Ukrainian couple divided by occupation meet again

Larysa Ryndova hurried to see her husband as if they were going out on a first date — makeup on and perfume spritzed in the car.

It was the first time she had laid eyes on 68-year-old Serhiy Ryndova in four-and-a-half years — time he had spent trapped with others in the Russian-held town of Oleshky in southern Ukraine.

“I can’t believe you are here,” Larysa Ryndova, 72, kept repeating, her mascara smudged with tears after they embraced outside a hospital in Kyiv.

Larysa, left, and Serhiy Ryndova pose for a photograph at a hospital in Kyiv on Thursday last week.

Photo: Reuters

“Honestly, I can’t believe it myself,” Serhiy Ryndova replied.

They last saw each other in 2022 when Larysa Ryndova fled to England to live with their son, three months into the occupation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Serhiy Ryndova stayed to look after the family home, ending up stuck in the town peppered with Russian-laid landmines and facing a mounting humanitarian crisis.

“We hoped for better. Turned out, it got ‘better,’” he said sarcastically.

Oleshky’s residents described living through constant drone attacks and without power and heating. Things got even worse this spring, when food deliveries stopped.

Serhiy Ryndova got out on Oct. 30 with hundreds of other residents, evacuated during a ceasefire that US first lady Melania Trump was involved in brokering, with the additional involvement of Pope Leo XIV.

For all the joy of seeing Larysa Ryndova — and the prospect of being reunited with his three children and six grandchildren — he had found his escape from Oleshky a devastating wrench.

“Your heart is torn apart at the thought of leaving everything behind. How can you? Your home, your family, the cemetery — all your relatives are there,” he said. “How will you ever visit their graves, keep them cared for?”

As Oleshky’s evacuees were moved by buses and planes through occupied land, Russia and Belarus, Larysa Ryndova set out on her own 2,000km journey to meet Serhiy Ryndova and bring him back with her to the UK.

“How haggard he looks,” she said when she saw the first pictures of her husband crossing into Ukraine. “It’s hard to recognize him.”

Serhiy Ryndova called Oleshky a “zone of death” where life under occupation could depend on the mood of an individual Russian soldier.

He survived on humanitarian aid that he had stockpiled during the occupation — noodles, grains, sometimes canned meat and fish. He tried frying up flatbreads with flour stored before the war, riddled with weevils.

“Sometime around April, the people who used to bring us food died — two men. After that, all food deliveries stopped completely. There was nothing,” Serhiy Ryndova said over a cup of coffee in a Kyiv cafe.

Locals shared what they had. Some risked the dangerous 20km journey on foot or bicycle to Radensk for supplies. Rare provisions were sold at severely inflated prices.

The local hospital ran out of supplies. Bodies were stacked up in the morgue, as forensic experts refused to risk the journey to the town to perform autopsies.

“Bodies are just lying there. Everything is leaking. When my neighbor died, I carried his body in there, and the smell was absolutely horrific,” Serhiy Ryndova said. “God forbid.”

Another neighbor asked him to bury her in her own courtyard if she was ever killed.

Serhiy Ryndova said he probably would not have left the town himself had it not been for the evacuation.

Land mines were laid out on all the roads and even in the town.

“They [Russian troops] had their own objective, as I understand it: to mine everything so they could keep everything under control,” he added.

“A lot of people were killed in Oleshky. Someone would go out to pick a cherry plum and get blown up. Someone else would pick up a mushroom or a nut and step on a landmine,” he said.

Russian troops “had done a great job of cleaning up” to put on a show before the organized evacuations began, Serhiy Ryndova said, adding that he did not see a single burnt-out car on the way.

He said he felt sure he could have survived another winter, despite the ordeal of occupation and food shortages.

Larysa Ryndova rolled her eyes, still wet with tears.

“I’ll fatten him up with borscht and varenyky” dumplings, she said.