The Soviet authorities sent him home in 1946 and although they exchanged letters for 10 years, party officials told him he would be sent to the gulag if he continued the correspondence.

Mr Byvshikh was allowed to send one last letter to Elisabeth Valdhelm explaining he was getting married to a Russian woman, something he regretted as a "betrayal" for decades afterwards.

Yesterday, after 60 years of separation, the couple, both 82, announced they would get married this year. Their extraordinary story began in July 1945. They met when Mr Byvshikh was posted to the Thuringia region in central Germany, as the Red Army swept through the defeated country. They fell in love after Mr Byvshikh, a fluent German speaker, was sent to interrogate Ms Valdhelm's father for failing to register with Soviet authorities.

The couple lived together for several months and still saw each other after Mr Byvshikh was posted to another town, but he was sent back to Russia in 1946.

The parting ended in 2005 when Mr Byvshikh was told by friends there was a telephone call for him. "There was Lisa's voice," he told the daily Izvestia. "She was crying and I began to cry too." They were reunited when Ms Valdhelm visited him in his home town of Krasnoyarsk. "What's amazing is that whatever I do it's OK with her and whatever she does is good with me, just as if there had never been a separation of 60 years."

The couple will plan their wedding when they meet again in June. Both were married but are separated.

Their story has focused attention on couples separated at the end of the war. Antony Beevor, the military historian, said there were several forms of relationship between Russian soldiers and German women. "Many German women struck up bargains with Russian soldiers in exchange for protection and food," he said, but added that there were many genuinely loving relationships, "which is what appears to have happened here".