"I escaped Mariupol hell, but in my head I’m still there"

Three stories of life and death in besieged Mariupol by Elizaveta Fokht

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO

The city of Mariupol in South East Ukraine has suffered the worst effects of the Russian invasion. Besieged by Russian forces, residential areas have endured constant shelling. Those who have managed to escape speak of living in a humanitarian catastrophe. There’s no electricity, internet or telephone connections, food and medicine are in short supply. Corpses lie in the streets and mass graves are appearing in courtyards between apartment blocks.     

BBC Russian correspondent Elizaveta Fokht spoke to three people who managed to get out of the city. 

Mariupol had a population around 500,000 when the war began and is the tenth largest city in Ukraine. It is the largest big city near the [pro-Russian separatist] self-declared People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. Until the Russian invasion, it was only about 20 km away from the line of contact with the separatist republics.    

Mariupol lies on the territory of the separatist Donetsk region. The Russian authorities stated one of the reasons for the invasion of Ukraine is to “liberate” [seize] all the territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions within their administrative borders.

The Azov battalion is based in Mariupol. It started as a volunteer battalion at the beginning of the conflict in Donbas in 2014 and some of its members have been accused of holding ultra-right wing and even neonazi views. Today Azov is one of many divisions in the Ukrainian National Guard.  

The Russian authorities say Azov is a nationalistic formation. Fighting similar groups is another declared aim of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.  

Mariupol has been the scene of the most intense fighting between the Ukrainian army and the united forces of the Russian army and the separatist republics. At the beginning of March the city was virtually under siege and on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.   

© SERGEI ORLOV - Bombed hospital in Mariupol, 9 March  

Mariupol has suffered some of the most shocking attacks of this war - the shelling of hospital No.3 which was accommodating a local maternity hospital, and the theatre building which was turned into a bomb shelter. The city administration says more than a 1000 people were hiding there and at least 300 were killed.  

Russia refutes all accusations by Ukraine of targeting civilian buildings, and calls them a provocation. Moscow says Ukrainian soldiers including Azov fighters are using civilians in Mariupol as a human shield.    

Although some inhabitants have been able to leave the city via humanitarian corridors into Ukraine and into Russia (the Ukrainian government says those taken eastwards are effectively hostages), last week President Volodymyr Zelensky said 100,000 people were still in Mariupol without electricity, food or water.  

The local authorities say that figure is 170,000. BBC Russian spoke to people who had seen the war in Mariupol and managed to get out.  

Katerina Erskaya, advertising company owner  

I was born in Vilkova in the Odessa region into a Russian speaking family. I went to a Russian speaking school and learnt to speak Ukrainian there. I’m trained to teach Ukrainian language and literature. I requalified as a lawyer. I worked as a journalist for years and now I own a small video production and advertising company. 

About a week before New Year I moved to Mariupol for family reasons. I decided to move there and stay for a few years. I really liked it. I used to live in Odessa which is by the sea and then in Kryvyi Rih which is more industrial. Mariupol is like a mix of the two.    

© EPA/SEDAT SUNA - Preparations for a potential Russian attack, Odessa, 21 March 

One morning in February, many days before the war began, some unfamiliar sounds woke me up early. At first I thought it was builders but then I realised it was gunfire coming from 15-20 km away. I was surprised but my neighbours said they’d been hearing it for 7 or 8 years. The night Russia invaded Ukraine I wasn’t woken up by the sound of shooting but by a phone call telling me Russia had crossed the border and started a full-scale invasion. I had already packed an emergency suitcase with all my important documents and perhaps I wasn’t prepared psychologically but somewhere deep in my soul I knew war was coming.    

In those first days we didn’t feel the war in Mariupol at all. The coffee bar where I usually had breakfast was open, people were out shopping. There was a bit of panic buying, and some of the tinned foods and flour people buy for supplies started to disappear. But you could still find most things. The queues at ATMs puzzled me because why did people want cash when the shops were still taking card payments?     

