Bittersweet victory in Lyman as battle has come at a significant cost to civilians
Success on the battlefield translates into a very different language for the residents of Lyman – and has come at a significant cost to the civilians.
The eastern Donetsk town is a husk of its former self, pummelled to bits with the heart ripped out of it and the few residents still there living beneath ground “like moles”, one told us.
“We don’t care who’s in control here,” one woman told us. “It could be the devil. We just want them to stop shooting.”
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We saw the corpses of Russian soldiers strewn on the road into Lyman, their burnt-out and wrecked vehicles beside them.
Their bodies were bloated and their faces wax-yellow in colour, with personal bags spewing their contents all around them.
“Careful”, one of my colleagues cautioned to our team, “there are mines everywhere”.
Sure enough, hidden amongst the soldiers’ belongings and half-covered with leaves and dirt were several mines along the road.
The Russians had wanted to kill as they beat a retreat in the face of the Ukrainian army.
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The road to Lyman
The recapture of Lyman is a significant victory because it was used by the Russians as a key transport hub – the railway lines used to take supplies and ammunition to their units in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two regions which make up the Donbas.
The severing of this vital supply link is likely to impact not only the Russians’ ability to maintain defences on the eastern front but potentially their plans to move forward. At least, that appears to be the Ukrainian intention.
The recapture has certainly placed them in a good military position on the eastern front and the soldiers are clearly buoyed by these successes.
“In Mariupol, the battle was the biggest,” Roman tells us in halting but clear English.
But here, in Lyman? I ask.
“Here the Russians go away,” he replies, smiling.
“Here they do a little shoot and go away.” There’s another telling smile from him.
Roman says the Russians didn’t put up much resistance
This has been no Mariupol.
Lyman was significantly empty of much Ukrainian military whilst we were in the town, days after it had been seized by the Ukrainians.
This seemed to indicate they’d secured it and already moved forward to try to recapture more villages and towns inside the Donbas.
Lyman is only about 10 miles from the border of neighbouring Luhansk and several soldiers we’ve spoken to are already confidently predicting the reclaiming of further substantial territory there.
But for those left in the wake of these military manoeuvres, the fight to survive has become no less harsh.
Part of a missile in a children’s playground
We found men trying to cut down trees in the grounds of the hospital. They were gathering wood to burn. The town has had no electricity for months and winter is fast approaching.
The hospital building had been holed in several places. We could see stretchers and medical paraphernalia including babies’ cots through the broken windows.
It’s difficult to work out, given that the Russians were holding Lyman for many months, who mounted the attack on the medical facility.
Was it done in the initial capture of the town or during the shelling to try to dislodge the Russian troops?
That will surely form part of an investigation into just what happened here, given attacking a hospital is against international law and a potential war crime.
There are anxious glances from the men cutting wood as an army fuel truck rumbles by. They can see the Russian ‘Z’ symbol – but it’s been painted over with a less distinct Ukrainian cross.
Natalia lives and eats in a basement and says it’s no life
“War over land,” one of them men mutters to us, “but we’ve got nothing to heat our houses… no electricity… nothing.”
The men – like many here – don’t want to be filmed.
“You ask us about referendums,” one woman remonstrates. “We don’t want to talk politics. We want to stop living in shelters. Even dogs have better lives than us right now.”
Natalia takes us down the stairs into a cold, dark concrete shelter where they’ve piled up stocks of wood to do underground cooking and to try to keep warm during the winter.
They don’t seem to believe life is likely to change much for them in the immediate future.
The town might have been recaptured but there’s a deep reluctance to take any chances and a great sense of doubt over whether the fighting is truly over here.
“There are no jobs, no pensions, nothing… no salaries,” Natalia says to us.
“We have nothing… our children have no salaries and no jobs… can you call this a life?” Her voice cracks and she sobs. “I can’t do this any more,” she says.
The police station has been freshly repainted in the colours of the Ukrainian flag
Lyman’s police station still has its signage in Russian but there’s a pot of paint and paintbrushes near the gate which show it’s been freshly remodelled with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
A policeman shows us the picture of the Russian flag which was on the same gate just a few days earlier. Flags and allegiances are all-important here.
