APR 9, 2022
Voices of besieged Mariupol: 'It’s not even comparable to hell' (kyivindependent.com)
“Sometimes hope returns to me. But sometimes it leaves, and I think that we are all going to die,” says Anastasiia Kiseliova, a 40-year-old mother of three, as she walks through the streets of Mariupol, voice-recording herself on an iPhone.
“The city is gone,” she adds, her voice trembling. She bursts into tears seconds later.
[...]
A large missile hit their property, sliding under the house, but not exploding. Another missile hit their neighbors’ yard. The family made a decision to leave, driving over to Kiseliova’s parents.
For two weeks, her husband, who is working abroad, thought that his wife and children were dead. All communications in the city have been shut since early March, meaning that many thousands of Ukrainians with friends and family in Mariupol have no way of knowing if they are alive.
[...]
Trying to escape Mariupol on March 17, Kiseliova joined a column of civilian cars that moved towards the outskirts of the city. For hours, she drove her three children, as well as her oldest son’s girlfriend, to safety, maneuvering between unexploded missiles and hundreds of mines that were scattered through roads and fields.
[...]
The next day, as evacuating cars carefully moved through a mined field just outside Mariupol, near an abandoned village of Kamianka, Russians shelled the convoy.
“They shelled cars that had signs that said ‘children’,” Kiseliova said. “One car was burned down, five people were injured. One girl had surgery performed right in the field.”
After crossing into Ukrainian territory, the family eventually made their way to Lviv, a regional capital in western Ukraine that has become the main destination for internally displaced Ukrainians flocking from the east, south and north.
[...]
“I didn’t want to leave Mariupol until the very end, until a person was killed in front of me,” says Maria Ruban-Vaskevich, 44, tightly holding onto an icon while sitting at a hostel in central Lviv.
Behind her are her two kids, Vasilisa, 12, and Volodymyr, 11, and a few small bags of clothes. This is all they got left after escaping from besieged Mariupol.
[...]
One day, as Ruban-Vaskevich and her family were hiding in her brother’s store, Russian soldiers shot a civilian man, named Viktor, right near the entrance.
[...]
As he was dying, he asked Ruban-Vaskevich to collect his documents from his house nearby. The medics would take him to the hospital, the man thought, but that never happened.
Instead, he died in the arms of Ruban-Vaskevich, as she was trying to stop his bleeding with medical tape.
[...]
The next day, on March 22, the woman saw a nine-story apartment building burning in its entirety. She also saw three Russian tanks shooting at an apartment block. She knew she had to leave.
[...]
For days, her family walked through the city which became filled with graves, dead bodies, and burning houses. There was a car with a large pool of blood underneath. And a body of a man without arms and legs.
[...]
Together with the kids, Ruban-Vaskevich stood in line for 30 minutes, when a stranger came up offering to get them out to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukraine-controlled city where most escapees from Mariupol arrive. Together with three other families, the volunteer drove them to safety.
“We got so lucky,” Ruban-Vaskevich said. “In a month, they turned our life into a horror movie. It’s not even comparable to hell.”
[...]
“No one counts the dead there. We buried people in our yard. There are cemeteries in every park. And how many people burned in their homes? How many died of natural causes and just lay in their flats? No one will find them.”
On April 6, Mariupol City Council said the Russian military began using mobile crematoriums to burn the bodies of killed Ukrainians.
Ukraine may never uncover the true scale of Russia’s atrocities in Mariupol.
Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast;
Respect to you all, for discussing, keep informing each other, the shared compassion, heart breaks and not looking away.
