Many residents of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol have been left without food for their children, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
They also say there is no water or heating in the city, where more than 400,000 people are besieged by Russian forces.
ICRC staff in Mariupol say people are fighting each other over food and stealing fuel from each other’s cars.
All the shops and pharmacies have been looted and as there is no gas supply and the temperature at night is expected to drop to -5°C, it will be very difficult to stay warm.
ICRC staff are warning that villagers are already getting sick.
On Thursday (10), people who have loved ones trapped inside the city were desperately trying to call them.
Dmitro Gurin, a Ukrainian lawmaker who grew up in Mariupol and whose parents are in prison there, said he was last able to speak to his neighbors four days ago.
“We talked for 30 seconds after they went to a place with a signal — there are some of these places that people know about,” Gurin said.
“They said my parents were alive, living in the basement of their building. It’s not a shelter with electricity, water and a bathroom, it’s a basement with nothing.”
Gurin said his parents were using snow to drink water and trying to cook over a campfire outside.
“Can you try to imagine that? His parents, 67 and 69, are drinking snow and trying to cook over a campfire in the winter, and there is continuous bombing,” he said. “This isn’t war anymore. This isn’t army against army. It’s Russia against humanity.”
Arthur Bondarenko, a 35-year-old coffee distributor in Odessa, said he was texting his close friends every day, a couple with a 6-year-old son.
“Every day I text them and say, ‘Hello, good morning, how are you?’ None of the messages reach them.”
Bondarenko said he last spoke to the couple on March 2. “They had no water, no electricity, no heating and there was no shelter under the house.”
Mariupol is a key strategic target for Russia because taking it would allow Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine to join forces with troops in Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
The city has been under heavy bombing for nine days, which has destroyed apartment buildings and flattened residential areas.
Images verified by the BBC showed shelling on Thursday, confirming a city council statement that the attack was underway.
Dmitro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said the situation in Mariupol was the most difficult in the country.
On Wednesday, three people – two adults and a girl – were killed in Mariupol and 17 were injured in a devastating attack that destroyed a maternity ward and a children’s ward of a hospital.
Diana Berg, a Mariupol resident who managed to escape with her husband, said she learned of the attack from the news.
“Yesterday was the most brutal and shocking thing,” she said. “That hospital is very close to where I used to live, I was there a week before, my family doctor is from there. I don’t know if he is still alive,” she said.
Berg also hasn’t been able to talk to his mother-in-law since Saturday (6th) and doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead.
“She texted the day after we left to say she was alive and knew we were still alive,” Berg said. “Since then we don’t know anything.”
City officials have finally managed to start burying bodies lying in the streets, deputy mayor Serhiy Orlov told the BBC on Thursday.
City officials estimate that 1,300 civilians have been killed so far, Orlov said. “Because of the sheer numbers and the continuous bombing, they are being placed in mass graves.”
Berg said news of the mass graves spread through the Telegram app chat groups that people are using to monitor the situation within the city.
“We haven’t heard from our friends, all we know is that they could be buried in these mass graves,” she said.
Numerous planned evacuation attempts for residents of Mariupol have collapsed in the past five days after Russian forces resumed shelling the city despite ceasefire agreements.
lack of medicines
Orlov said city officials are ready at any time to put evacuation plans into effect, but no agreement has been reached with Russia on the establishment of a humanitarian corridor.
Orlov said a group of 100 citizens tried to leave Mariupol on Thursday in a private car and passed a Ukrainian checkpoint, but were forced to retreat when Russian forces fired close to the cars, blocking their path.
Orlov’s own parents and brother were still trapped inside a heavily bombed Mariupol neighborhood, the deputy mayor said, and he had not been able to reach them for nine days.
Oleksandr Protyah, a 43-year-old English teacher, said his mother and a close friend were stranded inside the city and his friend may have run out of diabetes medicine.
“I was able to get him insulin on the first day of the war, but it’s over or will be over soon,” he said. “This is a humanitarian catastrophe.”
There will also be a food crisis soon, Gurin said. “The next thing will be hunger,” he said. “This is not a joke, in a week you will be hungry in central Europe.”
Responding to the attack on the Mariupol hospital on Wednesday, the mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boichenko, said: “How can this be justified? This is a genocide organized by Russia against our people.”
Russia said on Thursday that the maternity hospital destroyed in the attack had been taken over by Ukrainian troops long before it was hit, but images from the Associated Press news agency showed medical staff outside after the blast and a pregnant woman being carried away. out of the building on a stretcher.
“Thank God most of the people were already in the bomb shelter,” said Orlov, the deputy mayor. “Otherwise it would have been a lot worse.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack an “atrocity” and reiterated his call for world powers to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, something that has so far been denied.
Foreign Minister Kuleba said on Thursday that his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov had told Ukrainian authorities that Russia would continue to attack until Ukraine complied with all of its demands, including surrender.