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Alex Crawford reports from inside Lyman
Another policeman from Lyman arrives at the group of civilians we’re with – to let them know he’s back in town and will work on trying to reconnect the badly-needed utilities.
“We just need electricity,” several residents say to him, talking over each other at this rare sight of someone in authority.
“It’s just our second day here,” the policeman, Dmytro, tells them. “We can’t fix everything at once.”
But he reassures them: “We know you need it. We are trying.”
Seventy-five-year-old Zina stops cycling to talk to us. Like so many here, she’s endured a lot but with nowhere to go, there’s been little option for her.
“Who wants this war?” she says. “No one wants it… everyone is leaving, everyone has run away… the city is empty.”
‘Everyone is leaving, everyone has run away… the city is empty,’ says Zina
Police try to reassure people they will get things back up and running
And it’s not just Lyman. The surrounding villages and communities around the city have been battered almost beyond recognition.
The roads around the Kharkiv region – where the Ukrainians executed a lightning rout of Russian troops, allowing them to grab back Izyum and move onto Lyman – are littered with rusting carcasses of military vehicles.
The surrounding communities are also mostly empty and much of them, piles of rubble. Victory is bittersweet in Ukraine.
Alex Crawford reports with cameraman Jake Britton and producers Chris Cunningham and Artem Lysak.
World
Israeli soldiers ‘psychologically broken’ after ‘confronting the reality’ in Gaza, UN expert says
A UN expert has said some young soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are being left “psychologically broken” after “confront[ing] the reality among the rubble” when serving in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was responding to a Sky News interview with an Israeli solider who described arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza.
She told The World with Yalda Hakim that “many” of the young people fighting in Gaza are “haunted by what they have seen, what they have done”.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms Albanese said. “This is not a war, this is an assault against civilians and this is producing a fracture in many of them.
“As that soldier’s testimony reveals, especially the youngest among the soldiers have been convinced this is a form of patriotism, of defending Israel and Israeli society against this opaque but very hard felt enemy, which is Hamas.
“But the thing is that they’ve come to confront the reality among the rubble of Gaza.”
An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Pic: AP
Being in Gaza is “probably this is the first time the Israeli soldiers are awakening to this,” she added. “And they don’t make sense of this because their attachment to being part of the IDF, which is embedded in their national ideology, is too strong.
“This is why they are psychologically broken.”
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said he believes the Sky News interview with the former IDF solider “reflects one part of how ugly, difficult and horrible fighting in a densely populated, urban terrain is”.
“I think [the ex-soldier] is reflecting on how difficult it is to fight in such an area and what the challenges are on the battlefield,” he said.
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Ex-IDF spokesperson: ‘No distinction between military and civilians’
‘An economy of genocide’
Ms Albanese, one of dozens of independent UN-mandated experts, also said her most recent report for the human rights council has identified “an economy of genocide” in Israel.
The system, she told Hakim, is made up of more than 60 private sector companies “that have become enmeshed in the economy of occupation […] that have Israel displace the Palestinians and replace them with settlers, settlements and infrastructure Israel runs.”
Israel has rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza, citing its right to defend itself after Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.
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‘Israel has shifted towards economy of genocide’
The companies named in Ms Albanese’s report are in, but not limited to, the financial sector, big tech and the military industry.
“These companies can be held responsible for being directed linked to, or contributing, or causing human rights impacts,” she said. “We’re not talking of human rights violations, we are talking of crimes.”
“Some of the companies have engaged in good faith, others have not,” Ms Albanese said.
Read more:
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Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The companies she has named include American technology giant Palantir, which has issued a statement to Sky News.
It said it is “not true” that Palantir “is the (or a) developer of the ‘Gospel’ – the AI-assisted targeting software allegedly used by the IDF in Gaza, and that we are involved with the ‘Lavender’ database used by the IDF for targeting cross-referencing”.
“Both capabilities are independent of and pre-ate Palantir’s announced partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry,” the statement added.
An Israeli reservist who served three tours of duty in Gaza has told Sky News in a rare on-camera interview that his unit was often ordered to shoot anyone entering areas soldiers defined as no-go zones, regardless of whether they posed a threat, a practice he says left civilians dead where they fell.
“We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die,” he said. “If they’re inside, they’re dangerous you need to kill them. No matter who it is,” he said.
