In a battered Ukrainian city, the last battle is against winter

LYMAN, Ukraine – During the wartime winter, any obstacle can make life difficult for firefighters in Lyman.

The mobile phone service is so bad in this eastern Ukrainian city that a emergency call did not arrive.

Water is in short supply, so the town’s only fire truck barely has enough to put out a blaze.

Some streets in the suburbs are impracticable by the presence of mines and unexploded ammunition.

And then there are the windows.

After the war engulfed Lyman in a month-long wave of destruction, damaging and destroying neighborhoods with explosive shells, it blew out thousands of windows.

That is why the workers of the emergency services department No. 21, Lyman’s only operational fire station, are often engaged in an arduous but important task:

cover broken windows and damaged roofs when winter arrives.

“It all started in winter, and winter is back,” says Andriy Liakh, 33, a rescuer from a nearby town who now works in Lyman.

No more than 25 to 30 percent of Lyman’s buildings are totally unrepaired, he estimated, meaning that much work remains to be done to preserve the rest.

After heavy bombing at the start of the war, Russian occupation in the spring and summer, and Ukrainian liberation in the fall, the ED staff gradually become familiar with a radically different city.

There are fewer resources and workers, and temperatures continue to plummet, making terms they are extremely difficult.

This month, reporters from The New York Times spent a day with the Park 21 firefighters as they repaired buildings and responded to a house fire in Lyman, offering a brief window into a Ukrainian city that sits between its destruction and hopefully its rebuilding.

The sound of shelling at the front was not far off.

“We are adults; we understand our service, what is required,” said Liakh, clean-shaven and tired.

As war creeps into the colder months, winter has become a weapon in its own right.

Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure have left thousands without electricity, frozen in basements and huddled around wood-burning stoves.

On Thursday, Moscow launched one of its biggest attacks to date with a drone burst and cruise missiles aimed at the country’s energy grid in Kyiv and other major cities.

Near the front, in towns and cities without electricity for months, freezing temperatures are a part of life.

The inhabitants survive by hoarding firewood, rationing fuel for generators, and keeping themselves warm.

In the trenches of the battlefield, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers face frostbite, hypothermia and weeks of cold meals, constantly exposed to slippery mud and knee-deep puddles on the hottest days, and hard, frozen ground during the coldest nights.

This month, the wake-up call for Station 21’s small crew came just before the cook finished preparing a hearty lunch of noodles and meat in an old Soviet-era field kitchen.

A house was burning in the north of the city.

Lunch would have to wait.

It was a miracle that the switchboard picked up the emergency call.

At around 11 a.m., the city’s cell phone towers went down as maintenance workers began daily repairs to Lyman’s power grid.

The fire, which broke out around 13, was seen by a neighbor who had a few bars of cell phone signal.

But instead of calling Lyman’s 911 number, the person dialed a nearby town’s number, which in turn reached Station 21 via star link, a satellite internet service widely used in Ukraine, especially in combat zones.

Old red and white Soviet fire truck arrived on the scene.

By the time they reached the modest home, the fire was manageable.

Clad in body armor – a reminder that the threat of bombing was still present at Lyman – firefighters proceeded to put out the flames.

The fire was small, so they didn’t run out of water this time.

“The house is abandoned; the owner has gone somewhere; and some bums have been sitting here all night, warming themselves with the stove,” said Serhiy, 43, a tall, weather-beaten security inspector.

“The stove was broken, but it was trying to get warm anyway,” she explains, standing on the patio as her colleagues climb down the roof and open the pipe.

“He lit a fire and ran away. The neighbors saw him in time.”

With a broken window, a hole in the roof, and some crumbling walls, the house was largely intact.

Several others in the street had suffered worse fates, reduced by shelling to piles of rubble or black husks.

The neighborhood had been devastated by the fighting, but was considered the less damaged part of the city.

As the Russians advanced in the spring, they bombarded southern Lyman with artillery and rockets, turning the neighborhood of multi-story houses into an apocalyptic ghost town.

Hundreds of windows of the whitish high-rise residential buildings showed their chipped glass teeth.

A medical college building collapsed in on itself like a cardboard box being punched, and one wing of the city hospital had a hole in the roof and a wall two stories high.

Of the 24,000 pre-war inhabitants, approximately 3,000 still live in Lyman.

Winter is a dangerous time for fires, Serhiy said.

Most are caused by makeshift heating systems people use to try to stay warm, he said, some in damaged homes.

Members of Lyman’s emergency service, who left with the last evacuees before the Russian occupation in late May, were among the first to return after Ukraine retook the city in early October.

The Russians withdrew together with the emergency response team they had placed at station 21, which consisted mainly of Russians but also, apparently, some workers recruited from the Ukrainian team.

During the occupation, the station garage was bombed and an ambulance caught fire; smoke blackened the walls and ceiling.

“As soon as I heard Lyman was going to be released, I knew they were going to call us,” Liakh said. Prior to the Russian occupation, Station 21 had newer vehicles and around 120 employees.

There are now only about fifty workers, after some fled with the retreating Russians.

Divided loyalties among the united rescuers are rarely discussed, but those who returned after Lyman’s release compared those who stayed and worked for the Russians to traitors.

“It’s like a Ukrainian soldier going to the Russian army to serve against Ukraine,” Liakh said.

Like Serhiy, Liakh returned to Lyman without his family members, anticipating the challenges that awaited Lyman residents in the winter.

“I was prepared for anything,” he added.

Resistence

In a badly damaged city like Lyman, people’s lives were focused on day-to-day survival for many months.

Some of the challenges they usually face have just occurred to those who have just seen their infrastructure destroyed.

“The unoccupied territories near the front line are better prepared for winter than the whole of Ukraine,” says Serhiy Lipskyi, deputy head of the Lyman territorial community emergency service.

“People here knew that winter was coming and they would have no electricity, gas, heating… nothing,” he added.

Some residents moved from the bombed-out southern area to relatives’ homes or abandoned houses in other parts of the city, hoping it would be easier to survive there.

Others lived as members of communes in the basements of multistory buildings, formed when people spent months hiding underground from heavy shelling.

Kateryna, an elderly woman who manages part of the humanitarian aid that comes to the city from an abandoned nursery school, has moved out of her apartment into her mother-in-law’s house to keep warm with a wood stove.

“We were told that there is no heating in the apartments and that there won’t be any,” he explains.

“It’s okay. We’ll survive. We’ll make it. We’ll make it.”

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