A lot of people ask: why don't those civilians leave? Why are there still 1,600 civilians still in Lyman? Well, some cant leave, but most, who have remained there for the 5 years of war, choose to stay there, either because they are waiting for the Russian Army as "liberators" or because they have lived in their house their whole lives and don't know anything else. By this stage of a battle, its usually a combination of both. One quite striking example was, when earlier this year where the frontline looked something like what is shown on the map, some of the civilians in Shandryholove, which was under Russian control at the time, would simply walk down the road from the village, cross over the frontline, and enter Ukrainian-controlled Svyatohirsk to buy food and medicine from a shop there, and then simply return back across the frontline to their homes and basements in Shandryholove. This is, of course, only able to occur due to the very small number of soldiers on each side actually concentrated along the frontline, and those who are there being hidden away to avoid being detected by drones. Something similar occurred in the Vovchansk direction earlier this year, where civilians living in the villages of Lyman and Synelnykove would walk south to the village of Buhaivka to buy food and medicine from a store and then return across the frontline to their homes. In Kostyantynivka, some older civilians would drive to Druzhkivka (before the city was on the frontline) to collect their pensions, and then return to Kostyantynivka, where fighting was already taking place within the city at the time.