In 2022, when the Russian forces swept into Ukraine, a number of kids were caught up in areas of fighting without any adolescent supervision. The Russian government took care of them and the kids were evacuated. They were transferred to various children homes in peaceful areas of Russia.
Ukrainian politicians and western media created a scandal from that. The Russia side was accused of kidnapping. But after a while arrangements were found through which Ukrainian parents, after proving their guardianship over the kids, could be reunited with them. A number of solemn western sob stories were written about this rather normal process.
A late variant of such a tale appears in today’s New York Times. But most of what is of interest about it is missing.
A Mother’s Quest to Rescue Her Son From Russian-Occupied Ukraine (archived)
A mother of three sat in a Ukrainian rehabilitation center, clutching her phone, willing it to ring, trying to piece her shattered family back together.
Liliia Prutian, 55, was working as a military medic when Russian troops invaded in February 2022. They captured her, abused her, accused her of terrorism and held her for two and a half years.
After her release, she spent much of her time in this rehabilitation center, ..
.. what Ms. Prutian really wanted was to recover her youngest son, Dima Zahrebaiev, whom she had not seen in three years. He was now 20, living alone in their home in the family village, under Russian occupation since 2022. Fearing he would be forced into the Russian Army, she was desperate to rescue him, though it would be an elaborate, dangerous venture.
One wonders how the word ‘rescue’ is supposed to be appropriate for the travel of a 20 year old man who has lived by himself in the Russian controlled Donbas for more than four years. The story later mentions that the young man has severe diabetes which would prevent him from being drafted into any army.
Anyway – at the core of the story is how the man, with the help of a fake passport, was able to leave the Donbas via Russia, Belarus and Poland, to be reunited with his mother near Kiev.
But it is the life of Liliia Prutian, the mother, which is of real interest:
The father of Ms. Prutian’s three sons died years ago. Her oldest son served in the Ukrainian Army. Her middle son joined the Russian Army, leaving Dima, by far the youngest, to fend for himself.
…
Ms. Prutian raised her sons in the cinder-block house her parents had built in Blyzhnie, a village in the Donetsk region of about 750 people, with grain elevators, farms and low-slung buildings.
…
Ms. Prutian was staunchly Ukrainian, and she needed the money, so she enlisted in early 2017, as an accountant for the military, helping to manage the finances of a battalion. The job required her to leave home.She was 47. Her two older sons were adults. Dima was only 12.
Ms. Prutian relied on her older sons, relatives and friends to care for Dima.
…
She trained as a combat medic and, in 2019, was sent to the front lines.When her contract finished, she returned home for five months in 2020 to be with Dima. Then she enlisted again. So did her oldest son.
After the full-scale Russian invasion, Ms. Prutian’s unit was sent to protect Mariupol, a vital port city. The battles there were fierce, and the unit kept fighting.
Just 16 days into the war, Russian troops surrounded Ms. Prutian and six other Ukrainian soldiers in a village north of Mariupol. Out of ammunition, they surrendered.
Mariupol, some will remember, had in 2022 been surrounded by Russian forces. Militant fascist from the Azov battalion and other such groups tried to defend the city. They were eventually gave up and ended up as prisoners of war. As Azov and other such groups had previously been involved in war-crimes the Russian’s accused them of terrorism.
The New York Times does not mention which unit Ms. Prutian was associated with.
But a curious search for her name points to an older New Yorker piece (also here) about Russian PoW prisons. Ms. Prutian appears in it:
Before her capture, Prutian had served as a medic in the Aidar Battalion, a volunteer militia that had been absorbed into the Ukrainian armed forces. She is in her mid-fifties, a mother of three adult children, …
A Wikipedia entry on the Aidar battalion notes:
In 2014, Amnesty International reported that members of the Aidar Battalion had committed war crimes during the war in Donbas. …
On 8 September 2014 Amnesty International claimed that the battalion had committed war crimes, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.
…
On 24 December 2014, Amnesty International reported that the unit was blocking humanitarian aid from Ukraine reaching the population of the separatist-controlled areas. Over half the population in these areas depended on food aid.
…
In April 2015, the Ukrainian government-appointed Governor of Luhansk Hennadiy Moskal stated that the Aidar Battalion was “terrorizing the region” and asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry to rein in its members after a series of thefts, including ambulances and the takeover of a bread factory.
The NY Times narrative lacks any hint of why Ms. Prutian had chosen to volunteer with that well known unit …
Back to its story:
In summer 2023, [Ms. Prutian] was moved to a prison in southern Russia and put on trial on terrorism charges, a case that was covered by local media.
At one hearing, her middle son submitted written testimony against her. That was how she learned that he had joined the Russian Army, that their family could never be whole again.
…
In September 2024, Ms. Prutian was still on trial when she was suddenly released in a prisoner swap. Back on Ukrainian-controlled soil, she kissed the trees and walked barefoot in the grass. Mostly, she worried about Dima.
[Sob.]
It may well be that Ms. Prutian felt guilty about her youngest son, who she had left (twice) to volunteer with the ‘nationalist’ Aidar outfit, while the boy was severely sick with diabetes.
Freed from prison she took some effort to reconnect with him:
Lately, Ms. Prutian has started feeling like herself again. Still, she treats Dima as if he were much younger. She constantly mothers him, wiping his face, hugging him.
“Maybe I feel guilty for not doing enough when I couldn’t, but I don’t feel I’m overdoing it now,” she said. “You can never love someone too much.”
The NY Times sob story leaves many open questions. There is no quote from Dima, the young adult who has been pulled from school and a stable life in the Russian controlled region. There is no further mention of Ms. Prutian second son, who had chosen to fight on the Russian side, nor is their any exploration of Ms. Prutian’s ‘staunchly Ukrainian’, nationalist feelings as expressed by volunteer service in a war-crime unit.
But there is a quirky narrative of alleged rape by a Russian soldier soon after she had been captured:
Three Russians separated her from the men and locked her in a house, interrogating her for days. Why did she join the army? Who did she serve with? The soldiers then demanded sex, she said. Ms. Prutian negotiated. “At least let it be just one of you,” she later recalled saying.
One Russian soldier then raped her, she said.
I have never heard of a rape victim negotiating something like that …
It is curious that neither the New Yorker piece, nor any of the previous local media reports mentioning Ms. Prutian, carry any hint of such an event.
Might that tale be an exaggeration?
The New York Times could not independently verify her account, …
Wasn’t that a sufficient reason to not publish such dreck?
