Mila Panchenko found herself on a station platform in southwest Russia after lack of food and water forced her to hand herself over to pro-Russian forces to escape the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
At the station in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, she was put on a train along with around 200 other Ukrainians and told they were being transported to another part of Russia's Rostov region, which borders Ukraine.
But when the train arrived at its destination, the 53-year-old found herself in Tula province in central Russia, in the town of Suvorov, some 1,000 kilometers away.