A married couple from the occupied city of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast has been reunited with their family after escaping to Ukrainian-controlled territory, finally embracing their two-year-old grandson for the first time.
Nina and Anatolii left Oleshky on 14 October, travelling through occupied Skadovsk and then Belarus before crossing back into Ukraine, they told Radio Liberty's Ukrainian Service.
Life under occupation in Oleshky was defined by shortages of water, food and medicine, made worse by exorbitant prices. The couple said bread had not been sold in the city for more than a year.
With the city in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe, only a few products grown by local residents could be found at the market, and even those carried prices running into four figures. Sellers were asking UAH 1,000, about US$22, for a kilogramme of cucumbers or tomatoes, and UAH 2,000, about US$44, for a kilogramme of carrots.
Nina recalled how carefully vegetables had to be rationed: "I'd buy a small carrot, cut off a tiny bit, and put it into the soup, just a couple of little cubes and a couple of strips."
Food was so scarce that the couple dried goosefoot and used a coffee grinder to mill their remaining grain into flour for pancakes.
"I'd tell [my husband], 'Call me stingy if you like, but you get two pancakes, and I get two. That's breakfast. The rest are for lunch and dinner,'" Nina said.
After the escape, the couple's reunion with their family brought a moment they had waited years for. "For 25 years I gave my love to other people's children, yet I'd never held my own grandson in my arms. And he says to me: 'Nana, today we're going to have a festive dinner,'" Nina said.
"I pray to God for our people who remained in Oleshky. And I cry, I just cry," she added.
The Office of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Human Rights Commissioner has previously reported that some of those evacuated from Oleshky had survived largely by growing courgettes and had endured being hunted by a Russian drone.
