A 98-year-old Ukraine woman says she walked 10km under fire to escape Russians

A 98-year-old Ukrainian woman said she walked 10 kilometres under shelling, supporting herself with sticks and sleeping on the ground, leaving an area of the country now occupied by Russia to try and reach areas controlled by Kyiv.

In a video posted by Ukraine’s police on social media on Monday, seen below, the woman, identified as Lidia Stepanivna, said she had walked without food or water and fell several times, but her “character” kept her going.

“I survived that war (Second World War), and I am surviving this war,” Stepanivna said in the video, which shows her sitting on a bed in a shelter, dressed in an oversized coat and a scarf tied on her head, a wooden stick still in her hand. “I’m left with nothing. But I left my Ukraine on feet.”

She has left Ocheretyne in Donetsk and said the war that Russia is waging against her country is nothing like the Second World War.

“Houses are burning and trees are being uprooted,” she said.

Ukraine’s interior ministry said in a statement on its website that the woman was discovered by Ukraine’s military in the evening and handed to the police, who took her to a shelter for evacuees.

“Law enforcement officers are looking for the woman’s relatives,” the ministry said.

A video posted by Ukraine’s police on social media on Monday:

It was not immediately clear when the woman was discovered.

The war, now in its third year and with no end in sight, has killed thousands, turned Ukrainian cities and villages into rubble and displaced millions of people.

On Monday, a Russian missile attack on an educational institution in a popular seafront park in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odesa killed at least five people and injured 32, local officials said.

Regional governor Oleh Kiper, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said that in addition to those killed in the attack, one man died after suffering a stroke attributed to the strike.

Kiper said eight of the injured were in serious condition, including a four-year-old child. Among the injured were another child and a pregnant woman.

“Monsters. Beasts. Savages. Scum. I don’t know what else to say,” Odesa Mayor Hennadii Trukhanov said in a video posted on Telegram. “People are going for a walk by the sea and they are shooting and killing.”

Pictures posted online showed the building ablaze and smoke billowing skyward.

A student at the academy who identified herself by her first name, Maria, said the blaze was caused when the missile was intercepted.

“In front of my eyes, a missile was shot down, this was just in front of me. My doors were blown open and the glass was shaking. And then I saw this,” she told Reuters, pointing to the burning building.

“Just before this happened, we wanted to go down there for a walk, but thank God we weren’t there when it happened.”

Ukrainian navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk, in a post on a military Telegram channel, said the strike was conducted by an Iskander-M ballistic missile with a cluster warhead.