Empty stomachs and suspicion: Fights over food in liberated Ukrainian town
The hunger is sharp in Lyman but the instinct to survive, even sharper.
It’s been exceptionally honed in those Lyman residents who’ve remained through months of fighting, bombing and Russian occupation. And there are a surprisingly large number of them.
We see crowds on the outskirts of the town, gathering around a small warehouse where there is a rare handout of emergency supplies.
Now that the terrifying crashing sounds of battle are further away, many are emerging for the first time since the rapid pull-out of Russian troops about a week ago.
But life after liberation of this Donbas town is still an extraordinarily tough endurance test. There’s little food, no power, no running water, and no communications. They’ve been cut off from everything as the war raged around them, edging ever closer until it finally set up camp inside their town.
They only realised the fighting had moved on and control of the town had changed hands when the howling rumble of war faded.
So, word-of-mouth about donated bread immediately leads to long queues and there’s a barely contained desperation in the crowd as they each try to secure one of the boxes of aid being handed out.
Empty stomachs and suspicion
“I’ve waited for hours,” one elderly woman complains.
“My legs are very tired. How do you think it is? I’ve been cooking on a fire for months now. Do you think that’s a good life?”
When another pensioner using two crutches is called ahead of her in the queue, she cries out bitterly again.
“You weren’t like that before,” she says accusingly to the old man, looking at his crutches suspiciously and eyeing his limp with disdain and doubt. Empty stomachs and sheer war weariness have ground down everything but some of the most basic impulses in some.
A loud and angry argument breaks out between a young mother-of-four and the elderly woman. It’s over who is in more need of the emergency supplies.
But Olga’s brought her young son with her, and she’s not about to lose this fight.
Olga and her son
“People have become very aggressive,” she says.
“I thought the war would bring us all together. But no, the war’s done the opposite. People are just looking after themselves and don’t help each other. Everyone’s on their own.”
In the end, both women are among those to receive aid. A kind of uneasy harmony is restored… for now.
Read more:
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Shocking number of Russian corpses a grim illustration of Ukrainian battlefield success
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Alex Crawford visits the city of Lyman.
A town that’s finally giving up its secrets
The drift of the fighting as the Ukrainians press forward into the Donbas has meant the forests, the town of Lyman, and the surrounding areas are finally giving up their secrets.
The national police chief Ihor Klymenko, who’s in Lyman, says he’s called in experts including a United Nations team after police were directed to two possible mass graves with what appeared to be several hundred people buried together including babies and older children.
The legs of a fallen Russian soldier in Lyman
An abandoned Russian tank in the recaptured city
“We first questioned every civilian who remained in Lyman during the occupation and we discovered there’d been some burials,” he says.
“We checked out the sites and then started excavating. And on exhuming some bodies, we called the specialists in – investigators, forensics, and prosecutors – and after that, full exhumation began. Only after they’ve been examined, can we answer questions about how they died; when they died, and whether they’re civilians or military who’re in the mass graves.”
Demining crews have been operating in Lyman
We see large tents and teams of investigators – some in hazmat suits – sifting through the graves to try to determine the facts but police ask us not to film the area or their work until they’ve been able to establish a few facts.
And there are still many Russian corpses being discovered in the wake of the Ukrainian advance. Those we spot in the woodland around Lyman and the nearby towns also now liberated by Ukrainian troops are already badly eaten by forest flies and rats. But they lie there, mostly untouched.
Booby-trapped corpses
Some have been found with booby traps under them so the mine-clearance teams concentrate first on the roads and verges. The small mine-clearance group we’re with tell us they find about a hundred mines daily – including internationally banned cluster bombs disguised as leaves so as to go unnoticed and cause maximum damage.
The head of this anti-mining group is Anatolyy Krasnopyorov and he says: “We’re finding a lot of them in Donetsk – particularly the ‘leaves’. They’re forbidden under the Geneva Convention but they (the Russians) are still throwing them all around.”
The grave of two civilians in Lyman
He continues: “There are also lots of different anti-personnel mines too which are also forbidden by the Geneva Convention. They’re called black widows and they can blow off half your leg.”
Alex Crawford reports from a newly recaptured Lyman and the Ukrainian Eastern frontline 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.
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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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