Moscow - Belarusian woman Yulia Moiseyenko has been reunited with her parents two decades after she went missing during a train ride at age 4, authorities announced this week.
Heading from Minsk to a town in eastern Belarus in 1999, she went missing and somehow ended up travelling to the western Russian city of Ryazan, remembering only her parents' first names, the Belarusian Interior Ministry said in a statement.
"The problem was that the Belarusian police searched for me only in Belarus, while in Russia there was no information about such a missing girl," 24-year-old Moiseyenko said in comments carried by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
Moiseyenko was raised in Russian foster care. Last month a friend found a missing person notification during an internet search and called the Belarusian authorities to see whether it could be about her.
Moiseyenko was subsequently reunited with her parents, and a DNA test confirmed their relationship.
"We lived with hope for 20 years," Moiseyenko's mother, Lyudmila, was quoted as saying. "We lived with the hope that we would find her."