KYIV – In the summer of 2023, 37-year-old Iryna Krynina was working as an accountant in Krasnoyarsk, a Russian city on the Yenisei River in Siberia.
She had no idea how drastically her life was about to change when her partner, Evgeny Kovtkov, was recruited into the Russian military and sent to invade Ukraine.
Within months of being mobilised, Kovtkov went missing. “It was so hard to get any information from the Russian Government. I did not know where he was, or in what state,” Ms Krynina told The i Paper, during an interview at a park in central Kyiv.
Ms Krynina decided to find her partner herself. Speaking to his colleagues and other officials posted with him, she learned that Zhenya — as she fondly called him — had been captured by Ukraine.
With trepidation, Ms Krynina contacted the Ukrainian Government through a helpline called “Khochu Zhit” (translated into “I want to live”), created to encourage Russian soldiers to desert their positions in Ukraine. “They confirmed to me that Zhenya was indeed with them. I was thrilled to find him alive,” she said.
Convinced that, like her, he wanted nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, she packed her bags and, with her two children, made the difficult journey to the “enemy state” in October 2023.
“I didn’t tell anyone, no relatives, no colleagues, it was a total secret. I was probably guided by love or something,” she said.
Ms Krynina said she was against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “from the very first day”, back in 2014 when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. “This war is horrible and unjust. It has only brought grief and destruction, and Putin is the one who started this.”
She blamed the Russian president for the many casualties on both sides. “If it weren’t for him, hundreds of thousands of families wouldn’t have suffered, husbands wouldn’t have died, gone missing, or been captured,” she said.
Her plan was to negotiate her partner’s release on the condition that he would not return to the front lines or to Russia. She hoped they would migrate to a safer place with the kids.
But in Kyiv, she had a rude shock. “He was not happy to see me. He lowered his head and asked me ‘Why did you come here?’” she recalled.
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