© REUTERS/PAVEL KLIMOV - Queue at humanitarian aid distribution point in Mariupol, 24 March 

Gradually things began to disappear. At the beginning the lights went on and off. Then the water stopped coming through. After a while the gas was switched off too. The worst thing was when the phone lines and internet went down. People couldn’t communicate. They couldn’t call an ambulance or the police. After a few weeks we realised the city was encircled and they were trying to surround us. The circle tightened and a full-scale blockade began. 

As we realised what was happening panic broke out. Grocery stores and chemists shut. Everything was closed or looted. People who had no provisions were in a horrible situation. It really was a humanitarian disaster.      

From the start of the war I joined volunteers who were helping civilians and our soldiers. They were set up by some social organisations.

We helped them with food, water, fuel and of course with hygiene products and medicines. People who had access to shops and warehouses supplied us and we managed the distribution. We worked with the police, with Azov soldiers, the National Guard and with our marines. Of course we helped civilians whose homes were in ruins. We moved them to improvised shelters. One of the largest was in the theatre which was bombed.     

Of course one organisation is just a drop in the ocean. We helped around 25,000 people, about 2 -3,000 a day. It’s not that many but we thought it was better to help a few than not to help at all. Most of the day I lived in our volunteers’ hub and often spent the night there. It was a semi-basement. There was a shelter there where I could hide from the shelling.

All the supplies in the city began to run out. Basic necessities, like insulin, were in short supply. Chemotherapy patients ran out of their medicines. A huge number of people on replacement treatments and antidepressants couldn’t get their prescriptions.    

The wounded suffered worst of all. Numbers were going up every day. According to official sources 3000 civilians in Mariupol have died but I think the real number is closer to 10-15,000. 

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO - The dead body of a resident on the streets of Mariupol, 27 March

A huge number of people came to the field hospital with shrapnel wounds. They needed antibiotics and sterilised dressings. There was a catastrophic shortage of the silk used to stitch wounds. 

The occupiers wouldn’t allow humanitarian convoys to bring medicines or food into the city. So our doctors took desperate measures to help their patients. They went back to the old way of boiling material to sterilise them. 

One day a woman brought a sheet cut into strips and rolled up like bandages to the volunteer centre. We thought, god forbid we ever have to use that! But later we understood that they could come in handy. 

I didn’t have problems with food and water myself because our volunteer organisation looked after its volunteers too. The building where I rented a flat is partly destroyed. 

We had a generator at the volunteer centre and we cooked in a field kitchen. But I saw people cooking over a fire outside. 

The strangest and most shocking thing I saw was a man hunting pigeons with a slingshot. He said he had an Alsatian and nothing to feed her. So pets were going hungry as well as their owners. It was dreadful to see people cooking porridge over fires burning around the theatre. The theatre was bombed a few hours after I managed to leave the city.    

I went there a few times. It was very overcrowded. There were a lot of families with children in awfully cramped conditions. It was dark. There wasn’t enough food or medicine. They were all sitting on the floor wrapped in blankets and plaids because it was very chilly. It smelled awful from the unsanitary conditions and a lot of people had colds.  

© AZOV/REUTERS - The bombed theater in Mariupol 

Ukraine holds Russia responsible while Moscow considers the bombing a provocation by the Azov battalion.

In my last week in the city the house next to the volunteers’ centre was hit. People, mainly women and children, were cooking over an open fire in the courtyard. They were fired on by a drone. Our volunteer organisation was nearest to the site. We rushed over to administer first aid and get people out of there. The body of a child, a boy, lay in the middle of the entrance where cars drive in and out. I took his pulse and understood he was dead. My colleague decided to take his body out of the road. A man rushed over, completely grey and said, “What are you doing, where are you taking him?” It turned out he was the boy’s grandfather.  

He asked me, “What should I do now?” I said, “Bury him”. “But how?” he asked, “I don’t even have a spade.”   

It’s a really big problem. There are dead bodies lying in the streets. There’s no one and nowhere to bury them. Huge mass graves have appeared around the city. 

The scariest thing is seeing them in children’s playgrounds. It’s the easiest place to dig because of the sand and soft earth. People tried to bury their dead neighbours near their homes so their graves can be identified. 

