People with loved ones trapped inside the besieged city of Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, were desperately trying to reach them on Thursday after it was virtually cut off from the outside world by an indiscriminate bombing campaign by security forces.
Dmytro Gurin, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who grew up in Mariupol and whose parents are trapped there, said the last time he was able to communicate with his neighbors was four days ago.
“We talked during seconds after they went to a place with a signal; there are a couple of these places that people know about”, said Gurin.
“They said that my parents were alive and remain in the basement below of his apartment building.
“And please understand that it is not a shelter with electricity, water and a bathroom, it is a basement with nothing”.
Gurin indicated that his parents were taking snow to drink water and trying to cook on an open fire outside.
“Can you try to imagine this? Your parents, from 43 and 69 years, they are drinking snow and trying to cook on a fire outside in winter and there is continuous shelling”, he said.
“This is no longer a war. This is not army against army. It’s saturation bombing. It is Russia against humanity”.
Arthur Bondarenko, a coffee distributor from 35 years in Odessa, noted that every day he desperately sends messages to his close friends, a couple with a 6-year-old son.
“Every day I send them a message and say: ‘Hello, good morning, how are you? ‘. None of the messages get through.”
Bondarenko said he last spoke to them on March 2.
“They had no no water, no electricity, no heating and there was no shelter under their house”.
- “It’s a war crime”: the bombing of a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol attributed to Russia causes international outrage
Mariupol, a city of about 400,000 population, is a key strategic target for Russia because seizing it would allow pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine to join forces with troops in Crimea, the southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
The city has now been subjected to nine days of intense bombardment by Russian forces, destroying apartment buildings and razing residential areas.
BBC verified footage showed shelling on Thursday, confirming a city council statement that the shelling was in progress.
Difficult situation
Dmytro Kuleba, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said on Thursday that the situation in Mariupol is the most difficult in the country.
On Wednesday, three people -two adults and a girl- died and 14 were injured in a devastating attack that destroyed a maternity ward and a children’s ward of a hospital in the port city.
Diana Berg, a city resident who managed to escape with her husband on Friday, said she learned of the attack through the news.
“Yesterday was the most brutal and shocking thing,” she said. “That hospital is very close to where I lived, I was there a week before, my family doctor is there. I don’t know if he’s still alive,” he said.
Berg has also been unable to communicate with his mother-in-law since Saturday and has no idea if she is alive or dead.
“She sent a message after we left to say that she was alive and that she knew we were still alive,” Berg said. “Since then we don’t know anything. We use the Telegram app, we watch the media, that’s all”.
The municipal authorities were finally able to start to collect and bury the bodies that had been on the streets, the city’s deputy mayor, Sergei Orlov, told the BBC.
City officials estimated that 1.67 civilians have died so far, Orlov said.
“There is no possibility of private graves, due to the large number and the continuous bombing. They are being placed in mass graves,” he said.
Berg said the news of the mass graves spread through chat groups of Telegram that people use to monitor the situation within the city.
“We have no news of our friends, all we know is that may be buried in those mass graves”, he pointed out.
Numerous attempts planned for the evacuation of the residents of Mariupol collapsed in the last five days after Russian forces resumed shelling the city, despite ceasefire agreements.
Orlov said that city officials were ready at any time to implement evacuation plans, but no agreement could be reached with Russia on the establishment of the evacuation plan. nt of a humanitarian corridor.
The interim mayor added that a group of 82 citizens tried to leave Mariupol on Thursday in a private car and passed a Ukrainian checkpoint, but were forced to turn back as Russian forces fired near the cars, blocking their path.
Orlov’s own parents and brother are still trapped inside a heavily bombed Mariupol neighborhood, he said, and he had not been able to communicate with them for nine days.
There are now growing fears of a serious humanitarian crisis inside Mariupol, following widespread reports that people are trying to get water out of the snow and have no access to food or medicine.
Food crisis
Oleksandr Protyah, an English teacher from 43 years, i indicated that her mother and a close friend were trapped within the city and that her friend may have run out of diabetes medication.
“I managed to get her insulin on the first day of the war, but it is over or it will be over soon,” he said. “This is a humanitarian catastrophe”.
There will also be a food crisis soon, MP Gurin said.
“The next thing will be hunger,” he said. “ This is not a joke, in a week there will be famine in central Europe”.
In response to the attack on the Mariupol hospital on Wednesday, the city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, accused Russian forces of “ a total evil that has no explanation”.
“How can this be justified?” he expressed. “This is a genocide organized by Russia against our people.”
What Russia said
Russia claimed that the maternity ward destroyed in the attack was taken over by Ukrainian troops long before it was attacked, but images of the scene captured by the AP news agency showed medical personnel outside after the blast and a pregnant woman being carried out of the building on a stretcher.
“Thank God most people were already in the bomb shelter,” said Orlov, the deputy mayor. “Otherwise, it would have been much worse.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky qualified the attack as an “atrocity” and reiterated his call for world powers to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a request that has so far been denied.
Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said Thursday that his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, told Ukrainian officials that Russia will continue its aggression until Ukraine meets all its demands, including surrender.
Svitlana Libet contributed to this report.
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