At 93, Nikolai Vasenin, a former Red Army soldier and Gulag prisoner who fought for the French Resistance in World War II, is searching for the love he says he lost 60 years ago in France, reports France 24.
"Her name was Jeanne.... A brunette, nothing special. But I must find her at any cost," he says.
"I am 93, there is no reason to wait any longer."
Vasenin's extraordinary nine decades of life have seen him captured by the Nazis, escape from German captivity, join the French resistance and then be arrested on his return to the Soviet Union.
It is believed that Jeanne -- the daughter of a top Resistance commander -- is still alive but so far Vasenin has been unable to realise his final life's mission of meeting her.
Born in 1919, Vasenin was conscripted into the Red Army soon after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
On July 9, 1941, his regiment was encircled near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Wounded, Nikolai -- just like 400,000 other Soviet soldiers -- was taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Following a failed attempt to escape from prison in Nuremberg, he was sent to a labour camp in the Drome region of southern France, which he managed to flee in October 1943 to join a group of Maquisards, rural fighters of the French Resistance.
"I did not speak a word of French," he told AFP by telephone from his home in the Urals region of central Russia.
Read more of this AFP report published on France 24.