Fresh plywood crosses with handwritten tablets look appalling against the background of the ruined city. The fact that fresh and artificial flowers are appearing on the mass graves on the streets of this destroyed city in the 21st century only makes it even more dreadful.     

The occupiers who have done this will never be forgiven. The Ukrainians who defend Mariupol and protect the graves are a great source of pride. Not a single inhabitant of Mariupol would want their relatives who died at the hands of the occupiers to be buried by those same Russian occupiers.  

Another scene which will stay in my memory for a long time…in that same shelled building, when we started to go around the apartments to check for wounded people, we found a man in the stairwell with a torn lip. Another man was stitching it up. He turned to me and said, “Hello, I’m Eduard Ivanovich. Do you have any dressings?” We gave him everything in our first aid kit. He turned out to be the dental surgeon who had a practice on the ground floor of the apartment block. I suddenly felt very proud of him. Even in that horrible situation he stayed completely calm.  

I was inspired by the quiet heroism of this man who could have stayed safe in his apartment but went out and did his duty as a doctor. I thought, in war nothing we do is insignificant, everything we do is a big deal.      

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO - Shelled building in Mariupol, 27 March

When the street fighting began and the frontline came close to our volunteers’ centre we realised it was time to leave. Once, on my way back from work I saw a tank with the letter Z driving down the next street. We realised that we should try to leave in large numbers to avoid making more work for the soldiers and doctors. We didn’t want to be a risk factor. The occupiers hate the volunteers and treat us the same as soldiers. We could be captured and used as hostages. 

The humanitarian corridor opened on 15 March and I left on the 16th. We had some space in the car so we took a family as far as Berdyansk. There we picked up another family - grannies, mums, two girls, their two cats, a tortoise and several hamsters. I thought, what good people! They had hardly any luggage but they took all their pets.    

Near Tokmak, a man at the checkpoint with a DNR (People’s Republic of Donetsk) flag fired a round from his machine gun at our car. Some of the bullets went into the front door and some into the rear door. One flew over my head and over my driver’s head. Some shrapnel went in his eye but he was so shocked he only realised when we got to Zaporizhe. 

The girl who was sitting in the back received a head wound. She was in a very serious condition. Fortunately we managed to get her to Zaporizhe. Several days ago I saw on CNN that she had already come round. She will have a scar. I don’t know whether she’ll recover completely but at least she is alive. I really want her to be healthy.        

Everyone asks me, why did he fire on us? I can’t explain it. Why did the Russians attack us at all? Maybe because they are occupiers and don’t observe the rules of war? Maybe they think it’s ok to shoot at a car full of women and children, it’s ok to break the rules of a humanitarian corridor? Or maybe because they wanted to frighten us so other cars would turn around and drive to the self-declared DNR (People’s Republic of Donetsk)? 

After all, they spread rumours that Ukraine isn’t taking refugees. They’re doing it so they can lead our people away to Russia and keep them there as hostages. 

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO

Text messages break through from people who stayed in Mariupol although the connection is unstable. My friend wrote there are cars driving around the city with loudspeakers announcing that Kyiv and other cities have fallen and Ukraine has surrendered. That’s how the enemy propaganda works: they want to frighten the people of Mariupol who have been stuck in cellars for a month. This news should finally get to them.  

I don’t know how many years or decades it will take to rebuild Mariupol. But I believe it will be rebuilt. Let a new city grow in its place. It will be a Ukrainian city for all the inhabitants of Mariupol who must return when there’s somewhere to return to. 

I still don’t feel safe. I will only feel safe when the last Russian soldier has left Ukraine. Now they can walk out on their own feet or be sent home in a coffin. So far they seem to prefer the latter. The outcome of this war is clear. Russia will be beaten because history shows that good always triumphs over evil.    

The humanitarian catastrophe in Mariupol

On 13 March the Mariupol city council announced that 2187 civilians had been killed by shelling in the city. On 28 March the mayor Vadim Boychenko said this figure is much higher and thousands have been killed but he didn’t want to say the actual number because it would frighten people. 

