SVIATOHIRSK, Ukraine – The Ukrainian army has achieved a number of military successes in recent weeks.

But these gains came with a sad twist:

the land he has claimed is largely deserted and in ruins.

In the pine forests and hills where battles are now being fought in northeastern and eastern Ukraine, fuel trucks, tanks and pickup trucks roar along muddy roads to press the attack, completely traversing towns and villages destroyed and abandoned.

In Lyman, a strategically important regional center claimed by the Ukrainian military on Saturday, the day after Russia declared the region annexed, wind blew over blocks where every house was reduced to a pile of bricks.

In nearby Sviatohirsk, a once bustling city that welcomed tourists and pilgrims visiting a revered Orthodox monastery, the Roche Royal hotel was strangely empty, most of its windows broken, its rooms and corridors littered with discarded food wrappers. Russian rations and broken glass.

“We are clearing the land, but no people on it,” said in an interview Vitaly Zagoruyko, a Ukrainian army soldier as he stood guard at the dock of a speedboat that soldiers used to cross the Siversky Donets River, nearby. to a blown up bridge.

Looking at the destroyed city, he spoke of the Russian soldiers who had occupied it.

“They come to us and say:

‘We are brotherly peoples’.

And I say: ‘We are no longer brothers’. Siblings they don’t kill to the brothers ».

In two counter-offensives in the south and north-east, the Ukrainian army is rapidly recapturing the territory.

advances

On Tuesday, officials said they had breached Russian defenses in the southern region of Cherson.

The trailers cheer Ukrainians and open glimpses of some of the worst destruction seen during the war, after towns and villages were fought twice:

in the Russian invasion and the Ukrainian counterattack.

In the eastern Donbas region, up to 80% of the population fledor west before the Russian invasion last winter, becoming internally displaced in western Ukraine or refugees in Europe.

When Ukraine reacted last month, some of those who remained fled the fighting east to Russia.

Some “ran to the other side, towards the enemy,” Zagoruyko said of the former inhabitants of the dilapidated ghost town he now patrols.

Anyway the president Volodymyr Zelensky Ukraine tries to limit the flight of Ukrainian citizens to Russia during the counter-offensive.

In his late night speech on Monday, he assured Ukrainians living in the territory that the country said they would be treated fairly by the return of the Ukrainian authorities.

The Russian army killed a uncertain number of Ukrainian civilians in fighting and extrajudicial executions during the occupation, further emptying the areas Ukraine now claims.

Ukrainian authorities have yet to provide full estimates of population loss in areas recaptured during the offensives.

But in a hint, the Ukrainian army liberated the city of Lyman, where some 5,000 residentsaccording to local police, from a population of 22,000 Before the war.

Maria Varenikova contributed to this report.

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