Love in times of war: the fleeting encounter between a Ukrainian prisoner released by the Russians and his partner

"One day I hope to become his wife."

Dariia Tsikunova, 22, dreams out loud when she talks about her partner.

Lieutenant Ilia Samoilenko, who lost his right eye and left hand in combat, is one of the Ukrainian prisoners released by the Russians last Wednesday after spending more than four months in their hands.

That day the largest exchange of prisoners of war took place, with almost 300 beneficiaries, 215 from Ukraine and 56 from Russia.

The operation was carried out at a point on the border with Russia in the Chernihiv region, in the north of the country.

"Many of them suffered very cruel forms of torture," said Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence.

Samoilenko has been in an isolation cell in Moscow without having contact with anyone or receiving visitors, as explained by his mother, Alla Samoilenko, in statements to Ukraine's Channel 5 television after speaking on the phone with her son.

It is one of the few details that have come to light, since the authorities are still gathering information about those released and many of them remain in hospitals.

His girlfriend does not know or prefers not to tell anything about the seclusion in the Russian capital.

She does relate that one of the places her partner passed through was Olenivka, the town in eastern Ukraine where the Russians have a prison.

That center was attacked in late July and more than 40 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed.

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Dariia was not present at the time of the exchange, but she was authorized, like other relatives and friends, to visit her loved ones hours later.

The young woman tells that she was finally able to hug her boyfriend in a Chernihiv hospital, who does not have serious injuries, as is the case with other prisoners.

She doesn't complain, although they were barely together and never alone.

"We haven't talked much.

It is very difficult for him to process everything that has happened and he is undergoing rehabilitation.

He doesn't talk much about his captivity because it's been a big trauma and he's going to need time.

He is undergoing treatment in a hospital and I hope he recovers soon, ”says Dariia.

Ilia Samoilenko, on the right, in an image provided by the authorities of the moment in which the exchange of prisoners took place in Chenihiv on Wednesday night. SECURITY SERVICE OF UKRAINE HAND (EFE)

Samoilenko, nicknamed

, a character of his admired JRR Tolkien, has served 28 years in captivity.

It was last July 10.

That day, Dariia says that she did nothing, she stayed at home not wanting to see anyone, she just hopefully added a handful more lines to the diary in which she has been collecting how much she loves him.

And that she was still waiting for him, she wrote she too.

A few pages that have become her particular weapon to, far from the front, "fight for him" and make the wait less bitter.

"It is an honor to be the girlfriend of a hero," the young woman emphasizes during a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS.

Dariia and Ilia were friends when last February, specifically on the 11th, they took the step and became a couple.

Little did they know, despite the buzz of threats coming from Russia, that their country was going to be plunged into a full-scale war.

On February 19, five days before the Russian invasion began, he traveled to Mariupol.

That had been the last day they were together until the sigh they shared after the liberation.

That city on the shores of the Sea of ​​Azov ended up being the scene for weeks of one of the bloodiest battles.

There, besieged by the enemy, hundreds of civilians and members of the security forces, many of them wounded, were trapped in heavy fighting at the Azovstal metallurgical plant.

Meeting with the Pope

Alla Samoilenko is currently in the United States a mission of women and mothers of prisoners who fought in Azovstal to ask for their release.

Two of them were even received by Pope Francis in the Vatican a few days before her husbands fell into Russian hands at the Mariupol steel mill.

It was Katerina Prokopenko, wife of the head of the Azov battalion, Denis Prokopenko, who begged the pontiff not to "let them die".

"You are our last hope," she told him.

For weeks, Ilia Samoilenko acted as the spokesperson for that battalion, which operates under the National Guard.

He gave interviews and made statements from the plant besieged by the Russians, which made him one of the most popular faces of the resistance.

Surrounded, without ammunition or hardly any food, the surrender finally came in mid-May.

This is how they fell into the hands of the enemy.

“We couldn't communicate since May 20.

It has been horrible not hearing from him in four months,” laments Dariia.

The release of some of them, as hundreds of others are still captured, has come after an agreement that, according to Mijailo Podoliak, adviser to President Volodímir Zelenski, has taken months of work for the secret services.

Accustomed to the rumors that had announced the return home on previous occasions, Dariia did not want to be too hopeful.

Moreover, the men from Azov, a group promoted in 2014 by far-right militiamen before joining the National Guard, are especially coveted by the Russian occupation authorities, who claim that Ukraine must be “denazified”.

What was agreed in the prisoner exchange is that its top officials, Prokopenko and four others, live in Turkey until the war ends.

"They had warned us that those from Azov would be the last," says Dariia without hiding a certain surprise that this has not been the case.

Samoilenko had enlisted in Azov in 2015, when he was 21 years old.

"He wanted to have done it in 2014, but he was too young and spent that year studying History at the University," recalls his girlfriend.

The armed conflict had broken out in 2014 in Donbas, in the east of the country, where pro-Russian militiamen led by Moscow were fighting against the Ukrainian army.

There, on New Year's Eve 2017, Ilia was blown up while handling a device in the middle of an attack.

The explosion left him seriously injured.

He lost his right eyeball, where he now alternates between a patch and a prosthesis, and his left hand, where he sometimes sports a metal hook.

That didn't stop him from deciding to go to the front lines when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion this year.

His mother says that Ilia has frequently used black humor over the years to assume his appearance and that before his arrest he was even visiting mutilated from the war in Mariupol to help them accept their wounds and their new body.

Now, adds Alla Samoilenko in the interview with Channel 5, it is he who has months of recovery ahead of him after "isolation and loneliness".

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