Families who managed to get out of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, describe what they left behind as they fled the Russian siege of the city as “hell”. The location is strategic for the Kremlin because it is the last major center of Ukrainian resistance in the corridor that connects Crimea by land to Russia.
Residents report that as Moscow troops bombed the city, bodies piled up in the streets and there was a lack of food and electricity.
“They fired a lot of rockets,” Tamara Kavunenko, 58, told the AFP news agency. She is among 4,300 Mariupol residents who fled this week for Zaporijia, in central Ukraine.
“When the snow fell, we melted it to get water. When not, we boiled river water to drink”, he says. “On the streets are the bodies of many dead civilians. It’s not Mariupol anymore. It’s hell.” More than 2,000 people have died in the city so far, according to Ukrainian authorities — a number that could not be independently verified.
Last Wednesday (16), Kiev accused Russia of bombing a theater in which hundreds of homeless civilians – who are said to have written the word “children” on the sidewalk of the building, according to satellite images captured by a US company on March 14. The country’s authorities say that civilians have already started to be rescued from the scene, but no figures have been released.
About 6,500 vehicles left the city in the last two days, Vadim Boichenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said on the Telegram in the early hours of Thursday (17).
At a Soviet-era circus in Zaporyjia, a group of Red Cross volunteers wait for the rescued, with children’s shoes and blankets covering the floor. The organization said it left Mariupol due to the worsening humanitarian crisis in the city.
Dima, his hands black with dirt, tells AFP that he hasn’t showered in two weeks. On her third attempt, she managed to reach Zaporijia with her wife and two children.
To feed the children and their grandparents in Mariupol, he says he had to loot stores in search of food. “We lived underground and if it was -4°C, it was a good temperature,” he says, lifting his leg to show he’s wearing three pants to try to keep warm.
“Sometimes the bodies would be on the street for three days,” he recalls. “The smell is in the air and you don’t want your kids to smell it.”
Daria, who also fled Mariupol, says she lived in the basement of her building with her baby for ten days. “It got worse every day,” she says, holding her daughter in her arms. “We had no electricity, no water, no gas, no means of existence. It was impossible to buy things.”
Marina, a volunteer with the Zaporijia Red Cross, reports that people arriving from Mariupol were in terrible shape. “They were tired, sick, crying.”
The only way to escape the city was with a private car. Many of those who managed to escape say that they could not leave the shelters because of the bombings and that they found a way to travel by luck, because there was no phone or internet signal.
“We saw that there were people with white stripes on their cars, getting out,” says a woman who identified herself as Daria. She says she asked a neighbor if she could join her in escaping.
For some, the journey to Zaporijia, which normally takes three or four hours, took more than a day.
A father of two reports that he was able to pick up a signal after turning on the radio, thus getting information about the humanitarian corridor. Hugging his young son, Dmitri says they spent “nine or ten days” hiding in the Mariupol theater – the same theater that was bombed, according to Kiev, by Russian forces.
