In 1999, Yulia Gorina was only four years old when she got separated from her family. One day, she and her father were travelling by train from Minsk to Asipovichy when she mysteriously disappeared.
Viktor Moiseenko fell asleep on the train for a few minutes and when he woke up, he was shocked to see that his daughter was nowhere to be found. He and his wife searched for their daughter for many years, never giving up hope that they would meet again.
According to investigation, Yulia had been snatched by a man and woman who were hiding from police. She was taken across the Belarusian-Russian border and was found near the railway in Ryazan, western Russia, about 800 kilometres from where she had disappeared. She ended up in an orphanage before her foster parents adopted her.
The parents searched frantically for their daughter for many years, but she was never found. The case was reopened in 2017. During the investigation, the parents were given a lie detector test, as there were suspicions that their daughter had been murdered and they actually knew very well where her remains had been hidden.
Yulia’s boyfriend, 31-year-old Ilya Kryukov, after learning how and under what circumstances his girlfriend had been separated from her family, decided to help them so that she could be reunited with her parents.
He searched the internet and found the Moiseenko family, and then a DNA test proved that Yulia was indeed the daughter of Viktor and Lyudmila Moiseenko.
When Yulia saw the photos, she was absolutely sure that Viktor and Lyudmila were her biological parents, and the DNA result only confirmed her belief that she had finally found her family.
Yulia’s father begged for forgiveness
The 24-year-old was finally reunited with her parents and siblings.
Yulia found it hard to recall the three weeks after being lost on the train. She vaguely remembers travelling with a man and woman who later took her to the police. But she has no recollection at all of how she disappeared from the train or how she arrived in Russia.
During the touching encounter, Yulia’s father begged for forgiveness, claiming that they had never given up hope and had not given up looking for her. Yulia’s mother felt that the past 20 years had been an eternity, but to be reunited with her daughter was more than she could have ever asked for.