Lvov, Ukraine. Marina Levinchuk said she received a disturbing text message from local authorities in besieged Mariupol a few days ago before she decided to flee. “If someone in your family dies,” she said, recalling the message in her own words, “just take the body outside, cover it, tie your hands and feet, and leave it outside.”
“This is what is happening in Mariupol right now,” she said of the city, which is now surrounded by Russian troops who are bombarding it with rockets and artillery and hit a maternity hospital on Wednesday. “There are only bodies lying on the streets.
“There is no water, no heating, no gas,” she continued in a WhatsApp video call on Wednesday. “And snow is collected, and snow is melted, and snow is boiled.”
It has been seven days since Russian forces surrounded the city, an important port on the southern coast of Ukraine, and began laying siege to the roughly half a million people living there. Most communication with the outside world was cut off, and basically those with access to satellite phones had to warn Ukraine and the rest of the world of the increasingly dire state of affairs.
Having failed to defeat the Ukrainian army in the first weeks of the war and facing fierce resistance in major cities such as Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv, Russian commanders seem to be resorting to the tactics of previous wars in Chechnya and Syria: destroying cities with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. .
A video uploaded to Facebook on Wednesday evening shows downtown Mariupol after aerial bombardment. It looked like a wasteland, with singed tree branches, broken windows of entire residential buildings and a destroyed maternity hospital.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack on the hospital, berating world powers for failing to stop the killings and echoing his calls for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
“Mariupol. Direct strike by Russian troops on the maternity hospital,” he wrote in a Twitter post on Wednesday afternoon. “People, children under the rubble. Atrocity! How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky now! Stop killing! You have power, but you seem to be losing your humanity.”
Attempts to negotiate a ceasefire to give the civilian population a chance to escape have repeatedly failed. For three days, the prospect of delivering aid to the city along the “humanitarian corridor” crumbled under a hail of mortar and artillery fire.
The fighting around the city was some of the fiercest of the entire war, say residents who managed to avoid conflict.
“There were shelling all the time. They were bombed,” said Yulia Diderko, a 33-year-old journalist from Mariupol who slipped out of the city immediately after being surrounded by Russian soldiers. “If anyone can help, please do so,” she said. “Please do it right now. Because people are dying.”
According to Ms. Levinchuk, residents are doing their best to survive for themselves and others in need. Trees are cut down and food is cooked outside because there is no electricity or gas.
“All the neighbors help each other, share food and water if they have it,” added Ms. Levinchuk, 28, “and people try to survive that way.”
Mariupol has long been seen as a potential hotspot that controls a strategic land corridor between the Kremlin-backed breakaway enclaves in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, a territory Moscow annexed in 2014. Control of Mariupol will not only allow Russia to send supplies and reinforcements. to forces further west, but would also cut off Ukrainian shipping from the Azov and Black Seas beyond.
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March 9, 2022 5:08 pm ET
The mayor of the city, Vadim Boychenko, refused to give up. He also complained that it was difficult to count the dead because the shelling never stopped.
Local authorities are planning to dig mass graves for all the bodies, including that of a 6-year-old girl named Tanya, who they say died of dehydration on Tuesday after her mother was killed. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “for the first time in decades, apparently since the Nazi invasion” a child died of dehydration in Mariupol.
Leaving behind a seven-month-old husband and a newly renovated home, Ms. Levinchuk made it safely to a city in western Ukraine after 30 hours on the road. But her husband Alexander and her parents, who are in their sixties, have remained, and she constantly fears for their lives and health.
According to her, the windows in her parents’ house were shattered during the heavy bombardment of their area, but “thank God my parents have a roof.”
The house of Alexander’s parents on the left bank of the Kalmius River, where most of the initial bombing was concentrated, was completely destroyed, so they left with Ms. Levinchuk. She worries about her parents, left shivering in their windowless house, where the temperature drops below freezing almost every night.
Explosions continue to rock the city, creating a “very, very bad situation” for older residents and people with disabilities, a MSF member in Mariupol said in an audio message provided by The New York Times. “They can’t even find food, and they can’t make a fire to cook their own food.”
Conditions are also getting worse for parents and their children, he said, “because they need many, many, more different products and hygiene products, and they can’t find it anywhere now.”
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on the diplomatic front. Vice President Kamala Harris has begun a three-day trip to Poland and Romania as the United States and its NATO allies urgently struggle to find a way to help Ukraine defend itself without being drawn into a wider war against Russia.
Major Denis Prokopenko, along with the Azov Battalion defending the city, turned to the international community for more help.
“Innocent people in the city of Mariupol are almost starving, this is happening now, this is happening in modern Europe,” he said in a video uploaded to Facebook. Explosions are heard nearby.
“Attempts to set up a safe corridor to evacuate Mariupol failed due to several enemy actions,” he said, stating that Russian troops had fired at places where civilians gathered to board buses to leave the city.
“If a no-fly zone over Ukraine is not secured in the near future, we will not be able to cope with the supply of water and food, medicines, and also safely evacuate people,” he said.
Mariupol is only 35 miles from the Russian border, and its residents once traveled there regularly. Back in 2014, people in Mariupol watched the Maidan protests that toppled the country’s pro-Moscow president and felt uncomfortable, Ms. Levinchuk said.
“We didn’t want to go to Europe because we felt like part of Russia, we were very close,” she said, “like brother and sister.”
But that began to change when war broke out in 2014 between Russian-backed separatists and Kiev. Separatist forces held Mariupol for a month during this conflict before the Ukrainian government took it back. The experience, and what happened in nearby separatist enclaves and in Russia over the years, has turned the city’s residents against Moscow, Ms. Levinchuk said.
“Things have changed in these eight years, because no, no one wants to go to Russia,” she said. “We feel like Ukrainians.”
As relations between Mariupol and Russia deteriorated, so did Ms Levinchuk’s relationship with her 47-year-old brother Misha, who moved to Russia in 2014 to escape the war. Now, due to information blockage in Russia, he has no idea what is happening to the city they were born in, making Ms. Levinchuk one of many Ukrainians whose Russian relatives deny news of the brutality of the invasion.
“He calls me and I am very surprised because he tells me that Russia has tried to make people free,” she said.
“Misha, our mother is dying without water, without heat, she has nothing,” she replied. “And you told me that Russia is trying to make Ukraine free?
“They freed our mother from electricity, from heating, from food, from water,” she said, holding back tears. “And they’ll probably release us from her life too.
Mark Santora is reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.