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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Shaun Walker in Kyiv

‘What would this Ukrainian like for her 100th birthday? That Putin will die’

Olha Punyk, 69, has tried to shield her 99-year-old mother, Anna Bahatelya, from the worst news about the war
Olha Punyk, 69, has tried to shield her 99-year-old mother, Anna Bahatelya, from the worst news about the war. Photograph: Sviatoslav Medyk/The Observer

Ninety-nine years and eight months old, Anna Bahatelya has survived every ordeal a tumultuous century of Ukrainian history has thrown at her.

Born in August 1922, four months before the proclamation of the Soviet Union, Bahatelya lived through the Holodomor, when Joseph Stalin’s regime visited an artificial famine on large areas of Ukraine by confiscating its grain stocks. She survived the second world war, even after spending two years in a Nazi slave camp in Austria.

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