A mum who fled Ukraine with her daughter after hiding in a basement for 10 days to escape Russian attacks, and later returned to the war-torn country to save her dog, has said the stress of the ordeal “aged her many years” but free lip and cheek fillers are helping her to “move forward in life”. Svetlana Ishchenko, a 41-year-old teacher, was forced to leave her home town of Bucha in February 2022, after spending 10 days hiding from shelling in the basement of her home with her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasiia.
“We were trapped in the basement for days and there was a moment where she looked at me and said, ‘Mum, I want to live’,” Svetlana, who does not speak English, said via a Ukrainian interpreter. “I knew then that I had to get us out of there.”
In March 2022, Ukrainian forces liberated Russian-occupied Bucha and the mother and daughter then fled to western Ukraine – staying there for a month before travelling to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Svetlana had contacted an old friend from university, Dr Olha Vorodyukhina, an aesthetic physician who lives in Nottingham and helped her to find a “lovely family” in the city who sponsored them to come to the UK in April.
