Ukraine’s super gran: ‘I went into the wolf’s lair to save my grandson’
“I was going into the wolf’s lair but I had to overcome my fear because I was the only one who could rescue my grandson.”
Ilya’s mother was dead. The missile strike that killed her left him bleeding, shrapnel embedded in his legs.
Under the guise of an “evacuation”, Russian soldiers stole the nine-year-old from his home and brought him across the border into occupied Donetsk in March 2022.
He might never have seen his family again.
But as bombs rained down on Ukrainian cities and fighter jets screamed through the skies, his grandmother set out on a desperate rescue mission.
This is the story of how one brave grandma crossed four borders and risked everything to bring her beloved grandson home.
Sheltering in the dark
“Mariupol was flourishing, it was booming,” Olena Matvienko, 64, says. The city she had once called home was beautiful, she recalled, like a fairy tale.
When Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Olena remembers thinking that it would not last long.
But then the bombs came, and the soldiers.
Olena was living in western Ukraine far away from the Russian advances. But her daughter and grandson in Mariupol were not as lucky.
Huge areas of the city were razed to the ground, once proud apartment blocks obliterated and green parks scorched black. The rest was swiftly occupied, with the notable exception of the stoic defence of a steel factory.
In downtown Mariupol, Olena’s daughter Natalya and grandson Ilya hid in a basement with several others as explosions shook the building.
For 12 days they sheltered in that dark space, cooking what food they had on a fire outside.
The remains of the house where Ilya had lived on the outskirts of Mariupol
‘My daughter died that night’
When they eventually ran out of supplies they were forced to leave. They walked five miles to the outskirts of the city where they lived. When they reached their road they saw their home had been reduced to rubble.
Intense shelling rocked the streets around them, and the pair sought shelter in the building next door. Six days passed.
Then on 20 March, a missile hammered into their building, sending smoke and dust pouring into the air.
“My daughter was injured in the head and my grandson had shrapnel in his right thigh, his left thigh was torn away,” Olena says.
She’s speaking to Sky News from her home in Uzghorod in western Ukraine. There are toys on the shelves. Behind her Ilya is playing and flits in and out of view.
Olena looks down as she tells this part of the story, her face solemn.
“My daughter died that night. They buried her in front of the house where we used to live.”
The next morning, the Russians came.
Olena with her daughter Natalya
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Stolen away to enemy territory
The soldiers separated the adults from their children and sent them to district 17 in the centre of Mariupol.
Just hours after losing his mother, Ilya was snatched away from Ukraine into Russian-held territory like so many others. Thousands have never returned.
In a hospital in Donetsk doctors treated Ilya. At one point they considered amputating his leg but instead gave him two skin grafts.
There was talk about taking him to Moscow with other children. But Ilya told the Russians he did not want to go anywhere and that he was going to wait for his grandma.
Olena, meanwhile, was frantically trying to find out what had happened to her daughter and grandson. Eventually someone she knew passed on the devastating news.
“At first I felt hysterical. The pain was overwhelming,” she says.
“But the thought that my grandson was in Donetsk, alone without anyone, helped me overcome the pain and pull myself together.
“And so I started thinking about how I could take him back to Ukraine.”
Olena’s daughter Natalya – Ilya’s mother – was buried in Mariupol
‘I was the only one who could rescue Ilya’
Olena wrote to organisations, agencies, everyone she could think of, asking for help to get Ilya back.
Eventually she got a reply from the office of Ukraine’s president, written by deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk.
A plan was hatched and arrangements made for Olena to go and fetch her grandson. The details, including the route she took to get to Ilya, are being kept secret.
It was dangerous. Olena was leaving free Ukraine and heading to parts of the country that have been outside Kyiv’s control for nearly a decade.
“I was scared. I did not want to be there. I was going into the wolf’s lair but I had to overcome my fear because I was the only one who could rescue my grandson.
“The only thing I could think about was getting Ilya back to Ukraine.”
It took about six days to reach the city of Donetsk. Olena crossed four borders and was finally reunited with Ilya at the hospital on 21 April.
“I cried when I saw Ilya,” she says. “He couldn’t believe that it was me at first. He was very happy and we hugged each other.”
Ilya still had shrapnel in his legs and couldn’t walk, but they were able to leave the hospital together.
The long journey home
They travelled from the hospital by ambulance but ran into trouble at the border between the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Russia.
“They did not want to let me go because I was coming from the western part of Ukraine,” Olena says. “But when I showed them my passport and it said Mariupol they allowed me to cross the border.”
She’s asked if she was surprised they had let her and Ilya go. “Speaking honestly, yes. I was very surprised.”
Their route home is likewise being kept secret, but we can report that they travelled to Moscow by car. From there they were able to fly to Turkey and then on to Poland, and from there they took a train to Kyiv.
Finally, after weeks of worry, their journey was over. They were back in free Ukraine.
At this point in her story Olena seems to tear up, emotions bubbling to the surface as she speaks of the moment she set foot on familiar soil.
“It was a big relief when we finally crossed the border into Ukraine: we were home.
“Yes, all my property had been destroyed. But I was finally home and I was with my grandson.”
