Lydia Stepanivna Lomikovska and her family decided to flee their home in the frontline eastern Donetsk region town of Ocheretyne last week, after Russian troops moved in and fighting intensified.

Russian forces have been advancing in the region, pounding Kyiv’s outgunned and outmanned forces with artillery, rockets and bombs, the Associated Press reported.

“I woke up to the sound of shooting — it was so scary,” Lomikovska said in a video interview published by the Donetsk regional police.

In the chaos of their departure, Lomikovska became separated from her son and two daughters-in-law, including one, Olha Lomikovska, who had been wounded by shrapnel days earlier.

The younger family members took to the back roads, but Lydia wanted to stick to the main highway.

Using a cane in one hand and wearing a pair of slippers, the elderly woman walked all day without food or water to reach Ukrainian lines.

Describing her journey, the 90-year-old said she fell twice and had to stop to rest at points, even sleeping on the road at one stage before waking and continuing her trek.

“Once I lost my balance and fell into the bushes. I slept a little, then walked on. And then a second time I fell again. But then I got up and thought to myself: I need to keep going, little by little,” Lomikovska said.

Pavlo Dyachenko, acting spokesman for the National Police in the Donetsk region, said Lomikovska was eventually spotted walking along a road at night by Ukrainian soldiers.

They handed her over to the “White Angels,” a police unit that evacuates civilians from the front lines, who took her to a shelter for displaced people and contacted her relatives.

“I lived through that war,” the elderly woman said, referring to World War II.

“I had to go through this war as well, and in the end I am left with nothing,” she added.

Lomikovska said the second global conflict was not like this one: “Not a single house burned down. But now everything is on fire.”

In a more recent twist to her story, the CEO of one of Ukraine’s largest banks said on his Telegram channel Tuesday that the lender will buy the elderly woman a house.

“Monobank will buy a house for Lydia Stepanivna, and she will definitely live in it until the moment when this abomination disappears from our land,” Oleh Horokhovskyi wrote.

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