A mother of three sat in a Ukrainian rehabilitation center, clutching her phone, willing it to ring, trying to piece her shattered family back together.

Liliia Prutian, 55, was working as a military medic when Russian troops invaded in February 2022. They captured her, abused her, accused her of terrorism and held her for two and a half years.

After her release, she spent much of her time in this rehabilitation center, in a forest on the outskirts of Kyiv, going to government interviews, doctors’ appointments, group therapy sessions, horseback-riding and ski lessons, massages, yoga classes and reconstructive surgery on her right eardrum.

But what Ms. Prutian really wanted was to recover her youngest son, Dima Zahrebaiev, whom she had not seen in three years. He was now 20, living alone in their home in the family village, under Russian occupation since 2022. Fearing he would be forced into the Russian Army, she was desperate to rescue him, though it would be an elaborate, dangerous venture.

Finally, just before 7 p.m. one Sunday, the phone jangled and she answered before the first ring finished. Struggling to keep her voice steady, she used bland language, unsure who was listening.

“Dima, hey, how are you?” she asked. “Everything OK?”

Their separation is the story of many families in the 20 percent of Ukraine controlled by Russia. Millions fled those occupied territories but millions stayed, unwilling or unable to leave. As cities were reduced to rubble, families like Ms. Prutian’s were split, an enduring source of anguish and one reason that Ukraine is balking at giving up land as part of any peace talks.

The father of Ms. Prutian’s three sons died years ago. Her oldest son served in the Ukrainian Army. Her middle son joined the Russian Army, leaving Dima, by far the youngest, to fend for himself.

She planned Dima’s escape with care, paying a taxi driver about $115 to smuggle him a temporary Ukrainian passport. She hired another driver who ferried people from the occupied territories through Russia to Belarus and eventually back to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

On the phone, Ms. Prutian peppered Dima with questions: Was he getting ready to leave? (Yes.) Did he find a hose to drain the heating system? (Yes.) Had he seen his uncle? (Not yet.) Was everything on track as planned? (Yes.)

“Make sure to dress warmly for the trip,” she told him. “But don’t overdo it, either. If it gets too warm, you can always take off your jacket. Just don’t let yourself freeze. You might have to wait outside for a long time. Did you decide on shoes? Do you have a pair?”

In days, Dima planned to leave the only home he had ever known to meet his mother in Kyiv, where he had never been. He packed a large gym bag, folding up two of his mother’s favorite dresses — one pink, one blue — and some of his T-shirts and sweaters. He stuffed in his soccer ball and his hat.

Dima hid his temporary passport inside his backpack. And he waited.

The Mother

Ms. Prutian raised her sons in the cinder-block house her parents had built in Blyzhnie, a village in the Donetsk region of about 750 people, with grain elevators, farms and low-slung buildings.

In 2014, protesters ousted the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, and Moscow retaliated by launching a shadow war in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin backed separatist militias and deployed its own forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the area called the Donbas.

Jobs became scarce. Ms. Prutian, who had trained as an accountant, got government aid and earned the equivalent of about $140 a month working at a gas station.

Then she decided to join the army, where the pay was about $365 a month. At that time, joining the Ukrainian military was a patriotic statement in the Donbas, where some people sympathized with Russia, pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother. Yet doing so was very rare for a mother.

Still, Ms. Prutian was staunchly Ukrainian, and she needed the money, so she enlisted in early 2017, as an accountant for the military, helping to manage the finances of a battalion. The job required her to leave home.

She was 47. Her two older sons were adults. Dima was only 12.

Ms. Prutian relied on her older sons, relatives and friends to care for Dima. She came back every two or three weeks, and baked honey cakes and made pizzas piled with meat. She rationalized her absences, telling herself she did what a man would do so her family could survive. And, she said, she found a sense of purpose in the army.

She trained as a combat medic and, in 2019, was sent to the front lines.

When her contract finished, she returned home for five months in 2020 to be with Dima. Then she enlisted again. So did her oldest son.

After the full-scale Russian invasion, Ms. Prutian’s unit was sent to protect Mariupol, a vital port city. The battles there were fierce, and the unit kept fighting.

Just 16 days into the war, Russian troops surrounded Ms. Prutian and six other Ukrainian soldiers in a village north of Mariupol. Out of ammunition, they surrendered.

Three Russians separated her from the men and locked her in a house, interrogating her for days. Why did she join the army? Who did she serve with? The soldiers then demanded sex, she said. Ms. Prutian negotiated. “At least let it be just one of you,” she later recalled saying.

One Russian soldier then raped her, she said.

The New York Times could not independently verify her account, but it is consistent with those that other women have given to human rights groups of sexual assault in captivity. Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to an inquiry about her experience, but it has generally denied abusing prisoners.

Days later, she was locked in a basement cell in Donetsk city. More than 20 women were crammed into a space designed for 10, she said. They had to share mattresses at night, sing the Russian national anthem every morning and stand all day.

If they sat down, she said, the guards beat them. Water was scarce, and the toilet stopped working. The women kept leftover soup to use the liquid to flush the toilet, she said.

