The ghostly vacancy of the streets of Lyman in japanese Ukraine belies this metropolis’s strategic significance.
There are not any indicators of Russian troops in any respect on Sunday — few broken Russian tanks, or Russian useless, or Russian prisoners. Members of the Ukrainian Nationwide Guard from the Dnipro-1 unit hover in small numbers on some streets.
The occasional rattle of gunfire, or thud of artillery, pierces the silence. A number of locals emerge, driving bicycles, looking for meals, bewildered about what is going on.
“Someday I put on one cap, one other day a special cap,” mentioned one lady in tears, pretending to take off a hat.
“How can we reside like this,” she mentioned, referring to the altering management of the town.
CNN was among the many first media shops into the just lately liberated metropolis, arriving half-hour after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Lyman fully cleared of Russians troops.
Ukrainian officers and troops had spoken repeatedly of huge numbers of Moscow’s higher models being trapped there. But on Sunday there have been few indicators of encirclement to be seen.
Some officers mentioned Russian corpses had already been cleared away and prisoners eliminated. However locals supplied one other clarification: that Russian forces had left the town on Friday in an orderly style.
“They obtained on their tanks, and drove out,” mentioned Tanya, driving her bicycle again to the bomb shelter, the place she nonetheless spends the nights with 15 others.
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