https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2023/feb/23/mariupol-the-ruin-of-a-city
For more than 80 days, the Russians bombarded Mariupol, determined to take the port city even if they had to raze it to the ground first.
After Russian forces finally crushed Ukrainian resistance last May, they set about putting their stamp on Mariupol, erasing evidence of the recent atrocities and of past Ukrainian history in the city.
A year on from the invasion of Ukraine, the Guardian tells the story of Mariupol – perhaps the bloodiest and most shocking chapter of Russia’s brutal war.
Mariupol greets the new year, 2022, in a relaxed mood. When a strong gust of
wind blows over the city Christmas tree, sending its vast illuminated
branches crashing to the ground, a few suspicious types whisper that it could be a bad omen for the year ahead.
But most people pay little heed to the crescendo of chatter about Vladimir Putin’s nefarious plans for Ukraine.
They
are used to the idea of war here, after the events of 2014 when Russian
proxies seized neighbouring Donetsk and briefly controlled Mariupol,
too. The frontline, just outside the city, has hardly moved for years.
Occasional military skirmishes are a fact of life, but the idea of a
full-scale invasion seems fanciful.
So for the
first seven weeks of the year, life goes on more or less as normal.
People huddle in cafes smoking shisha on cold evenings; teenagers giggle
as they slip on the ice rink behind the drama theatre. At a nearby
restaurant one Saturday night, a group of women dance to a vocalist
singing in Russian and English; their husbands remain seated, nursing
beers.
A few people do become uneasy and clean out their
basements, equipping them as bomb shelters. They stock up on tinned
food. Often, their friends tease them for such eccentric behaviour.
And then, in the early hours of 24 February, it begins.
Around
5am, calls go out to the chiefs of police and other municipal services,
announcing that military hostilities have begun and ordering them into
their offices. Most of them are already awake, roused by the sound of
Russian artillery.
At 11 in the morning, the
mayor, Vadym Boychenko, convenes a press conference. Already, three
civilians are dead and six injured, he says. The mood in the room is
tense, but Boychenko assures the few journalists present that officials
and key infrastructure workers are still working, and life will carry
on.
“Don’t panic. We are ready to fight for Mariupol and Ukraine,” says the mayor.
He and most of his team will flee the city three days later.
On those first few days, the fighting is limited
to the outskirts of the city. Wounded soldiers arrive at the hospitals
from the front, and hundreds of volunteers show up to donate blood.
There
are long queues at ATMs and petrol stations, but public transport is
still running, and some people stoically continue as if everything is
normal, heading for work.
At the train station,
a young couple hurries along the platform dragging suitcases and
cradling a cat. Tearful parents bundle their children on to evacuation
trains heading for Kyiv. But the trains leave half empty. By the time
most people realise what is coming, it will be too late to leave.
The
city is well defended from the east, where everyone expected the
Russians to launch an attack. But there has been no preparation for an
invasion from the west. Russian troops pour across the narrow isthmus
from Crimea towards Mariupol, and within a few days, the city is
encircled.
Almost immediately, the Russians hit the
electricity, water and gas supplies. People melt snow for water, and
cook outside over open flames. Phone reception disappears, creating an
information vacuum. The last shops close their doors, soon to be looted
by people desperate for food.
As the fighting
becomes more intense, people drag mattresses into the stairwells of
their apartment blocks, or move into their dark and freezing basements.
Some people are too old or too frail to move. Most of them will not
survive.
At Hospital Number One, on the eastern
side of the city, Serhiy Mudryi, a traumatologist, arrives for a
two-day shift on 28 February. It is too dangerous to move around the
city, so Mudryi sleeps at the hospital. His shift will end up lasting 40
days; he leaves only once, to collect his family and bring them back to
the hospital, giving them beds in an empty ward.
Most
of the other doctors flee, and soon there is just a skeleton team
remaining at the hospital: Mudryi, two surgeons, an anaesthesiologist
and a couple of nurses.
Arrivals are frequent,
both soldiers and civilians. Before long, the ambulances stop running
and patients arrive in private cars, driven by relatives frantic with
worry. It takes a lot to shock a traumatologist with two decades of
experience, but the minced flesh and crushed bodies Mudryi is seeing
every day turn his stomach.
The doctors do not have the time for the
complicated operations required to save limbs. “Post-operation, wounds
require lots of care, there is a huge risk of infection and gangrene,
and then dying from it,” Mudryi explains to patients. Now, whenever
there is a serious injury, the doctors amputate. The patient will lose
an arm or a leg but have more chance of staying alive.
As
the fighting shifts into the suburbs and more buildings come under
fire, many people who live close to the hospital arrive and move into
the hospital basements. One 92-year-old woman tells Mudryi she has come
because she remembers hiding in the same place during the second world
war.
The hope that hospitals will be spared the worst
of the war turns out to be naive. Across town, a maternity ward is
shelled, and photographs of a bloodied, heavily pregnant woman
scrambling through the rubble shock the world. Russian officials suggest
the woman is an actor.
Soon after, in the
Turkish resort town of Antalya, the Russian and Ukrainian foreign
ministers meet, the highest-level discussion since the war started. The
two men discuss Mariupol more than anything else.
Russia’s
Sergei Lavrov looks his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in the eye,
and tells him the maternity ward was filled with Ukrainian fighters,
not pregnant women.
“Unfortunately, I can confirm that the Russian leadership, including minister Lavrov, live in their own reality,” says Kuleba.
The talks break up after 90 minutes, with no agreement on anything.
