She was alone in her Ukraine war-damaged apartment, 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 Auckland-based son Yuri and mother-in-law to his 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 knows 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, told the Herald on Sunday from Poland this week that his mother-in-law 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 mementoes.