There is no electricity, no heat, no water, no food. Residents are melting snow and preparing what food is left over open fires. The artillery fire never stops. Airplanes are dropping bombs “every 30 minutes.” This is what residents are facing in Mariupol, according to a Ukrainian MP’s account of what is happening in the port city.
Mariupol is under siege and surrounded by land mines, and its residents will starve in the coming days if help does not come, says Dmytro Gurin. Citizens have been unable to evacuate, a situation Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky described as “outright terror.”
“There is no convoy, there is no green corridor in Mariupol. Everything is mined around it – everything. All the fields and roads,” Gurin told CTV News Channel on Friday.
“The only way out from this mousetrap with 350,000 people is the sea.”
Gurin, whose exact location was not disclosed as a matter of security, wrote on Twitter earlier in the week that his parents were in a district of Mariupol that was “razed to the ground” and that the nine-storey building where he grew up was also bombed.
On Wednesday, an airstrike in the city struck a maternity hospital and killed three, an act Western and Ukrainian officials called a war crime.
Like Zelensky and other members of government, Gurin says he is fighting for his land and that what is happening is no longer a war between armies, but “mass murder.”
“Everybody sees now they have permission to kill civilians almost a week already. And we have terror in all the cities under their control. And Mariupol is under hard siege, it’s [a] medieval sage. there [is] no heat, electricity, water, gas, mobile network….everybody now sees it’s not war anymore,” he said, pleading for international help.
“We need to save our children, and our parents, and our cities. We need a big caravan to the Mariupol port, to bring to Mariupol and to get people out of there. Because all of us now, we decide if it’s okay for us to have 350,000 die from hunger in Mariupol. That’s our decision together.”
With files from The Associated Press