Vera Chernuga, a 76-year-old Ukrainian woman, told Reuters about her journey of more than 4,000 kilometers, which took her through 5 countries to return to her village in Ukraine, where she remained the only resident.

After Russian forces bombed Dementiivka, the village where he lives, on the first day of the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin last year, Chernukha found himself in a hospital near the Russian border.

Now she spends her time in the yard and takes care of the shrine dedicated to the Ukrainian soldiers who died defending the village.

“I’m not afraid anymore. I lived my life,” she says.

From February 24, 2022, when the Russians invaded, she remembers only that at 4:20 a.m. a neighbor woke her up and told her that the war had begun. Then a rocket hit.

“The door to the kitchen was open, I was sitting by the stove. I looked out the window, the glass broke, the door flew off, a black cloud, the ground rose,” she says.

“I just remember jumping back into the house, still standing. I was covered in blood from head to toe… I crawled out into the street and I don’t know who found me,” the old woman says.

The Russians wanted to send the old woman to a refugee camp

When she woke up, she found herself being taken to a hospital in Belgorod, the administrative center of the Russian region of the same name, which is near the border with Ukraine.

She says she spent a month in the hospital, often crying, while local officials prepared documents to send her to a refugee camp.

“I said: ‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m going to sit on a bench here in Belgorod, near the station.’ But then my daughter-in-law found me and took me away with the help of volunteers,” the woman said.

The first attempt to cross the border was unsuccessful, so they looked for other solutions.

Chernukha’s odyssey passed through countries she had never seen before

“I traveled to Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to get to Lviv and then to Vinnytsia,” she says, referring to the two cities in western Ukraine.

“I stayed in buses for 7 days, but returned to Ukraine. There are still 5 people [din satul Dementiivka] which are in Russia, I don’t know anything about them,” she says.

Ukrainian troops recaptured the village during the blitzkrieg, which led to the catastrophic collapse of the Russian front in the Kharkiv region last September.

Chernukha says she has had to survive bombs, rockets and phosphorous warheads, which she says “glow like little lights.”

She says that after she managed to return to her village, it occurred to her to go to the city of Kharkiv, the capital of the region of the same name, which was never under Russian occupation.

“I was walking past where the gate was and stopped and thought, ‘Grandpa, you just made it home. Now, what will be, will be.” That’s why I turned off the road,” Chernukha said.