A Ukrainian couple who enlisted to protect their city and were subsequently captured by the invading Russian army have reunited and are slated to be married after the groom recovers.
Illia Muzyka, 29, and Alina Panina, 27, were defending Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, when Muzyka was captured on April 12, 2022, and his fiancee was taken with her platoon a month later.
After nearly a year apart and not knowing what happened to the other, the couple was freed and able to find each other in Kyiv, with Muzyka slowly recovering from malnourishment.
”I was beside myself, overwhelmed by emotions. We had waited for so long to speak, to embrace, to talk,” Panina told Reuters of their reunion.
“We were so happy.”
The couple first met in 2019 through work, when Muzyka and Panina were both working as guards in Mariupol. They were eventually posted together as dog handlers in the city’s busy commercial port, inspecting cargo with their spaniels, Jessie and Sonia.
The couple led an idyllic life in the bustling city with their two dogs until Russia invaded in February 2022, with Mariupol among the first targets of the Kremlin’s forces.
Like many city residents, Muzyka and Panina enlisted in the army, taking part in some of the deadliest battles in the early days of the war as they were deployed to protect Mariupol’s Azovmash factory.
On April 10, Panina was relocated to protect the city’s massive Azovstal steelworks plant, and as she said goodbye to her partner, the two had no idea that they would be separated for nearly a year.
Two days after Panina was deployed with their two dogs, Muzyka’s unit was captured by the Russians, who would go on to mount an unstoppable assault on the steel factory where she was stationed.
By May 17, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ordered the unit at Azovstal to surrender, with Panina separated from her dogs and taken prisoner.
“When they were taking me to Russia, we went by the place where the dogs were kept and they barked as I was driven away. This was the last time I heard them,” she recalled.
Muzyka said he “did not know whether she had been or still was in captivity” while he was being held by the Russians.
“I kept thinking so much that it messed with my head,” he added. “I must have buried her a thousand times in my head.”
Panina said she was moved around several times in Russia and occupied Ukraine, describing her treatment as a POW as “harsh.”
She also recalled her captors lying to her, claiming Ukraine had already lost the war and had been carved up between Moscow and Europe.
She was eventually released in October 2022 as part of the regular POW exchanges between Russia and Ukraine.
Muzyka, on the other hand, remained in captivity for much longer as he was kept in a Russian camp where he said he lost weight because he was not fed properly.
The border guard was not released until Jan. 3, 2023, when he was reunited with his family and informed that his fiancee was freed three months earlier.
Although Muzyka and Panina had planned to marry in March 2022, they had to postpone their wedding until he fully recovers.
For now, the two are enjoying their days together, with Panina and her new spaniel, Roxy, working as customs guards in the western city of Lutsk.
With Post wires