Hiding in the basements of houses, the inhabitants of Mariupol have often lost contact with the outside world since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Nastya is now a refugee in Bucharest, Romania, with her six-year-old daughter, but her spirit remains in Mariupol, where her 74-year-old mother, who refused to leave her apartment, and her engineer husband, who was detained by a mobilization general. An estimated 40,000 civilians were trapped in this siege.
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In Ukraine, the rest of her family has been surviving under bombs for 15 days. “My husband works as a volunteer and travels around the cities a lot. Sometimes he manages to send me some horrible pictures,” she explains. The most recent photo of their building. More precisely, from their apartment, destroyed by one of the countless bombs that have been falling almost continuously on Mariupol for two weeks now. Nastya’s former neighbors are hiding in the basements of their houses.
People go out between the bombings, make fires in the yards, as there is neither gas nor electricity, and many apartments have already been destroyed. Stocks are running out. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink.
Nastya, resident of Mariupol
on Franceinfo
Most of all, Nastya is enraged by these 60 buses with humanitarian aid, which are blocked on the road for a week because the Russians do not let them through.
Since her exile from Romania, the mother of the family has been scouring social media for photos of her war-torn area. One video in particular has shocked her in recent days. We see men digging a deep hole between a colorful bench and children’s games in the garden separating two blocks of buildings. “They bury their neighbors in the yard,” she continues. “They are trying to survive.”
Mariupol’s mayor’s office estimates that 2,200 residents have died as a result of shelling in the past two weeks, but more and more people have fallen victim to fatigue, cold or hunger. In other videos broadcast by international channels, we see how volunteers, like Nastya’s husband, throw dozens of lifeless bodies into mass graves.