At 3:40 a.m., 77-year-old Nina Ivanova emerged from a basement in Lyman with her two daughters. Wearing comfortable shoes and carrying bags stripped down to the bare essentials, they began a journey of nearly 15 kilometres toward safer ground. Drones could already be overhead; after sunrise, shelling usually intensified.
Staying offered little more security. Russian positions had moved to roughly two kilometres from the city, while Lyman was repeatedly struck by glide bombs and drones. Ivanova’s home had been destroyed, her husband had died after a long illness, and the family had spent months living underground in the basement of an apartment block.
Eventually, the choice narrowed to two dangerous possibilities: wait below ground for the next strike or try to escape on foot. Civilian evacuation teams could no longer routinely enter the most exposed parts of the city. Roads were under threat, and FPV drones had turned vehicles carrying civilians into conspicuous and vulnerable objects.
The decision did not come at once. Ivanova said one moment that pushed her beyond what she could endure was seeing a dead body lying in the city. By then, the family had already lived through the destruction of their home, the deaths of neighbours and months without reliable heating, water, communications or regular food deliveries.
Daycom’s analysis indicates that the Ivanovas’ journey is not simply an extraordinary story of endurance. It illustrates a new reality of evacuation close to the front, where the density of reconnaissance and attack drones is steadily shrinking the zone in which moving civilians by road can be considered even relatively safe.
The family’s journey was reconstructed by The New York Times after reporters met the women at an evacuation centre in Sloviansk. Their experience shows how the technological transformation of the war has made the final kilometres between civilians and an evacuation vehicle among the most dangerous stages of getting people out.
Nina and her husband, Borys, had lived in Lyman for decades. They raised their children there and built their life around a house on Michurina Street. Before the full-scale invasion, the city had around 20,000 residents and served as an important railway hub linking different parts of the Donbas.
Russian forces captured Lyman in May 2022. Ukrainian troops retook it five months later, but the front never moved far enough away for normal life to return. Shelling continued, and over time Russian forces again began edging closer through the forests and fields surrounding the city.
Conditions deteriorated sharply last autumn. Regular humanitarian deliveries eventually stopped because of the danger. On December 17, a strike tore through the roof of the Ivanovas’ home and blew out its windows. Two days later, another impact devastated the living room. By then, the family was sheltering with neighbours beneath a five-storey building.
In the freezing basement, people slept beneath several blankets while still wearing coats and hats. Food left from humanitarian supplies was cooked over an open fire balanced on bricks. For Borys Ivanov, 79, who had been bedridden for eight years, those conditions became the final months of his life.
He died on January 12. With fighting making an ordinary burial impossible, his family buried him in the yard. In March, two more people sharing the shelter were killed: one died in a strike, and another was killed the next day while trying to dig a grave for the first victim.
By spring, the situation around Lyman had become even more precarious. FPV drones increasingly shaped not only military movement but civilian evacuation. Ukrainian medics on the Lyman axis have described cases in which drone activity can delay even the evacuation of wounded soldiers for hours or, in extreme circumstances, days.
The Ivanovas hesitated for months. Their supplies were dwindling, the mayor was urging residents to leave, and other civilians had already begun attempting the journey on foot. On May 23, the women decided they could no longer remain underground and made their first attempt to walk out of the city.
It failed. The group reached a forest only to find craters, fallen trees and terrain that was almost impossible to cross. After three hours of searching for a route, daylight was approaching and the danger of shelling was increasing. Exhausted and demoralised, they turned around and returned to the basement.
They then reduced the weight of their bags. Tracksuits were removed, clothing was cut to the minimum and only essential belongings remained. Before the second attempt, Nina barely slept. She understood that another return might mean there would be no third chance to leave.
This time, she was joined by her daughters Olha, 54, and Tetyana, 53, a friend, and another family from the shelter. Among them was a 31-year-old man carrying two pieces of shrapnel in his back from an earlier Russian strike. Backpacks and two cats were balanced on bicycles pushed alongside the group.
On the mayor’s advice, they took a longer route around the city. They passed destroyed buildings and torn railway tracks, then entered burned woodland and a cratered road. Wrecked civilian cars and the remains of military vehicles marked a landscape where movement itself had become dangerous.
They were afraid to stop even for water. Drones were in the air, and shelling usually grew heavier after 7 a.m. The wounded man struggled to maintain the pace. Ivanova later recalled reaching the point where she could barely stay upright, staggering down the road and repeatedly losing her balance from exhaustion.
Anti-drone netting stretched above parts of the route, but it provided little reassurance. Damaged vehicles beneath it showed the limits of that protection. The evacuees knew of other Lyman residents who had been killed while attempting the same journey. Nearly 15 kilometres had become hours of continuous exposure.
After four hours and 20 minutes, the Siverskyi Donets River finally came into view. Ukrainian soldiers, alerted in advance that civilians were coming, emerged from the vegetation along the bank. They gave the women water and told them to remain concealed in the bushes while a crossing was prepared.
The bags and cats went first. Then the civilians crossed two at a time, wearing body armour. A small wooden boat was pulled through the water using ropes. For Nina, that short crossing proved almost more frightening than the hours on the road. She later told her daughters that, had she known about it in advance, she might never have left.
Reaching the opposite bank did not end the journey. The women scrambled up a steep, muddy slope before soldiers loaded them onto all-terrain vehicles. They were driven through the forest to a road where conventional transport could finally reach them and take them to an evacuation centre in Sloviansk.
They arrived at around 10 a.m., covered in mud, physically spent and barely able to eat. A hot shower was the first they had experienced in months. Tetyana called relatives and, for the first time after months without reliable communications, summarised what had happened: their father was dead, their home destroyed, and they had walked almost 15 kilometres out.
Against that story, official evacuation statistics from the Donetsk region take on a different meaning. By late July, around 13,000 civilians were still living in 19 communities officially classified as active combat zones. Thousands more had left or been evacuated during the preceding weeks as the area of danger expanded.
Ukrainian units are increasingly turning to technical alternatives where a vehicle carrying civilians would be too exposed. In May, four elderly residents of the Lyman area, including an injured woman, were evacuated in stages using an unmanned ground vehicle, a boat and then conventional medical transport.
Evacuation from the Donetsk region continued at a significant daily pace through August. On one day alone before August 15, 671 people, including 114 children, were moved away from frontline communities. This is no longer a collection of isolated rescue missions but a sustained movement of civilians westward as the battlefield presses closer.
Yet the Ivanovas’ experience exposes the limits of any evacuation system. A bus can collect people only from a place it can reach. When the last kilometres are dominated by drones, civilians may have to reach the pickup point on foot, by bicycle, by boat or with the help of remotely operated equipment.
At 77, Nina Ivanova did not make the journey because she believed it was safe. She regarded her chances in the basement and on the road as roughly equal. After months of bombardment, the death of her husband and the destruction of her home, the distinction between those two risks had almost disappeared.
Once in Sloviansk, Ivanova reduced the whole journey to a few words: they had escaped from hell. Behind that description lay nearly 15 kilometres on foot — and a new geography of war in which the distance to safety is measured not only in kilometres, but in how much open sky a civilian must cross beneath drones.