Ms. Prutian’s ears, damaged in combat, became infected. She started losing her hearing.

In summer 2023, she was moved to a prison in southern Russia and put on trial on terrorism charges, a case that was covered by local media.

At one hearing, her middle son submitted written testimony against her. That was how she learned that he had joined the Russian Army, that their family could never be whole again.

Eventually she managed to send letters to Dima and her oldest son.

In September 2024, Ms. Prutian was still on trial when she was suddenly released in a prisoner swap. Back on Ukrainian-controlled soil, she kissed the trees and walked barefoot in the grass. Mostly, she worried about Dima.

The Son

In February 2022, Blyzhnie was a hiccup on the Russian march to the coast. Soldiers overran the village and made it theirs. Ukrainian flags were thrown away or laid on the ground as crude welcome mats in front of grocery stores. Flags went up for the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Russian proxy regime.

Troops moved into the homes of residents who had fled, using Blyzhnie as a staging area for assaults on Volnovakha, a nearby transportation hub.

At first, Dima, a slight 17-year-old with dark hair, was afraid to step outside. Before her capture, his mother called and texted when possible. Once, he told her he could see Russian soldiers near her fruit trees.

Then she stopped responding. For months, he did not know if she was alive.

After staying briefly with his middle brother — who had always opposed his mother and older brother joining the Ukrainian Army — Dima moved back home, alone again.

Dima, who has Type 1 diabetes, was small for his age, but he had grown up quicker than his friends. He left school after ninth grade, enrolling in a nearby forestry technical college and studying to repair tractors.

Now, school had stopped. Jobs were nonexistent. Internet and phone service were frustratingly slow. Walking around Blyzhnie, he put his head down when he passed Russian soldiers.

Dima asked his oldest brother, fighting for Ukraine, to send him money, about $80 at a time, which Dima had to convert into Russian rubles to buy groceries. He made simple dishes: pasta, porridge and fried eggs.

In September 2022, he got seriously ill from complications from diabetes. His middle brother drove him to the region’s major hospital and left him there. Lying in the intensive care unit, Dima had no idea that his mother was being held prisoner less than five miles away.

It was around that time, apparently, that the middle brother definitively chose sides, his mother and brothers said. He married a pro-Russian Ukrainian. He sold his mother’s car. He stopped talking to his brothers. Before long, he enlisted in the Russian Army.

It was the kind of rupture that has torn apart families throughout the occupied territories.

In the hospital, no one visited Dima. With no adult to take responsibility, he stayed for months until a teacher from his school found him and signed him out.

It was winter of 2023, a year after the invasion. More than half of Blyzhnie’s population had fled. Dima found Russian soldiers living in his home but moved back in anyway, a singular protest. The soldiers soon left, abandoning their uneaten military meals, old kettles and an electric stove. Dima noticed many things were missing: cutlery, gold, jewelry, a laptop, and some of his clothes and shoes.

He returned to school and took on a part-time construction job. He learned to make borscht and fry sausages. He got a Russian passport, which he needed to pay his utilities, collect canned food from aid agencies and attend school.

The war was close. Dima saw dead bodies twice. He saw Russian soldiers and hoped they wouldn’t force him into the army.

In late February 2025, Dima began his journey. A taxi took him to meet a jeep in Volnovakha, joining others escaping the occupation. One passenger was going to Belarus; another was taking her child to unoccupied Ukraine.

Dima lied at border checkpoints. They crossed first into Russia, the only practical and somewhat safe way out of occupied Ukraine, then into Belarus and then Poland before going back to Ukraine, a trip covering 1,740 miles. They slept in the vehicle. When Dima finally arrived in Kyiv and spotted his mother at the train station, he ran to her and hugged her tightly.

Ms. Prutian kissed her boy, in his filthy coat and faded jeans. She saw how he smiled but seemed pensive. She felt oddly numb.

“I was afraid that I didn’t feel anything,” she later explained. “I can’t say I felt joy. Meeting him felt like meeting a stranger. They say that’s normal after captivity. ”

Ms. Prutian set up a new home with Dima and her older son, now discharged from the military, in Dnipro, a city about 60 miles west of the frontline.

People back home said her middle son had suffered a head injury in a drone attack. She didn’t try to find out more.

Ms. Prutian dreams of returning to their village. For now, she has a desk job in the Ukrainian Army. It takes her away from home much of the time, but it is far from the fighting.

Adjustment to life with her sons has been hard — they had to work to fit back together. Dima was initially so reserved that he asked permission for everything, and did not talk much.

“Dima, don’t be afraid,” his mother told him. “No one here’s going to punish you for what you say.”

Slowly, he opened up, taking his mother’s hand when they walked, as he used to. He resumed taking classes.

Lately, Ms. Prutian has started feeling like herself again. Still, she treats Dima as if he were much younger. She constantly mothers him, wiping his face, hugging him.

“Maybe I feel guilty for not doing enough when I couldn’t, but I don’t feel I’m overdoing it now,” she said. “You can never love someone too much.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.