfully.

"Yes," she replied.

The pensioner painted an unusual co-existence between the Ukrainian soldiers and Russian civilians, even saying she tried to "teach" the young troops the Russian imperial version of history.

But she said they found common ground on one thing: wanting the conflict -- raging for almost three years -- to end.

"We would tell them that we are tired of this," she said, claiming the Ukrainians agreed.

"Who needs this? Nobody... Not the Ukrainians, and not our Russians either," she said.

"But who will sort out and clear the mess? We don't know."