‘It was a massacre’: Mariupol residents remember the battle for the Ukrainian city

Local residents sit on a bench near an apartment building damaged during the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, April 28, 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

MARIUPOL, Ukraine, April 29 (Reuters) – Residents of Mariupol recounted the horrors of the battle for their now-ravaged city this week as they searched through the rubble for their belongings, cooked by the roadside or simply gazed at the charred shells of buildings. . around them.

“It was terrible … like the movies that show the last days of the planet, the same thing happened here,” said Viktoria Nikolayeva, 54, who, like many residents, stayed with her family in a basement as Russian forces and Ukrainians fought on top.

“We were hungry, the child was crying when the Grad (multiple rocket launcher) shells fell near the house. We were thinking, this is it, the end. It cannot be described… I cannot put it into words,” she told Reuters through tears. .

Emergency services were seen in the streets collecting the bodies of those who did not survive the weeks of fighting.

Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war so far and much of the port city is now in ruins. Russia declared victory there last week, but hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians remain trapped in the city’s vast Azovstal steelworks industrial complex.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said an operation was planned on Friday to remove civilians from the plant, but gave no details. Previous evacuation efforts have failed.

Russia has denied targeting civilians in what it calls a “special operation” to disarm Ukraine and protect it from fascists. Ukraine and the West say that the fascist accusation is unfounded and that the war is an unprovoked act of aggression.

In the shadow of the smashed and destroyed apartment blocks of Mariupol, where many walls, windows and balconies are missing, a woman wearily sliced ​​an onion at a table laid out in the spring sun. She passed a bicyclist. A man loaded furniture into a truck.

A makeshift wooden cross, one of many in the city, marked the spot near an apartment block where someone had been hastily and temporarily buried during the fighting.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko has said that tens of thousands of civilians were killed in Mariupol. Organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations say they believe thousands have died.

“It was a massacre. It was the scariest thing when shells were flying overhead. Shells, rounds and all that, you couldn’t survive. And yet we did,” said Vitaliy Kudasov, 71.

“A shell exploded eight meters away… I didn’t make it to the basement in time, I felt the heat on my face. But whatever, thank God everything will be fine,” he added.

Reuters Television Reporting Written by Gareth Jones Edited by Frances Kerry

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