Estimates on 27 March put the number at almost 5,000 including around 210 children. 

© Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

About 5000 dead in Mariupol - Among them approximately 210 children

Source - city authorities 27 March

According to the city authorities almost 90% of buildings are partially damaged or entirely destroyed. The city authorities said on 28 March that 170,000 people are living under siege.  

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken compared events in Mariupol to the siege of  Leningrad during WW2. 

The city is almost entirely without connections. Social networks are flooded with messages from people trying to find their friends and relatives. Hundreds of them are sent to journalists writing about Mariupol and those who manage to get out of the city.   

The city authorities say around 140,000 managed to leave before the blockade. Since the siege began 150,000 have been evacuated, including more than 70,000 to Zaporizhe. 

Now the humanitarian corridors are the only routes out of the city. They were opened in the middle of March. Ukrainian authorities say Russian soldiers are regularly shelling the corridors and stopping humanitarian aid from reaching the city. Moscow denies these claims and says Ukrainian nationalists are stopping civilians from using the corridors.   

A number of the corridors from Mariupol lead into Russia through territories of the pro-Russian separatists. Ukraine says Russian soldiers are using them to force citizens out of the country. Kyiv is calling them hostages. Moscow disagrees. The Mariupol authorities say 30,000 people have been taken on that route.  

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO

Nikolai Osychenko, president of Mariupol Television channel

In 2014 I worked for a TV channel called Donbass. We lived 3.5 km away from Donetsk airport. Our son was 4 and a half. I understood with absolute clarity that the most important thing was to get our child out of the war zone. I had moved there because of my work. 

In all the years since, neither in Kyiv, nor anywhere else, has anyone ever complained about us speaking Russian. It’s all completely invented. I think politicians on both sides are using the language question to divide people.    

On the 24 February I was in Mariupol. It had been on the line of contact for eight years - just twenty kilometres away from the fighting. And from time to time we could hear it. Like the rest of the country, probably, we had no idea of the actual horrors going on there. And on the 24th and even on the 25th and 26th, no one believed that the city would be virtually razed to the ground.  

© MAXIMILIAN CLARKE/SOPA IMAGES/GETT

The feeling of something irreversible happening came on when all at once the electricity went off across the city. I phoned the deputy mayor Mikhail Kogut. I was curious about what was going on. From what I heard down the phone, from a very civilised person, amidst the swear words, I can only extract, “I don’t know”, “destroyed” and “permanently”. Now I can’t even remember the date. All the days merged into one long day. At that point I already understood that we wouldn’t have any electricity until the fighting was over. Without electricity the pumping stations came to a halt which meant we didn’t have any water or heating indoors. Only two pleasures of civilised life remained. The first and most important - gas. The second - most important as we later learnt - mobile connections.     

Without electricity no one could watch our TV channel. So I forbade people to go to work. We stayed at home and produced some reports on our phones while the batteries lasted and uploaded them on social media. There were just a few mobile masts running off generators and you could pick up a signal from them. 

I went up to the ninth floor of our building and picked up the signal and tried to put something online quickly. I was chasing ratings because I’m a media person, but I also wanted to let my friends and family know that I am alive and to try to tell them what was going on in our city. 

Having lived through 2014, I knew what to do and on 24-25 February I stocked up on power banks, charged up all my devices, bought food and a fuel supply. At the time I thought that would be more than enough.  

© ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY - A busload of refugees from Mariupol arrives in Zaporizhe, 22 March 

When the gas disappeared we felt not so much a lack of food as a lack of fire. It became very hard work to prepare food. To cook pasta you need to boil water, for example. But you also need heat which you have to get from somewhere. While in the past we got it from gas, when the gas disappeared we had to prepare food over a fire. We built fires but it was very dangerous because you could become a target.  

So we divided one loaf of bread between seven people for a week. The bakeries stopped baking. Bread became hard to find. 

As for water, which was like gold dust, there were several sources. There are springs in the parks. You had to walk to them which was extremely dangerous, and when you got there, you had to stand in line. We were only allowed to fill one five litre bottle because you had to be able to run home with it. Our neighbour went to get water and said they saw several dead bodies lying by the springs. 

