Ex-mayor’s Ukraine rescue mission
A worried New Zealand man asked a Kiwi delivering aid in Ukraine to rescue his partner’s elderly mother from the battered south of the war-torn country. “We’ll get her out,” former Tauranga mayor Tenby Powell said. Anne Gibson reports.
She was alone in her wardamaged apartment in Ukraine, windows blown out, no water and only intermittent electricity, her son worrying she would not survive.
Friends and family feared the worst for Tamara Opeshko, aged 80, “mamushka” (mother) to Aucklandbased son Yuri and mother-in-law to his Kiwi partner, Peter Macky.
Yet for five months, their attempts to persuade her to leave were unsuccessful, despite Macky heading to Europe in June, and Yuri a month later, in the hope she would change her mind.
So they called on ex-tauranga mayor, businessman, entrepreneur and former army colonel Tenby Powell to cross the war-ravaged country to reach the southern city of Mykolaiv to bring her out to safety.
“We will get her out, mate,” Powell told Macky in advance.
On arriving in Mykolaiv, Powell could see Opeshko’s dire situation.
“She won’t survive the winter in an apartment with no windows,” he advised her relatives.
“We have this brief opportunity and you have my assurances that we will get her out and she will be well looked after en route.”
Powell, who knew Macky through mutual friends, has been volunteering in Poland and Ukraine, utilising his specialist expertise.
He gave nearly three decades of military service to the New Zealand Army regular and reserve forces and was a deputy commander of a United Nations mission in Lebanon and Israel from 2001 to 2002.
He holds the rank of lieutenant commander and his military service includes a tour of duty with UN peacekeeping forces in the Middle East.
Macky, a retired lawyer who spends part of each year in Germany, said from Poland that his mother-inlaw had lived in Mykolaiv all her life. She had her routines and a dacha (garden plot) on the outskirts of the city to tend to. Her apartment was full of her mementos.
She had been born under German occupation in 1942 and Macky said she had known previous hardship and deprivation and was resolute. Since Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces invaded on February 24, the city had suffered deeply. It had been shelled for 127 of the past 148 days.
This onslaught had taken its toll on the buildings and infrastructure and Opeshko’s apartment enclave had not been spared.
Since the invasion, Yuri had been in regular contact with his mother.
He learned she was generally in good spirits and that her routine was not affected. But as the weeks and then months progressed, life was becoming more uncertain and often dangerous.
“With stories in the press about a new offensive in and around Mykolaiv, it was time for Yuri to get his mother out and to safety,” Macky recalls.
“She had the opportunity of leaving many times. His best friend from his school days had left in
March. Neighbours and friends had left during April and May.”
But each time the pair tried to get her to leave, she declined.
“Two weeks ago, I told Yuri, ‘You’ve got to tell your mother that she’s being picked up next week and taken to the Polish border and that’s it,” Macky said.
“No more negotiations. No more prevarication by her. This is what was happening.
“I knew I had to speak to her. “I asked a German friend what to do and he said to me ‘lie, if that’s what it takes to get her to leave’.
“So I concocted a story about how
my 93-year-old mother, Elizabeth, had arranged everything to get her out through ‘the ambassador’ because she wanted to see her again.”
After refusing to leave her battered apartment during the past three months, Opeshko had finally agreed to go, Macky said — thanks to the brilliance of the lie.
Arrangements were made with Powell to take his van south through Ukraine to the wrecked apartment in the Black Sea city.
The small van heading through Ukraine occupied Macky’s mind last week.
“She is coming,” a jubilant, almost disbelieving Macky said from his
hotel room in Lublin, Poland, when he knew Powell had picked up his relative.
“We kept in regular contact with Tenby en route and he told me how he’d witnessed the tears as he and one of his team stood quietly in Tamara’s apartment, as they collected her belongings to take down to the van outside.
“As she walked out of her battered fourth-floor home, Tenby told me that Tamara blew a kiss into it before tearfully closing and locking the door.
“He gave her a hug on the landing. Then, holding her hand, they turned away and quietly walked down to the van together.”
Macky and Yuri spent the past few days getting updates as Powell uplifted “mamushka”. The journey was about 1180km.
“The roads are horrific,” Powell said as he neared the Polish border to rendezvous with the couple.
Mother and son had an emotional reunion on Friday.
“Tamara is doing very well,” Macky said. “There’s been a transformation already.
“She said at dinner last night that this was the first time that she had smiled in months.
In her hometown, the shelling would start at 3 nearly every morning and stop about 8am. It’s a ghastly routine . . . so it is so nice that Tamara is now safe and sound with us.”
Macky said the mission to get his mother-in-law to leave Ukraine was torturous and terrifying but he paid tribute to Powell and the team he worked with on the daring excursion.
“Thankfully, Tamara is safe thanks to Tenby.
“This is largely also due to that wonderful Kiwi can-do attitude, the top team, the ‘lie’ and a phantom ambassador,” Macky said.
But, he said, this rescue mission had been just for one person.
“There are many more in peril. So far, 7 million people have been displaced, either internally within Ukraine or have been forced to flee their homeland and there is no end in sight.”
The couple will remain in Poland to help get Opeshko established safely elsewhere in Europe — perhaps Poland.
Meanwhile, Powell will keep bringing in supplies to Ukraine — “everything from tampons to teddy bears, trauma packs to wheelchairs” — and helping people escape.
“I’m doing this all voluntarily. “I have funded my own way here and pay for myself while in situ in Poland and Ukraine.
“We are also providing an evacuation capability for those who need to get out of hazardous areas on our return journeys.
“The distances . . . are long and often those displaced are very emotional, sometimes needing medical and psychological support.”
Powell is inviting people with relatives in Ukraine to message him via Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin in the hope he can help.