In the dark morning hours around 3 a.m. on Thursday, the Russian siege of Mariupol continued. “The windows shake. It’s bloody early today,” Angela Timchenko wrote on Facebook. The recent bombing hit the Ukrainian port city, which has been under fire for the ninth day, like “a heavy downpour”. “I’m wondering,” Timchenko continues, “where I can find some tea and some sugar.”
It is “frosty outside” and “bitterly cold” in Mariupol’s apartments, where the heating is off. At the same time, there is “no snow, which means no water”. Earlier in the week, residents of the city had collected snow to melt into water. Without water, Timchenko explained, it is difficult to feed the family. “Tell me, is it possible to bake an egg in foil? I have six of these laying around. Then the kids would have had their breakfast,” she wrote.
No electricity, no heating, no drinking water, no gas
According to residents, the destruction of the city continues. On Wednesday, a Russian warplane dropped a bomb on Mariupol’s number nine maternity hospital. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, three people were killed in the attack, including a girl. Seventeen patients and staff were injured. The photos of pregnant women being carried across a landscape of rubble and smoldering craters outraged the world. This is genocide, Zelensky said.
City councilor Petro Andryushchenko also believes that the genocide is continuing. Mariupol is under “constant fire” from Russian artillery, including Grad and Smerch attack missiles and Tochka-U missiles. On Thursday, rockets reduced another residential area to rubble and ripped holes in several buildings. The drama theater in the center of Mariupol, built in Soviet neoclassical style, was also hit by bombs.
Andryushchenko described the left bank of Mariupol, where 135,000 people normally live, as “uninhabitable”. “The other districts have significant damage. Most residential buildings are no longer usable,” he wrote on Telegram. The city is without electricity, heating, drinking water and gas. The Russian Federation is holding almost 350,000 people hostage.
With the bodies lying on the streets – the situation is too dangerous to recover them – the exact death toll cannot be determined. According to Andryushchenko, “according to rough calculations” 1,200 people lost their lives. The exact number of people under the rubble is not known. “The Russian army attacks immediately, so we can neither recover the dead nor take away the injured. All hospitals are full. We have 2,500 beds.” A mass grave had been dug on the outskirts of the city, he said.
For the sixth day in a row, the evacuation of civilians in Mariupol failed. According to Andryushchenko, Russian planes specifically attacked the road where buses were supposed to pick people up to take them to safety and Ukrainian-controlled areas. “The air raids began early in the morning. Air raid after air raid. The entire historic center is being bombed,” he said, adding that the city is home to around 50,000 children and 3,000 infants.
“You want to leave”
Mariupol’s deputy mayor Serhiy Orlov described the conditions in which people lived as “medieval”. A Red Cross representative in the city, Sasha Volkov, confirmed this grim report. Despite the city’s efforts to get bottled water into key neighborhoods, many residents have no water to drink. Shops and pharmacies were looted four or five days ago. Some people would have food; others, including parents with children, nothing more.
The situation is now hopeless, added Volkov. “People attack others for food or they break into someone else’s car to get gas. A lot of people get sick because of the cold.” The most valuable commodity is wood for cooking, he explained. He also reported of groups of people roaming through destroyed houses, looking for food, seeing what might be useful and boiling water from the river.
According to Volkov, 65 people live in his house. There is a generator that produces electricity for three to four hours a day. Women and small children are accommodated in the basement, while others sleep on the ground floor. Meat is not available. But there is “a kind of black market for vegetables”. “We’re trying to get by as best we can,” he said, coughing.
Others live underground in their cars. 18-year-old Tanya, who grew up in Mariupol, lives in Germany. Her mother and brother have set themselves up in a basement garage in Mariupol. “It’s safer than her fifth floor apartment,” Tanya explained. “They sleep in the car so they can keep warm and charge their phones.”
“There are ten or twelve people down there,” reports the young woman, who does not want to give her last name. “My brother says everyone is trying to help each other. If anyone has food or water left, they share it.” When there was electricity, her mother cooked “a huge amount of porridge”. And in the first days of the Russian invasion, she filled the bathtub with water. “They also bought supplies when the war started, but there’s never enough,” Tanya continued. “My mom said on the phone that everyone lost so much weight because they were so stressed. My mom said, ‘No food, that’s okay. We’re not scared anymore – we’re just tired, tired of this situation. You kind of get used to it all. The shooting – it’s okay. The bombing – it’s okay.’” The nagging hunger has also subsided. “You’re just so tired,” Tanya explained. “They want to go, they want to be safe.”
Mariupol is surrounded
Mariupol residents seemed frustrated at their hopeless situation – abandoned by Kyiv and the international community. Mariupol is located in the extreme south-east of Ukraine on the Azov Sea. The city is wedged between the old front line, lined up by pro-Russian separatists twelve miles east of downtown, and the Russian army, stationed on the western shoreline. Mariupol is surrounded.
To the north around Kyiv, Ukrainian forces shot down Russian fighter jets and riddled enemy armored columns using Turkish-made drones. The Ukrainian army in Mariupol, on the other hand, does not appear to have any anti-aircraft missiles. The Russian fighter planes can bombard unhindered. “Why is there no news about the glorious combat drone Bayraktar in the Mariupol area?” wrote Timschenko on Facebook with a bitter undertone.
Meanwhile, some relatives of those detained in Mariupol do not know if their families are still alive. 33-year-old Viky from Vienna has had no contact with her parents Volodymyr and Irina, her 88-year-old grandmother Galyna, her sister Julia and her niece Veronika since March 2. Together they had taken shelter in a small basement in their home in Primorsky District, a part of the city that has repeatedly been the target of Russian bombing raids.
“Not hearing anything kills us,” explained Viky’s husband Olsi. “We don’t know what happened to them. Are you still alive or not? We tried the Telegram groups of the city of Mariupol and volunteers who forward information to relatives. But we haven’t heard anything. In the first days of the invasion we could still speak every day.”
Their worst fear is that they may never find out what happened to their family. “They have eight cell phones in total. We try them all, all day long, from morning to night. At least two days ago, one of the cell phones rang twice. But no one answered. Not being able to answer the phone is a terrifying thought.”