The second source - every cloud has a silver lining. March was still wintery this year. When it was minus 10 outside, and that happened a lot, it was minus 10 inside too. But once we woke up in the morning and saw snow through the window. We were as delighted as children because snow means water.  

We live in a ten-storey building in the centre and it’s full of prominent people. Most of them are well off. They were running out into the street with spades like crazy people, filling buckets with snow and taking it back indoors. But because of the cold, it took two days to melt. And to add insult to injury, we had all forgotten the laws of physics that a bucket rammed full of snow melts down into about three centimetres of water at the bottom. 

We drained the water from the radiators to use for maintaining basic hygiene. It’s a nasty detail, but we agreed that we would use it to flush the toilet once in twenty four hours or once in 48 hours.  

You shouldn’t drink this water because it contains anti-freeze but some people did drink it because it was all they had. Once we tried to boil potatoes in it but the flame was clearly too weak because although we boiled it all day the potatoes still weren’t cooked.   

We made a shelter with our neighbours in the building in our underground car park. There was a sort of office for the janitor. We took all the furniture out of it and brought mattresses from our apartments so people who were scared at night - mainly those living on the upper floors - could spend the night down there. 

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO - Mariupol residents hide in the basement of a housing block, 25 March 

Others made themselves a place to sleep in the rooms without windows inside their apartments. We made a bed in the bathroom. Until 13 March.

On 13 March, I was in the bathroom shaving without water. In 2014-2016 I crossed the contact line many times for my work and I know how to manage there. But that day something I had never seen or heard before happened. There was a hideous, completely terrifying sound. A shockwave threw me to the left and then to the right. I ran out of the bathroom, into the room where my wife and son were. At that moment my friend’s mum ran along the corridor. Their whole family was staying with us because their building was virtually wiped out.    

I ran into his mum, then that sound again. Another shockwave. We all ran into the bathroom. A third explosion. We sat there for 20 minutes, afraid to come out. When we did come out we saw all the glass was smashed. We had heavy oak doors between the rooms. I couldn’t lift them by myself. They were smashed too. 

Later we learned it had been airstrikes, 50 metres from our building. And although the building was still standing, all the windows were shattered and there was no way to patch them over.     

© REUTERS/ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO

Miraculously, it turned out, we were all still alive. When the shelling had just begun, the women in our building, despite their husband’s condescending smiles, wrote down prayers that were supposed to protect us all. And every evening at exactly 8pm in their apartments and in the shelter, they recited the prayer by candle light. It was a kind of group therapy. 

Those who believed in God, believed in him even more, and some who hadn’t, began to believe. Because everyone had survived. 

After that, we all moved down to the shelter. There wasn’t much space. The women and children slept on the mattresses. There were chairs by the walls and the grandads and grannies slept on them.         

It was about 12-13 degrees down there. My wife and I slept under the stairs. But we slept very badly at night. There were constant explosions near the building. We realised it was becoming impossible to live there. That was on the 14th and the first convoys were driving out of Mariupol to Zaporizhe. People who could leave had drawn three lucky tickets - they had a car, it was still in one piece after two and a half weeks of the attack, and they had petrol.  

I went up to the 10th floor and found out that people could drive out of the city. We packed, realising we would leave most of our belongings behind. For me it wasn’t so hard because I’d been through it all before in 2014. On March 15 we divided up our clean water between the people who had decided to leave and the families who were staying behind. We left them all our food and water for flushing the toilet and set off. 

The journey to Zaporizhe which usually takes two and a half hours took 15. There were traffic jams and Russian checkpoints. 

Later people asked me if I saw the city as we drove through it. I made an effort to look  very carefully. There were children in nearly every car and everyone was trying to stop them looking out the window. Because as you drive you can see the corpses lying in the streets. You see torn off arms and legs. I saw the bodies of dead children. I tried to distract my son as much as I could.  