With no mobile reception in the city, rumours spread of ceasefires and of evacuation corridors,
but there is no verified information. Will the Ukrainian forces let
them out? Will the Russians shoot at them on the way? Are Russian troops
already in Kyiv? Nobody knows for sure.
The fighting intensifies to a level where dashing
to a well or stream for a bucket of water carries a serious risk of
being a one-way mission. During breaks in the shelling, people dig
shallow graves and bury the dead on the spot.
In
one central apartment block, a group of men dash out in mid-March to
bury several older women, killed while cooking over an open fire in a
courtyard. It is a scene repeated across the city.
“I
knew those old women all my life. They sat outside the apartment block
on the benches, chatting away, passing the time. And then you have to
close the eyes of those women and bury them in their own courtyard,”
recalls Vitaly, one of the impromptu gravediggers.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, people desperately try to
contact relatives in Mariupol to find out if they are still alive. “This
phone number is out of coverage,” is invariably the automated response.
People begin to have nightmares about the phrase.
Every
few days, there might be a fleeting moment when a bar of reception
appears and people’s telephones light up with messages. Sometimes, the
delayed news brings a wave of overwhelming relief at a sign of life, on
other occasions it brings confirmation of the worst fears.
As
time goes by, some people become angry and hysterical, as it dawns on
them that there is no safe way out of the city and they may die in their
basements, from the cold, the hunger or the bombs.
Maryna Puhachova, an activist and lawyer, develops
a morning ritual to help her stay calm: soon after dawn, she goes
outside with the neighbours, collects some snow and boils it over a
flame to make coffee.
A bit later, she sits by
the window, the only source of light in her apartment, and applies her
makeup. The booms are relentless, and next to the window is the most
dangerous place to be, but she finds the routine to be soothing.
Some
people in the neighbouring block see her doing it and suspect she may
have gone mad. But then they start doing it too, and before long a
morning ritual is established in which several women sit at their
windows, wave to each other and do their makeup. It is a small moment of
humanity that keeps them going.
During the
days, when the shelling quietens, Puhachova speeds across town to a
distribution point, where volunteers collect food aid and drive it to
places where they know there are large concentrations of people
sheltering in cellars.
Puhachova has worked for many years in the
villages around Mariupol, for an organisation offering legal and
psychological support to people living close to the front line. She is
used to operating under pressure. But with each day, the runs across
town get hairier. She sees burning cars, and corpses gnawed at by stray
dogs.
She witnesses acts of grim selfishness,
such as people trying to sell looted supplies for a profit, but also
gestures of remarkable bravery and kindness, like those who give away
their last food and medicines to people in greater need.
She
tries her hardest to put on a brave face when she visits the basements
to deliver food and sees the desperation in people’s faces. She can
sense that people appear reassured by the sight of someone who remains
strong and cheerful, at least on the outside.
As more residential blocks sustain hits, and with evacuation routes out
of the city closed off, many people congregate at a series of public
shelters. Perhaps the largest is at the drama theatre, where more than 1,000 people take refuge. In front of the colonnaded building, someone spells out the word DETI – children – in giant Russian letters.
On 11 March, Oleksandr Khodzhava, a steelworker,
arrives at the theatre with his parents, wife and two young daughters.
Heavy shelling near their apartment block has collapsed the plaster
ceiling of their basement, and the neighbours mention that the drama
theatre has become a refugee shelter, and thus should be spared from
strikes.
On arrival, the family find a place to
sleep on the cold floor of a costume room, beside sewing machines and
bits of cloth. They receive meagre rations three times per day: hot
water for breakfast, soup for lunch, and a biscuit for dinner.
Early
in the morning on 16 March, they relocate to the cellar, a theatre
control room full of electronics, thinking it will be safer there. The
floor is covered with soft padding ripped from seats and armchairs.
Oleksandr
goes to help with food preparations, while his wife takes their
youngest daughter back up to the costume room, to clean their former
quarters. Oleksandr’s parents, Serhiy and Iryna, stay down in the
basement.
Somewhere in the distance, they hear the faint noise of a plane’s engines. Shortly after, there is a flash and a huge explosion.The blast throws Serhiy 3 metres across the room and rips off the cellar
doors. Everything is covered in chalky dust; thick smoke hangs in the
air. He struggles to his feet after freeing himself and clambers his way
out of the cellar. The floor is awash with blood, and through the smoke
he sees two men pull another man from the rubble, his boots attached to
his legs only by bloodied skin, all the bone gone.
In the landing area by the stairs, Serhiy finds
his wife and their eldest granddaughter, but Oleksandr has been crushed
under rubble. Oleksandr’s wife, Anastasia, and their young daughter,
Karolina, are also missing in the costume room. Although dazed and
shocked, looking at the ruins Serhiy knows for sure there is no chance
any of the three survived.
Serhiy and his wife,
holding their surviving granddaughter, Valeriya, by the hand, wander in
shock in the streets around the theatre, coughing from the dust and
unsure what to do.
After some time, a family in
a car about to embark on the risky journey out of Mariupol hears the
wails of the newly orphaned Valeriya, and offers the trio a lift. They
make it to Ukrainian-controlled territory, where they must start a new
life equipped with no possessions to speak of and a devastating sense of
loss.
Russia first claims the theatre was filled with Ukrainian troops. Later, it changes its story, insisting the theatre was blown
up by Ukrainian forces as a “provocation”. The evidence, however,
points to a Russian airstrike.
The Associated Press estimates that 600 people died in the attack.