A Ukrainian army medic was captured by Russian troops, raped in custody, and put on trial for terrorism. Her sons ended up on opposite sides of the war. Here’s what happened to her family.

Liliia Prutian is a Ukrainian from the Donbas, a former military medic with the Aidar Battalion, and a mother of three sons. After the full-scale invasion began, she endured rape and captivity. Her oldest son served in Ukraine’s armed forces, her middle son joined the Russian army, and her youngest was stranded in occupied territory as a teenager and spent three years surviving there on his own. The New York Times told the family’s story, speaking to Prutian and two of her sons. Meduza summarizes that report.

Prutian, 56, is a widow with three sons from the village of Blyzhnie in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. She worked at a gas station for $140 a month until 2017, when she took a job with the Ukrainian army that paid two and a half times as much. She served first as an accountant, later as a military medic.

Prutian wound up in the Aidar Battalion, which, along with Azov, became a symbol of “Ukrainian Nazism” in Russian propaganda after 2014. The posting took her far from home. Her two older sons were already adults. Dima, the youngest, was just 12.

Prutian came home every two or three weeks. While she was away, Dima’s brothers and other relatives looked after him. She told herself it was the only way to support her family. She also felt the army had given her a sense of purpose, The New York Times wrote.

After February 24, 2022, Aidar was sent to the Mariupol area. Sixteen days into the full-scale invasion, Russian troops surrounded Prutian and several of her fellow soldiers. A Russian soldier raped her in captivity. Her captors initially planned to gang-rape her, Prutian said, but, sobbing, she asked them, “Please let it be just one of you.” “You could say they met me halfway,” she later told The New Yorker.

What followed was a cell in Donetsk, then one in Rostov. The toilet stopped working, so Prutian and her cellmates saved leftover soup and used the broth to flush it. Then came a trial on terrorism charges. Then, before any verdict, she was suddenly released in a prisoner swap. Once she was back on Ukrainian-held soil, her greatest worry was Dima.

Russian forces occupied Blyzhnie, the family’s hometown, in the first month of the full-scale invasion. Dima, then 17, was left alone in the house. His mother wrote and called when she could, and then the messages stopped. His oldest brother, like her, was serving in the Ukrainian army, far from home. His middle brother lived on his own and did not share the rest of the family’s pro-Ukrainian views.

Dima had been studying at a forestry college before the full-scale war began. Now his classes had stopped, and there were no jobs. He asked his oldest brother, who was fighting for Ukraine, to keep sending him money for groceries. In September 2022, complications from his Type 1 diabetes left him seriously ill. His middle brother drove him to the hospital and left him there, never once visiting. He stayed for months, until a teacher from his school found him and signed him out.

It was around then, Prutian said, that her middle son chose sides for good. He married a pro-Russian Ukrainian woman, sold his mother’s car, stopped speaking to his brothers and soon enlisted in the Russian army. Later, during her terrorism trial in Russia, her middle son’s written testimony against her was read out — that was how she learned he had joined the Russian army.

When he got back from the hospital in the winter of 2023, Dima found Russian soldiers in his house. The soldiers soon moved out, taking with them a laptop, cutlery, Prutian’s jewelry, and even some of Dima’s clothes and shoes. He went back to school, took a part-time construction job, and got a Russian passport, which he needed to keep studying, pay his utilities, and collect aid rations.

After her release, Prutian ended up at a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Kyiv. There she underwent surgery to restore hearing she had lost after her ears were damaged in combat, and worked out how to get back Dima. She feared that if he stayed in Blyzhnie, he would eventually be forced into the Russian army. When they finally managed to make contact, Dima confirmed he wanted to leave.

To get her youngest son out, Prutian paid a taxi driver about $115 to smuggle him a temporary Ukrainian passport and hired another to drive him out of occupied territory. The only practical way out led through Russia, and from there he continued on to Belarus and Poland, covering 1,740 miles before meeting his mother in Kyiv. He ran to her and hugged her tightly, but Prutian felt oddly numb. “I can’t say I felt joy. Meeting him felt like meeting a stranger. They say that’s normal after captivity,” she told The New York Times.

Dima reached his mother in late February 2025, three years after the full-scale invasion began. At first he was so withdrawn that he asked permission for everything and barely spoke, but in time they adjusted to living together again. Prutian and Dima now live in Dnipro. She still works for the Ukrainian army, now at a desk job far from the front. He has resumed his studies. Prutian’s oldest son, now discharged from the Ukrainian military, lives with them. People back home told her that her middle son had suffered a head wound in a drone attack. She did not try to find out more.