 He is twelve and he probably grew up too soon. He didn’t cry once in all those weeks, he never got hysterical, he tried to help me and others. When he got anxious, I asked him what was the matter and he said, “Listen, I’ve calculated how much water we have - it’s enough for two days.” He was thinking pragmatically, like an adult man, about how his loved ones would survive.  

How do I feel now I have left? I’m a workaholic. I arrived in Zaporizhe and a day hasn’t gone by without me having something to do. I give interviews, meet volunteers all the time, tell them what they need to prepare for. And I think how stupid I was to go up to the 10th floor several times every day.

Because when planes flew over I stepped away from the window and hid behind the wall thinking that would save me. Now I realise it was absolutely stupid and my life could have been over. And my family would never have got out of there without me.   

© GETTY IMAGES - Mariupol residents are evacuated from the city by Russian soldiers and pro-Russian separatist fighters. Ukrainian authorities say Russia is taking them forcibly to the East.  

Who controls Mariupol now?

On 27 March Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told the Russian media that Mariupol is completely blockaded by Russian armed forces, but there are still Ukrainian troops inside the city. The mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko says the Ukrainian flag is still flying over Mariupol although the outskirts of the city are controlled by Russian soldiers. He says the city is defended by the Azov National Guard and the 36th Marine brigade.     

Russian media claims the airport and the leftbank district, the eastern section of Mariupol, is controlled by the Russian army. The Russian Ministry of Defence asked the city administration and its defence forces to surrender and choose their “own people” over “the bandits”. This proposal was rejected. 

The Russian side for the last week has been reporting it is going through the city, cleansing it of Ukrainian soldiers and nationalists. Videos posted regularly by Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the republic of Chechnya show Chechen soldiers are involved in the operation. Ukraine says the Russian army is using heavy weaponry, including planes, artillery, Grad rocket launchers and flamethrowers to target residential areas in Mariupol. 

Russia says it never aims at civilian targets. The Russian Ministry of Defence said the strike on hospital number 3 which was accommodating a maternity hospital was a set-up. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed there were no women in labour but the building had been seized by the Azov battalion. The Russian Defence Ministry also claimed the attack on the theatre was a provocation by nationalists, and Azov soldiers had mined the building and were holding people hostage inside.  

 Russia has said on many occasions that Ukrainian soldiers are using civilian locations  as a human shield. Russia is trying to take Mariupol primarily to have a land corridor to Crimea via Berdyansk and Melitopol which are already under Russian military control. 

Winning Mariupol would be an important victory, symbolically. Until now the Russian army’s major success has been capturing Kherson which has a population of less than 300,000. 

Nadezhda Sukhorukova, journalist

I’m a journalist for the state TV channel “Dom” [home] Before the war intensified we were working in Donetsk in the areas under Ukrainian control. We were reporting on how people are living, roads are being repaired, and how Mariupol is being transformed. We were showing the building and infrastructure projects, what a nice city it is to live in. I was posting on facebook about my own life, my pets, and my childhood memories. That was a kind of hobby.     

I was woken up on 24 February by an explosion. To be honest, I wasn’t even very scared because living so near the contact line we have been hearing these sounds periodically since 2014. Particularly on the part of the city we call the Left bank. 

But then I got a phone message from my editor, “That’s it guys, wake up. It’s war.” That was around 5am. I couldn’t get my head around it. I thought it’s some kind of mistake and it wouldn't last long. Then we went to the mayor’s first press conference. He seemed distracted, but he said Mariupol is at the frontier of Ukraine, that they would defend us and we wouldn’t let the aggressor enter the city.    

After the briefing I went with my cameraman to do a vox pops in the city centre on Prospekt Mira [Peace Avenue]. The trolleybuses and buses were still running, there were lots of people around. Even the explosions sounded far away. People answering our questions didn’t seem to realise what was happening. They complained about queues in the shops, and that some goods had run out. They said they weren’t afraid of anything.   

Within a few days everything changed. The chemists closed first. They stopped working altogether. Then the pet shops. And then the shelling intensified. And we could hear explosions very nearby.

