AFP, published Friday, April 15, 2022 at 4:03 p.m
Galina Vassilieva, 78 years old and with bright red hair, points to a completely burnt out nine-storey building: “Look at our beautiful buildings!” she exclaims, “the people are charred inside”.
“I was in construction, my generation built all these buildings. And now they’ve bombed everything,” says this pensioner, whose sarcastic remarks blurt out as he queues in front of a truck full of pro-Russian separatists distributing humanitarian aid.
Mariupol, a martyred Ukrainian port city that AFP was able to visit this week during a press tour organized by the Russian army, suffered a deluge of fire that destroyed infrastructure and the homes of the half million people who lived there when Vladimir Putin launched his offensive against Ukraine on February 24.
Today, more than forty days later, fighting is confined to the vast industrial area near the coast as Russian forces and their separatist allies in Donetsk imposed and then gradually tightened their terrible siege. The record remains unknown, but it is heavy.
The Ukrainian authorities speak of around 20,000 dead.
“See for yourself how the situation in the city is: there are many dead,” says Yuri Boukharev, a soldier in the armed forces of the pro-Russian separatist republic of Donetsk, simply.
– “Like on a volcano” –
A symbol of this suffering, a theater in whose basement hundreds of people had fled was largely destroyed and burned down after a bomb attack on March 16th. How many are under the rubble? Nobody knows.
For Kyiv, Moscow deliberately bombed the place. For the Russians, the Ukrainian fighters there used civilians as human shields.
“When (we) start clearing the rubble, the number of casualties will become clearer,” notes Yuri Boukharev.
Now that most of the fighting is over, civilians like Galina appear looking for water, food or a way out of Mariupol, its ruins and corpses.
“I know that we survived the horror and we don’t know what to expect, we’re coming down like a volcano,” sums up Tatiana, 59, a municipal worker, broom in hand, who is also waiting for humanitarian aid.
“It’s fear, fear! What more can one say? A lot of people are suffering (…) yes, there are dead people, we bury them right in the courtyards of buildings,” she continues.
Konstantin Mavrodi, 28, and his mother Taisiya walked from their home to the hospital hoping to find a bus going to Volnovakha, another Russian-captured town further north, where his grandmother could place them.
– “Nice, even like that” –
“Today we had to run this far under fire, under bullets,” he says as their route went along the Azovstal industrial zone, where the Ukrainian army is still resisting, through underground tunnels dug at the time.
The young man who taught computer science to children explains that since March 3 everyone has been living without electricity and the Internet. It is impossible to give or have news to relatives living in Kyiv and Russia.
He sees little in the way of his future, turning his back on neither Ukraine, his homeland, nor Russia, the large neighboring power that is settling in the ruins of Mariupol.
We ran under bullets. Now we are just people who want to live. In which country do we want to live? We’ll see about that later,” he said.
Svetlana Iassakova, a 43-year-old accountant, has no immediate plans to leave.
“I’m homeless, my apartment is totally destroyed. I moved in there three months ago, a new apartment, freshly renovated, she says, despite everything, smiling behind large glasses with orange lenses.
I live in the present moment, today I am here and tomorrow will be tomorrow. I love my city even in this state, it’s even so beautiful,” continues Svetlana, who also met in the “humanitarian aid” queue.
“I am for peace, love and tranquility. And as they say, may God help us and get the situation under control”.