Stepanskyi, his wife Lyda and their two children, Oksana and Oleh, once lived in Oleshky, a town on the left bank of the Dnipro River, in the part of Ukraine’s Kherson region that is now under Russian control.
The family witnessed firsthand the outbreak of war on 24 February 2022 when they heard gunfire and explosions as fighting raged over the Antonivskyi Bridge in the nearby regional capital of Kherson.