At first we had “Air raid” warnings, and we would go out onto the landing because the basement in our block was closed off. When the electricity went off the air raid warnings disappeared too. But we didn’t need them. The shooting was frequent and lasted a long time. We heard the bangs and went out into the corridor with our cats and dogs. We waited it out and then went back to our rooms. At night we didn’t always get up to hide. We put our heads under the pillow and counted the explosions.  

Each day things got worse. First they switched off the electricity then the water and for a while we cooked on gas. It was scary when the gas went off. An acquaintance in our building noticed that the gas was hardly burning on her stove and was the first to say they might switch off the gas. My mum said it’s probably just because it’s overloaded. But half an hour later it went off altogether. So we had nothing. Nothing at all. 

An ordinary guy brought water to our district in a big white barrel. He just wanted to help people. A massive queue formed at his car. People stood for hours and only scattered when a shell landed close by. My mum and I went to our 9-storey building and left buckets under the gutters after the rain or snow.   

All our neighbours did the same and they collected twigs and branches, sawed up fences, swings and anything wooden to stoke the fires and cook food somehow. That was when you could still go outside. There was a lot of shooting but there were lulls too. A week later they were firing non-stop. And it was dangerous even to spend three minutes in the yard. People weren’t thinking about a humanitarian catastrophe. They didn’t use those words. They were just doing whatever it took to survive. 

My family and friends never wanted the Russians to come. Our family is Russian speaking but we are Ukrainian and our homeland is Ukraine. We didn’t think the Russians would dare to come to our land. We thought they had enough common sense not to start a war. How is it even possible in the 21st century? But it turns out the occupiers are still living in the middle ages.  

One of my neighbours was waiting for the “Russian world” back in 2014 and she went to meetings where they shouted, “Russia, come!” After there had been a few bombing raids I met her in the street and she said that she will curse the Russian murderers every day. 

We know there has been looting and we’ve even seen people robbing chemists and shops. I’m not justifying them but people needed to survive. The shops and the chemists were closed. 

We saw how the marauders who were dragging huge trolleys stayed there forever. It was dangerous. Shells were flying and people lay dead by the trolleys. 

Someone saved my life. He hid in a closed chemist and brought medicine for my heart. Last year I had a heart attack and I had to have two stents put in. I have to take medication every day but I ran out of it. That person gave me the medicine for free. Because money didn’t mean anything there. There was nowhere to spend it. 

© GETTY IMAGES

Before the shelling was continuous, one of my friends went to the theatre. There were people there who had been brought from the left bank district which was under heavy fire. There were women and children. My friend remembered a little one who was sleeping in the theatre foyer with her arms stretched out and her fists closed tight. I hope that little girl survived the air attack. 

We fed the dog on the food we ate ourselves. During the last week our plump, spoilt labrador ate the same two spoonfuls of porridge that we did. We still had cat food but the cat didn’t eat very much. He was probably frightened by the bombing and perhaps he had a premonition he would be left alone. 

We left without making any preparations. We had wanted to go much sooner. My relatives who weren’t able to leave stayed behind. My uncle and my cousin and nephews, another cousin was killed by a mine. He was going to get water and got caught in the crossfire. They carried him to a garage and he’s still lying there. His parents only found out a week after he was killed. 

I could only take my dog. Yosik, my cat is my endless pain. We didn’t have time to go back up to our flat and he stayed there. Friends went and opened the door and put food down for him, but they couldn’t find him. He probably got scared and hid himself away. I feel so guilty about him, it’s breaking my heart. I think about him all the time and reproach myself that I was too scared to run up and get him.  

There are still no connections with Mariupol. Sometimes someone there tries to phone me. But the connection is bad. I can see that he calls and I know he is still alive. People who are managing to get out are telling us what’s going on. They say it’s just getting more terrifying. That the bombing and shooting doesn’t stop.  

I can’t get a grip on myself. I got out of hell but I still feel it inside me. Nothing is finished yet. And it won’t be over as long as people are still in Mariupol. There are hundreds of thousands of people there. They’re still in a living hell. What am I going to do now? I’m going to live. In Mariupol we lived day by day. That’s why I’m still alive. We survived one day and that’s ok. 

Read this story in Russian here.