The two sisters, who haven’t seen each other for 20 years, managed to find each other again in Spain after one of them had to flee during the Russo-Ukrainian War, which has escalated into Ukraine since Russia took the offensive. of February. against the country.
Their story was told by the British newspaper The Guardian. “We’ve dreamed of meeting again since we were little, but we could never have imagined it would be because of a war,” 25-year-old Tatyana Kluge García told the newspaper.
Angelika Batiai, 24, added, “The moment (the reunion) was both happy and sad. 20 years later I was seeing my sister again, but on the other hand, I had just left my family and friends in a country at war.”
Angelika Batiai and Tatyana Kluge García were born in a village in southern Ukraine in the late 1990s and had a childhood surrounded by family problems. The first was sent to live with her aunt at the age of 5, and the second with her grandmother at the age of 6.
Tatyana was then placed under the tutelage of the Ukrainian state. Both even tried to persuade Angelika’s aunt to take custody of the two of them, but without the financial means to do so, she was unable to honor the sisters’ request.
The eldest was adopted by a family from the Spanish region of Catalonia when he was 8 years old. The idea of meeting her sister, who remained in Ukraine, even from afar, grew with a fixed idea, this desire was also shared by Angelika.
Tatyana even created a profile on the social network VK, popular in Russia, in order to find her sister, but in 2019 it was Angelika who found her on Facebook.
Both began to speak and hold a meeting on Spanish soil, but the covid-19 pandemic thwarted the sisters’ plan. In 2022, however, the meeting ended as Angelika feared advancing Russian bombings against Ukraine.
“I was hoping that all this would pass and get better, but things just got worse and worse,” Angelika told the Guardian. “Tatyana was texting me every day saying, ‘Pack your bags, we’re all waiting for you and we’re worried’.
Angelika, who lives in Nova Odessa, near the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, took shelter in the basement of her cousin’s house with her fiancee before leaving for Spain. However, Russian bombardment began to approach the area.
Even though her family members wanted to stay in place, Angelika chose to flee Ukraine, got into a vehicle with other people who wanted to escape the conflict, and headed for the Polish border.
“I was afraid we would be stopped or there would be an air raid warning,” Angelika said. “I was thinking about what it would be like to see my sister all the way,” she said.
Arriving in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, Angelika boarded a plane to Spain with a ticket Tatyana had bought. In total, the saga between leaving Nova Odessa and reaching Catalonia took about 34 hours.
Currently, Angelika lives in the apartment where Tatyana lives. Both communicate with the help of translation tools and gestures, as her older sister loses some of her skills with the Ukrainian language over time.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Angelika said, describing the feeling of seeing her sister again as “wonderful and incredible.”
source: Noticias