The desolation of Mariupol
A meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Ilya still couldn’t walk, however, and spent some time at a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Doctors took four more pieces of metal out of his leg.
They were visited there by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Olena looked proudly at her grandson as he shook hands with the smiling Ukrainian president from his hospital bed.
For the next month-and-a-half, Olena took care of her grandson – she calls him Ilyushka fondly – in the city of Uzghorod in western Ukraine where they still live today.
Ilya meets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a hospital in Kyiv
“At first he was very reserved after what happened,” she says. “He was afraid of things like air raid sirens and thunderstorms.”
With time, Ilya regained the ability to walk. “He still limps a little bit but he feels much better,” Olena says.
He was assisted by the Museum of Civilian Voices, a project run by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, which helped him to access medical and psychological treatment.
The museum is a huge collection of stories of civilians affected by the war in Ukraine, with a mission to share them in hope of a better future.
Ilya has settled into his new home after returning to free Ukraine
Despite losing his parents and his home, Ilya – now 10 years old – has made new friends and settled into his new home.
He was the first child to be liberated from occupied Ukraine.
Ilya still has 11 jagged pieces of shrapnel in his body, an enduring legacy of the missile strike that killed his mother a year-and-a-half ago.
But Olena adds: “Now he feels alive. He knows that he is loved here.
“He’s my sense of life.”
Seven people have been killed and dozens are injured after two bridges collapsed in Russia overnight.
A train derailed after a bridge collapsed on to it in the Bryansk region, killing the driver and six others.
Some 69 people were injured in the crash, with the train travelling from Moscow to Klimov at the time.
Earlier, local authorities blamed “illegal interference” for the incident.
Later, a bridge collapsed in Russia’s Kursk region while a freight train was passing over it.
Local officials said one of the train’s drivers was injured in the crash.
The scene of the train crash in Kursk region. Pic: RIA/Telegram
Russia’s Baza Telegram channel, which often publishes information from sources in the security services and law
enforcement, reported, without providing evidence, that the bridge in Bryansk was blown up, according to initial information.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.
Since the start of the war that Russia launched more than three years ago, there have been continued cross-border shelling, drone strikes, and covert raids by Ukrainian forces into the Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod regions that border Ukraine.
Pic: Moscow Transport Prosecutor’s Office
Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said: “Everything is being done to provide all necessary assistance to the victims.”
Emergency workers are at the scene of the train derailment, attempting to pull survivors from the wreckage.
Russia’s federal road transportation agency said the destroyed bridge passed above the railway tracks where the train was travelling.
Images from the scene show passenger cars ripped apart and lying amid fallen concrete from the collapsed bridge.
Other footage on social media appeared to be taken from inside vehicles which narrowly avoided driving onto the bridge before it collapsed.
World
Israel confirms Hamas chief Mohammad Sinwar was killed – as group makes counter-offer on ceasefire
Israel has confirmed its forces have killed Hamas’s Gaza chief, Mohammad Sinwar, as US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff called the group’s counter-offer on a ceasefire “totally unacceptable”.
Mohammad Sinwar became the leader of the militant group in the Gaza Strip after his older brother Yahya Sinwar was killed last October.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it had killed Sinwar on 13 May, and was the target of a strike on a hospital in southern Gaza.
Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied his death, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told parliament on Wednesday that he had been “eliminated”.
A handout image of Mohammed Sinwar from December 2023. Pic: Israeli Army / Reuters
Hamas seeks changes in US ceasefire proposal
It comes as Hamas said it was seeking amendments to a US-proposed ceasefire deal, offering 10 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of 18 in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
On Thursday, the White House said Israel agreed to a 60-day ceasefire proposal, which would see the release of nine living hostages and half of the known hostages who have died over the course of a week.
Israel and Hamas would then continue talks to bring the remaining hostages home, but Israel would retain the right to resume military action in Gaza if talks were to break down.
In a statement about the proposal on Saturday, Hamas said its response “aims to achieve a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and to ensure the flow of humanitarian aid to our people in the Strip”.
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Israeli ambassador claims ‘no starvation in Gaza’
Hamas offer ‘totally unacceptable’ – Witkoff
Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Mr Witkoff, said on social media that Hamas’s response is “totally unacceptable and only takes us backwards”.
“Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week,” he added.
Senior Hamas official Basem Naim told Reuters that the group has not rejected the proposal but added Mr Witkoff’s response was “unfair” and showed “complete bias” towards Israel.
Israel has not yet responded to Hamas’ counter-offer, but has previously rejected the conditions and demanded the complete disarmament and dismantling of the group.
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Meanwhile, Gaza aid groups have said dozens of World Food Programme (WFP) trucks carrying flour to Gaza bakeries had been hijacked by armed groups and subsequently looted by people.
The WFP added: “After nearly 80 days of a total blockade, communities are starving and they are no longer willing to watch food pass them by.”
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Amjad Al-Shawa, head of an umbrella group representing Palestinian aid groups, said hundreds more trucks were needed and accused Israel of a “systematic policy of starvation”.
Israel denies operating a policy of starvation and says it is facilitating aid deliveries via the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Instead, it accuses Hamas of stealing supplies.
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