The bodies were swollen, and some had their mouths open, as if still wearing an expression of shock. As the Ukrainian troops drove by, the dead Russians were unceremoniously placed in black bags.
Sitting atop a tank a few yards away, Leonid, a soldier in Ukraine’s National Guard, pondered Russia’s plans to send more than 300,000 additional troops to Ukraine. “They’re going to need a bigger grave,” Leonid said.
Just two days after Ukrainian troops claimed victory in Lyman, a town of 22,000 that the Russians had used as a vital transport hub in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, there was almost no military presence there. -low – a sign of how quickly the Ukrainian forces are advancing after months. additional earnings, if any.
After Moscow’s “partial mobilization” intended to call up up to 300,000 new troops, Kyiv appears to be making a major effort to retake as much occupied territory as possible before those reinforcements arrive.
Forcing the Russians to withdraw from almost the entire northeastern region of Kharkiv and now Lyman has placed the Ukrainian army in a position of strength to attack the Russians occupying the neighboring region of Luhansk, whose border is less than 24 miles from Lyman by road.
On Monday, the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, voted unanimously to ratify Putin’s claimed annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, though even the spokesman for the Kremlin admitted that it did not know the precise borders of the new Russian territories. given that Russia does not fully control them.
In a separate, slower counteroffensive to the south, the Ukrainians made another breakthrough over the weekend, pushing the Russians back some 20 miles along the west bank of the Dnieper, in a move aimed at recapturing the city of Kherson, which fell to Russia at the start of the war.
As Kyiv plots its next moves, Ukraine’s victory in Lyman will remain symbolic for the message it sent to the Kremlin: Putin’s annexation of partially occupied regions was a farce. Lyman was an integral part of land claimed by Putin at a ceremony in Moscow on Friday, but just a day later his soldiers left in a hurry – some dying on the way out.
When told that at least in Putin’s eyes his citizenship had changed for that day, Lubov Vildyaskina laughed. “Are you serious?” Vildyaskina asked. “I’m in shock.”
On Monday, agents from Ukraine’s internal security service, the SBU, questioned her about what happened under the Russian occupation, including how many Russian rubles she charged for products in her small shop. Across the street, forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatist regime loyal to the Kremlin, had established a police station. But they suddenly abandoned the base two weeks ago, she said. The next day someone spray painted “How could you?” on the building.
Then, over the weekend, the occupation soldiers urged her and others to leave the city while there was still time. Vildyaskina ignored their advice and stayed, watching the convoys roll out of town five months after they arrived. “Now you can sleep at night,” she said.
Although the Ukrainian army surrounded Lyman over the weekend, most Russian forces had withdrawn earlier, residents said. A handful of enemy soldiers, however, might still be hiding in the surrounding woods.
After the Ukrainian army left Lyman in its convoy of armored personnel carriers, a few Ukrainian soldiers implored Washington Post reporters not to enter the town because it could still be dangerous.
Meanwhile, on the northern approach to Lyman, soldiers from the Ukrainian 81st Air Assault Brigade were on the lookout for fleeing Russians. A burly commander said his unit arrested a local separatist in the nearby forest. “The unit operating here was from the area,” the commander said. “They knew the routes through the forest when they needed them.”
In the newly liberated villages, residents were agitated by the crackle of gunfire that still echoed from Lyman.
“What is that?” retired kindergarten teacher Lyudmila asked her 73-year-old neighbor Olena. “Well, they either hunt pheasants or rabbits or Russians,” Olena said with a smile.
During the final weeks of the battle, villagers trapped in the crossfire often knew less than the outside world about the Ukrainian counteroffensive unfolding nearby. After months without electricity or cell phone service, reports have poured in. They used firewood to keep warm and light the long nights. “We lived like cave people,” Lyudmila said.
When the fighting escalated, the villagers retreated to their basements, where they were further cut off from any news. Russian soldiers entered from time to time and warned them that the Ukrainian army would shell the area without mercy. Several elderly residents said they had returned from rare trips outside to find that occupying soldiers had looted their food.
Then last Thursday, the battle died down. Residents emerged to find that the tanks on their streets now carried blue and yellow flags. The Russians were gone and Ukraine had regained control. The fleeing Russians, however, left a mixture of anger and apathy in their wake.
In interviews in the villages of Shandryholove, Drobysheve and Novoselivka, just northwest of Lyman on Thursday, a number of residents blamed the damage to their homes on Ukrainian shelling. Others seemed to care little who controlled the land, as long as the fighting ceased.
In Shandryholove, retired milkmaid Nadia laughed as her husband recalled a Soviet-era film, ‘A Wedding at Malinovka’, in which control of a village changes, but everyday realities remain the same. “Things aren’t getting better here,” she said.
Russian flags that had been displayed around the Lyman City Council building now lie in burnt pieces on the lawn. Documents from the Moscow-based proxy government are still inside, including a list of complaints from citizens. One was the destruction of apartment buildings from shelling.
In a category titled “How to solve the problem”, someone typed that Russia and the Donetsk People’s Republic would create two neighborhoods in the city with new apartment buildings to replace those that were destroyed.
A page of a local pro-Russian newspaper, announcing the referendum organized by Putin for the annexation of the Donetsk region by Russia, was on the ground. The title: “We are going home.
Kamila Hrabchuk and Serhii Korolchuk contributed to this report.
