By AFP | 2024-04-30

POKROVSK, Ukraine -- Ukrainian grandmother Lidia Lominovska was drained. The 97-year-old had walked for hours in search of safety after the Russians bombed her front-line village of Ocheretyne.

Wearing a colorful headscarf around her wrinkled face, the frail but resilient Lominovska recounted her exhausting trek of some 10km in Donetsk province.

"I walked for a long time. I walked and walked, and I was tired... My God!" she said, calmly recalling the chaos of the past few days after fleeing on April 26.

"I kept going and going and going," she told AFP from her bed at a shelter in nearby Pokrovsk.

Russia has been pushing westwards in Donetsk province since its capture in February of Avdiivka, an eastern hub that witnessed some of the worst battles of Moscow's two-year offensive.

In recent days, fighting has intensified in nearby Ocheretyne, part of which is reportedly under Russian control. Moscow has also captured other villages in the area.

Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi April 28 reported that the situation on the front was "worsening" as Russia's troops had capitalized on an advantage in manpower and arms to press forward.

'Grandma, where are you going?'

"Oh, I've suffered so much!" said Lominovska, who left everything behind and fled her home in Ocheretyne, which numbered about 3,000 residents before the war.

"God knows who was shelling. I didn't see anyone. I just heard something go off. I didn't know where it was, or what," Lominovska said.

So she left, coming across the bodies of fallen soldiers as she walked through her village, now largely in ruins.

"Almost everything was on fire... They [the Russians] have burnt down so many houses," she said.

"But you know, I was walking and there was no one anywhere. I just heard the shooting. I thought they would shoot at me while I was shuffling along."

Using a piece of broken board as a cane, Lominovska continued along a path leading towards Pokrovsk, some 30km to the west of Ocheretyne.

She had no sense of time, explaining: "I don't have a watch, I don't have anything."

She had been walking alone for several hours when two Ukrainian soldiers stopped their car and one asked: "Grandma, where are you going?"

"I said, 'I'm going as far as I can go, and then I'll fall into the grass and spend the night there,'" Lominovska recalled.

'Shelling does not stop'

"The soldiers gave me two sandwiches. I ate one. Somehow I no longer had the strength to eat," she added.

The troops then called the police to give her a ride to Pokrovsk.

Regional police spokesman Pavlo Dyachenko said Lominovska had "covered on foot a distance of about 10km."

On April 28, incessant heavy strikes targeted the area and grey smoke plumes appeared in the sky, according to an AFP reporter in the village of Vozdvizhenka.

Two of its residents were evacuated by members of a special police unit dubbed the White Angels, Dyachenko said.

Lominovska must have been one of the last people to leave her village, which he said was now destroyed, said Dyachenko.

"A few are still there, but we don't know their number, or whether they're alive or dead," he added.

The situation in surrounding villages is also very difficult, as "the enemy's shelling does not stop," he said.