Speaking anonymously, the soldier said troops killed civilians arbitrarily. He described the rules of engagement as unclear, with orders to open fire shifting constantly depending on the commander.
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division. He was posted twice to the Netzarim corridor; a narrow strip of land cut through central Gaza early in the war, running from the sea to the Israeli border. It was designed to split the territory and allow Israeli forces to have greater control from inside the Strip.
He said that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.
“In one of the houses that we had been in, we had the big territory. This was the closest to the citizens’ neighbourhood, with people inside. And there’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know it, and that they know they are not allowed to pass it,” he said. “But how can they know?”
People who crossed into this area were most often shot, he said.
“It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle,” he said.
The soldier is seen in Gaza. Photos are courtesy of the interviewed soldier, who requested anonymity
The soldier described a prevailing belief among troops that all Gazans were terrorists, even when they were clearly unarmed civilians. This perception, he said, was not challenged and was often endorsed by commanders.
“They don’t really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road, and they say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn’t be there, and if he still comes, it means he’s a terrorist,” he said.
“This is what they tell you. But I don’t really think it’s true. It’s just poor people, civilians that don’t really have too many choices.”
He said the rules of engagement shifted constantly, leaving civilians at the mercy of commanders’ discretion.
“They might be shot, they might be captured,” he said. “It really depends on the day, the mood of the commander.”
He recalled an occasion of a man crossing the boundary and being shot. When another man came later to the body, he too was shot.
Later the soldiers decided to capture people who approached the body. Hours after that, the order changed again, shoot everyone on sight who crosses the “imaginary line”.
The Israeli soldier during his on-camera interview with Sky News
At another time, his unit was positioned near the Shujaiya area of Gaza City. He described Palestinians scavenging scrap metal and solar panels from a building inside the so-called no-go zone.
“For sure, no terrorists there,” he said. “Every commander can choose for himself what he does. So it’s kind of like the Wild West. So, some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don’t face the consequences of that.”
The soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza, citing the Hamas-led 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Dozens of hostages have since been freed or rescued by Israeli forces, while about 50 remain in captivity, including roughly 30 Israel believes are dead.
He recalled soldiers openly discussing the killings.
“They’d say: ‘Yeah, but these people didn’t do anything to prevent October 7, and they probably had fun when this was happening to us. So they deserve to die’.”
He added: “People don’t feel mercy for them.”
“I think a lot of them really felt like they were doing something good,” he said. “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren’t innocent.”
The IDF soldier during one of his three tours in Gaza
In Israel, it is rare for soldiers to publicly criticise the IDF, which is seen as a unifying institution and a rite of passage for Jewish Israelis. Military service shapes identity and social standing, and those who speak out risk being ostracised.
The soldier said he did not want to be identified because he feared being branded a traitor or shunned by his community.
Still, he felt compelled to speak out.
“I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country,” he said
“I think the war is… a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over,” he said.
He added: “I think in Israeli community, it’s very hard to criticise itself and its army. A lot of people don’t understand what they are agreeing to. They think the war needs to happen, and we need to bring the hostages back, but they don’t understand the consequences.
“I think a lot of people, if they knew exactly what’s happening, it wouldn’t go down very well for them, and they wouldn’t agree with it. I hope that by speaking of it, it can change how things are being done.”
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division
We put the allegations of arbitrary killings in the Netzarim corridor to the Israeli military.
In a statement, the IDF said it “operates in strict accordance with its rules of engagement and international law, taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.
“The IDF operates against military targets and objectives, and does not target civilians or civilian objects,” the statement continued.
The Israeli military added that “reports and complaints regarding the violation of international law by the IDF are transferred to the relevant authorities responsible for examining exceptional incidents that occurred during the war”.
On the specific allegations raised by the soldier interviewed, the IDF said it could not address them directly because “the necessary details were not provided to address the case mentioned in the query. Should additional information be received, it will be thoroughly examined.”
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The statement also mentioned the steps the military says it takes to minimise civilian casualties, including issuing evacuation warnings and advising people to temporarily leave areas of intense fighting.
“The areas designated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip are updated as needed. The IDF continuously informs the civilian population of any changes,” it said.
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