Mariupol under siege: Conditions ‘medieval’ as residents focus on survival

Russia's siege of Mariupol resumed in the dark hours of the morning, residents said, at around 3am. "The windows are shaking. It's f**king early today," Angela Timchenko posted on Facebook.

She described the latest bombardment of the Ukrainian city – then in its ninth day – as a “heavy downpour”. She added: “I think about where to find some tea and a drop of sugar.”

It was “frosty outside and fiercely cold” inside Mariupol’s apartments, which are without heat. There was, as she put it, “no b**ch snow, which means there will be no water”. Earlier in the week the city’s residents collected snow to turn into drinking water. Without running water, Timchenko said, she was struggling to feed her family. “Tell me, is it possible to bake an egg in foil? I have six of them lying around. Kids would have had their breakfast,” she wrote.

The destruction of the city continued, residents said. On Wednesday a Russian warplane dropped a bomb on Mariupol's maternity hospital number nine. According to Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the strike killed three people, including a girl. Some 17 patients and staff were injured. The photos of pregnant women being carried over a landscape of rubble and smouldering craters outraged the world. This, Zelenskiy said, was genocide.

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Petro Andriushchenko, a member of the city council, said genocide was still happening. Mariupol was under "constant shelling" from Russian artillery, he said: from Grad and Smerch rockets and Tochka-U missiles. On Thursday missiles pulverised another residential district, clawing holes out of several buildings. Shells also landed on Mariupol's drama theatre, built in Soviet neoclassical style and located in the city centre.

According to Andriushchenko, Mariupol’s left bank, normally home to 135,000 people, was “no longer liveable”.

“The other districts have critical damage. Most residential buildings are not usable,” he wrote on Telegram. The city was without electricity, heat, drinking water and gas, he added, saying the Russian Federation was effectively holding 350,000 people hostage.

Death toll

With bodies lying on the streets – it is too dangerous to collect them – the precise death toll was unknowable. Andriushchenko said 1,200 people had perished “by rough calculations. We don’t know the exact number of people under the debris.

“The Russian army attacks directly so we can’t gather the dead or evacuate the wounded. All the hospitals are full. We have 2,500 beds.” A mass grave had been dug on the city’s outskirts, he said.

For the sixth day in a row, the evacuation of Mariupol’s civilians failed to happen. Andriushchenko said Russian aircraft were deliberately targeting the road where buses were meant to collect people to take them to safety and to Ukrainian-controlled territory. “Air strikes started from the early morning. Air strike after air strike. All the historic centre is under bombardment,” he said, adding that the city was home to about 50,000 children and 3,000 babies.

Living conditions

Mariupol's deputy mayor, Serhiy Orlov, has described living conditions as "medieval". Sasha Volkov, an official with the International Committee of the Red Cross in the city, corroborated this bleak account. He said many residents had no water for drinking, despite efforts by the city council to deliver bottles to major areas. Shops and pharmacies were looted four or five days ago. Some people had food; others, including parents with children, had run out, he said.

The situation had become desperate, Volkov added. “People attack each other for food, or they smash someone’s car to take the petrol out. Residents are falling ill because of the cold.” The most precious commodity was wood, he said, for cooking. Groups were roaming around destroyed houses, searching for something to eat, taking their chances and boiling water from the stream.

Volkov said his building was home to 65 people. They had a generator, which gave them power for three or four hours a day. Women and small children were accommodated in the basement while others slept on the ground floor. Meat was unavailable, but there was a “sort of black market for vegetables”. “We try to do the best we can,” he said, coughing.

Underground

Others are living underground in their cars. Tanya (18) grew up in Mariupol, but is now in Germany. She said her mother and brother were camping out in a basement garage in Mariupol. "It's safer than their apartment, which is on the fifth floor," she said. "They're sleeping in the car so they can keep a little bit warm and can charge their phone."

The teenager, who declined to give her surname, said: “There are around 10 or 12 people down there. My brother told me that everyone is trying to help each other. If someone has spare food or water, they share it.” Her mother had cooked a “huge amount of porridge” while there was still electricity and had filled up the bath with water in the first days after Russia’s invasion. “They did some shopping to stock up when the war started, but it’s never enough,” Tanya said.

“My mum said by phone they’ve lost so much weight because they’re so stressed. She said: ‘Without food, that’s fine, you know. We’re not scared any more – we’re just tired, tired from this situation. There’s no fear now. We kind of get used to all this. Shooting – that’s fine. Bombing – that’s fine.” The hunger pangs had faded. “They’re just so tired. They want to leave, they want to be safe,” Tanya said.

Abandoned

There was a sense of frustration among residents at their hopeless situation – abandoned by Kyiv and the international community. Mariupol, located in the far southeast corner of Ukraine, on the Sea of Azov, is sandwiched between the old frontline with pro-Russian separatists, 19km east of the city centre, and the Russian army, which has taken up positions on the western coastal outskirts. Mariupol is surrounded.

In the north around Kyiv, Ukrainian forces have shot down Russian warplanes and peppered enemy tank columns using Turkish-made drones. The Ukrainian army in Mariupol has no anti-air missiles, it seems, and Russian jets are able to carry out bombing runs unimpeded. “Why is there no news about the glorious Bayraktar [drone] in the Mariupol area!!” Timchenko wrote on Facebook, in bitter tones.

Some relatives of those trapped in Mariupol, meanwhile, do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Speaking from Vienna, Viky (33) said that since on March 2nd, she had been unable to contact her parents, Volodymyr and Irina, her grandmother Galyna (88), her sister, Julia and her niece Veronika. All were sheltering in a small basement in their house in the Primorsky district, the target of repeated Russian bombing.

Viky’s husband, Olsi, said: “The silence is just killing us. We do not know what’s happened to them. Are they alive or not alive? We have tried Mariupol city Telegram groups, and volunteers who’re trying to get information out to relatives, but we have heard nothing. During the early days of the invasion we could speak every day.”

He said their worst fear was that they would never find out what had happened to their family. “They have eight cellphones. We try all of them, all day long, from morning until night. The only positive thing that happened was two days ago, one of the cellphones rang two times. No one answered, no one picked up the phone. That they didn’t have the chance to pick up the phone is a terrifying thought.” – Guardian