An American evacuee pulled from a bus by Russian forces while fleeing the Ukrainian city of Kherson has been released after being jailed for 10 days. Tyler Jacob, 28, was taken at a checkpoint in Russian-occupied Crimea, NBC News reports. His mother, Tina Hauser, said from Minnesota that after Kerson fell to the Russians, her son boarded a bus taking foreigners to Turkey, per the New York Times. Jacob has now been reunited with his wife and stepdaughter in a third country, Hauser said, in what she called "a safe area."
Jacob moved to Ukraine, where he's been teaching English, last fall to be with his girlfriend, whom he met on an online dating site. They married in January. His wife and stepdaughter, 11, stayed behind when Jacob left but have since reached another country safely. Hauser said he plans to move back to the US once he obtains visas for his wife and stepdaughter, per Minnesota Public Radio. His family doesn't know why he was kept from leaving Ukraine when other foreigners on the bus were not. Hauser said he was fed sufficiently in jail in the town of Armyansk. "He wasn't treated badly or anything like that," she said.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who worked on getting Jacob released, said he was "unjustly detained." She said the State Department and US Embassy in Moscow also worked on the case. Hauser said her son was interrogated about his marriage certificate, photos, and passport. She spoke to Jacob over FaceTime once he'd arrived in the third country but didn't have time to learn many details of his ordeal. "I heard his voice, and that’s all that matters to me," she said. "It was like angels singing to me." (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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