LYMAN, Ukraine — Residents of the war-torn town of Lyman ventured onto the streets Sunday morning, enjoying an unusual calm after months of fighting and unsure who was in charge now.
The last of the Russian forces drove out of the city the night before, trying to avoid being encircled by the advancing Ukrainian troops. Not all Russians made it. Burning Russian vehicles and the sprawled bodies of dead Russian soldiers line the roadsides outside of town.
“We still can’t figure out who is what. Are the soldiers on the street Russians or Ukrainians?” wondered Dmytro Hontar as he watched dozens of Lyman residents help themselves to abandoned Russian shops and take away sacks of flour labeled “Russian Humanitarian Aid” in the city’s main square on Sunday morning.
“People just loot everything,” he said, shaking his head and a few minutes later joined in the frenzy himself.
“We had no help from anyone here. We only ate the stocks we had accumulated before the war,” explained Tamara Kozachenko, while dragging two bags of five kilograms of flour behind her.
“The Russians, we didn’t even see them disappear,” she added, before asking in alarm, “Is it final now?”
Lyman residents Sunday helped themselves to supplies left behind by Russian forces.
Lyman was home to about 22,000 people before the war and is a strategic town on the northern tip of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, one of four territories Russia claimed as its own country after mock referendums last month. His loss is a major embarrassment for President Vladimir Putin – the first such retreat from a city he claims is officially part of Russia.
After a rapid Ukrainian offensive that pushed Russia out of occupied parts of the Kharkiv region last month, the Russian defeat here opens the way for Ukrainian forces to push into the nearby Luhansk region, reducing the territorial gains that Russia has been making of late , continue to be undone months. Luhansk and Donetsk are collectively known as Donbass, and Russia has occupied parts of both regions since 2014.
The speed of Ukraine’s gains in recent weeks has stunned Russia, sparked open criticism of Moscow’s top military and forced Putin to mobilize hundreds of thousands of reservists to bolster Russia’s defenses. Ukraine is racing against the clock trying to retake as much land as possible before the majority of these reservists are trained and deployed.
While a separate, less successful Ukrainian offensive is underway in the southern Kherson region, advances in Kharkiv and the fall of Lyman are allowing Ukraine to regain parts of the adjacent Lugansk region, particularly the Severodonetsk metropolitan area, Russia’s troops captured after bloody fighting in late June .
The Russian withdrawal from Lyman, which came just days after the referendum on joining Russia, was steep.
“No one told us that the Russians were leaving – they just picked up and disappeared without warning,” said Roman Chornomorets, who worked at the local train station before the war.
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He said he was delighted with the Ukrainian victory: “There was misery, darkness, constant shelling, no gas, no electricity. I hope that it will at least get better now.”
Another resident, who declined to give his full name for fear of the future, was less optimistic. He pointed out that Lyman was captured by Russian forces in late May and has now changed hands for the fourth time after being held by Russian proxies and recaptured by Ukrainian troops in 2014. Russia has now pledged to take it back again.
“People here will only be happy when the war is finally over,” he said. “This back and forth really annoys us. All we want is peace and quiet.”
Only a light force of Ukrainian airborne troops entered Lyman on Sunday morning, going from one known Russian location to another looking for remnants of ammunition and stray Russian troops. After entering the local municipal building on Lyman’s main square, the soldiers pulled out Russian flags and placards from last week’s referendum, which proclaimed “Russia and Donbass, forever.” They piled them on the ground and set them on fire.
Ukrainian soldiers in Lyman burn electoral materials from the recently staged referendum on joining the Russian Federation.
As the campfire blazed, a local on a bicycle approached a Ukrainian police officer who had just arrived in Lyman. “How long are you here?” asked the man. “Forever,” said the officer.
“I’m finally home,” the Lyman native added. “I haven’t been home for six months. Too long.”
As he spoke, another local resident, poet Viktor Trokhymenko, approached them with copies of his book Ukraine Above All, wrapped in plastic bags but still soaked. Mr Trokhymenko said he hid the books from the Russians and now wants to give them to the Ukrainian troops.
“To meet you feels like daylight has come after a long polar night,” he said. “It’s been a dog’s life so far. You couldn’t say a word against it [the Russians].”
In a choreographed ceremony in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin declared the annexation of four Ukrainian regions occupied by Russian troops. The celebrations came hours after a Russian attack killed dozens of civilians in one of those areas. Photo: Sputnik/Portal
Although no Russian soldiers and only a few abandoned Russian military vehicles could be seen in Lyman on Sunday, it was not clear what proportion of the thousands of Russian troops made it out of the encirclement when the city was abandoned overnight. A large pocket east of Lyman towards the town of Zarichne has not yet been cleared and Ukrainian artillery could be heard in that direction.
As a Wall Street Journal team attempted to navigate the street past a smoldering Russian infantry fighting vehicle and a shattered minivan, a man whose foot had been severed in a recent explosion crawled onto the pavement next to a green pickup truck marked Z- Russian Army symbol. Five minutes later, Ukrainian soldiers took the man, unsure if he belonged to the Russian armed forces, and took him for medical treatment.
Across Lyman, on a stretch of road that cuts through a dense pine forest, the twisted remains of seven Russian vehicles bear witness to a recent Ukrainian ambush. Nine bodies of young Russian soldiers lay by the roadside, two hugging in unnatural contortions, another lying on his back, skin pale with wax, fists clenched. Nearby, among anti-tank mines and other artillery, lay a severed hand on the asphalt, a wedding ring on one of the three remaining fingers.
The bodies of three Russian soldiers lay by the roadside on the outskirts of Lyman on Sunday.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
As of Sunday morning, Ukrainian troops said many Russian survivors of similar ambushes were still lurking in the woods around Lyman. Foot patrols begin clearing the area.
In the city itself, Ukrainian airborne soldiers cheered entering Lyman for the first time. One stuck a trophy badge of Russia’s proxy state in Donbass on his cap. After an initial firefight on Saturday morning, the Russians retreated to the east side of Lyman towards Zarichne, he said.
“Then the bastards just fled,” said a team leader of the Ukrainian Airborne Forces.
As he and his comrades walked from one formerly Russian-occupied compound to another, they spray-painted over the Z symbols left behind by the occupying forces and instead wrote ZSU, the acronym for Armed Forces of Ukraine.
At the local hospital used by the Russians, they found a room containing several decomposing corpses and the stench was too overpowering to investigate further.
As troops cleared a mansion used by the Russians, they disarmed a tripwire at the entrance. Inside they found boxes of medicines and canned meat that they intended to distribute to local civilians. Then, to everyone’s laughter, a soldier threw another trophy out the window – a dildo. “Do they take that to their wives?” joked a soldier.
Finally, they pulled out a sack full of hand grenades and a box of detonators for her and threw the trophy guns into their pickup truck.
“It’s great that we’re getting help from the Russians,” joked the team manager as we set off.
write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected]
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