Oleg, 47, Ukrainian who, on the 23rd, told the sheet in Zaporíjia about his endeavor to return to the besieged Mariupol at his own risk to try to rescue family members trapped in the combat zones, he managed to save his 15-year-old son with cerebral palsy, his ex-wife and his ex-mother-in-law.
They are now in Dnipro, a city 310 kilometers north of Mariupol, from where Oleg — he did not release his surname — spoke again with the report.
Instead of the four hours normally required for the trip, it was four days. The main obstacles on the way, in addition to heavy traffic, were landmines. They are being used and scattered on the roads by Russians and Ukrainians, who hope to stop the enemy from advancing with tanks. The problem is that they also make it difficult for civilian vehicles to travel — buses carrying refugees, ambulances, trucks carrying humanitarian aid and Oleg’s car.
Upon reaching Mariupol, he found a city completely in ruins. “It’s a disaster, a complete disaster,” he says. Destroyed buildings, electrical cables scattered across the streets, shrapnel everywhere, bodies and pieces of them, makeshift cemeteries.
Neighbors of his ex-wife said they had hunted pigeons and stray dogs for food. Whether the account was true or not, Oleg says he gave them all the food he had taken with him, “to support them in some way.”
Russian soldiers do not necessarily prevent entry and exit from Mariupol for those individuals who risk themselves on their own to save their families. “They asked for cigarettes, cell phone chargers, they took my electronic cigarette. They asked, ‘You don’t mind if we take this, do you?’ Of course not, because I don’t have a rifle to care about,” he says.
Still, everyone is searched, and Oleg says he had to show his cell phone messages and photos and undress so that soldiers could identify tattoos with Nazi symbols — common marks among fighters in the so-called Azov Battalion.
For both sides of the war, in addition to being strategic, control over Mariupol is also a matter of honor.
Happy to have managed to rescue part of the family, Oleg will have to go back again, to look for at least two other people that he couldn’t even look for when he was there. As his sister-in-law and nephew wouldn’t fit in the car, he still doesn’t know if they’re still alive – the last time they spoke was on the 2nd, and the neighborhood where they live is under the control of Russian troops. “Maybe they’re hiding in the basement, I’ll look.”
At the checkpoints, the biggest fear was that the car would be taken over by Moscow soldiers. That’s why he’s now bought a heavily used car, from 2004, just good enough to get in and out of Mariupol without arousing greed.
Oleg says that Russian forces around the port city behave as if they have already occupied the territory permanently, for example imposing curfews and restrictions on the local population, which is treated as an enemy.
According to the Ukrainian who works for a humanitarian organization, at least 95% of Moscow Army soldiers fighting in Mariupol are Chechens and other ethnicities. “It’s much easier for a non-Russian to kill a Ukrainian, because they don’t feel like they’re killing their brothers.”
In the city, Oleg circulated for just over an hour. “When I got close to home and saw that the building had broken windows and damaged balconies, I was desperate. Luckily, my family lived in an apartment that only had the windows shattered”, he says.
He says he didn’t allow himself to feel anything at all; he was focused on the goal of saving them. “I took everyone by surprise, they didn’t know I was going. I knocked on the door and they asked, ‘Who’s there?’. They were shocked, I hugged them and said, ‘We’re leaving now’.”
The ex-wife thought he was dead and had no hope that he would ever come to the rescue. They had spent their days praying for God to keep them alive, but they say they had already prepared to die.
It was only in Berdiansk, halfway back to Dnipro, that Oleg allowed himself to cry. The city is also on the coast of the Sea of Azov and is under Russian siege, but in a very different scenario from Mariupol: supermarkets have a good supply of food and even vodka, which the Ukrainian bought to drink and sleep after the rescue.
Surrounded, Kiev soldiers in Mariupol are separated by a maximum of 500 meters from those in Moscow — at some points, they observe each other. In the city, Oleg says he had no problems with the Ukrainian troops, who didn’t even ask for his documents. The Russians, in turn, tried to find out from him how many soldiers there were on the other side; he simply replied that he had not had time to calculate.
“Ukrainian forces are angry. They will not leave Mariupol, they will fight to the last soldier,” he says.
On Tuesday, Russia announced a drastic reduction in attacks in the Kiev region, saying it would now focus on eastern Ukraine. In this region, Mariupol is seen as a top priority for the Kremlin, and the lack of a clear agreement that ensures a lasting humanitarian corridor will seal the fate of the civilians still trapped in the city.
Members of the forces of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk also fight in the region and, according to Oleg, are even worse than Russian troops. Separatists see the population seeking to escape as traitors, and Ukrainians accuse them of frequently using violence and humiliation against civilians.
In Dnipro, the family is in a shelter prepared by volunteers. “When they arrived, they asked if there were no bombings here, because for a month they lived in total hell. They are recovering emotionally”, she says. After he returns from rescuing his sister-in-law and nephew, Oleg intends to drive them all further west. “My sister lives in Germany and I will send them there.”
Before the war, Oleg worked for a Danish agency that supports refugees and he had never imagined himself in a situation like the one he is in now, of him and his family becoming refugees and suffering what he saw happen to other people.
If Russia wins the war or if Ukraine accepts a surrender and surrenders control of the country’s eastern region in exchange for peace, Oleg says he could be permanently barred from returning home.
Luckily, he managed to recover a piece of memory. He went to his mother’s apartment, who died last summer before the war, and found it destroyed — not by bombs, but by someone who had broken into the place and stole everything he could. Oleg managed to retrieve a photo of the mother. If he can never come back, at least he will have her with him.
