GUTSY GRAMPA’S WAR ZONE RESCUE!
Michigan doc’s daring bid to free family from Ukraine
AHERO doctor from Massachusetts — desperate to pry his daughter and new grandbaby from the jaws of the Russian war machine in Ukraine — flew to the blood-soaked country and led his family on a desperate wilderness hike to safety! Fitchburg podiatrist
Dr. William Hubbard guided 19-year-old daughter Aislinn, her boyfriend and the couple’s nine-month-old baby boy across the treacherous terrain, using satellite maps to mark their daring dash to freedom.
“The Ukrainians were just making things difficult because we were foreigners, so automatically their mind went to the worst place and thought we were trying to steal a baby out of the country,” says Hubbard.
“We were left with no other alternative than to devise a plan to get out of the country on our own!”
Since 2018, Aislinn has been living about 18 miles from the nowbesieged Ukrainian capital, where she studies ballet at Kyiv Choreographic College.
The gutsy granddad decided to take matters into his own hands when a planned rescue mission got bogged down in international red tape. He says he spent weeks in Ukraine trying to figure out a way to get them to the international border some 300 miles away. Exhausted after hours of hiking, the family finally crossed over into Slovakia, where another hurdle awaited them — Aislinn had given birth to little Seraphim at home during the pandemic so the boy didn’t have documentation that would allow him to cross the border!
The determined doc offered officials a DNA test to prove the baby was part of the family.
Now they plan to head toward Portugal.
"We will present ourselves to the American Embassy in Lisbon at that point,” says Hubbard. “There will be two new DNA tests — one for the boyfriend and one for my daughter — and they should be able to get all the rest of the documents within the next three or four weeks.”