Smoke rises after the apparent shelling of Mariupol, Ukraine, by Russian troops on Friday, March 4. (Eugene Maloletka/AP)
Vadim Boychenko, the mayor of the city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, painted a grim picture of city life.
“The situation is very complicated,” Boychenko said in an interview on Saturday on the YouTube channel. “The Russian army has already blocked the humanitarian corridor. We have a lot of social problems that all Russians have created.”
Boychenko said the city of nearly 400,000 people has been without electricity for five days. “All our thermal substations are designed for this power source, so we are without heat,” he said.
Boychenko said that there are no mobile networks, and “since the attack on Mariupol, we have lost backup water supply, so now we are without water at all.”
“[The Russian army] is working on the siege of the city and the establishment of a blockade,” he said. “They want to cut us off from the humanitarian corridor, blocking the delivery of essential goods, medicines, even baby food. Their goal is to suffocate the city and subject it to unbearable stress.”
Boychenko said that “the wounded and killed over the past five days number in the dozens. By the eighth day there were hundreds. Now we are talking about thousands.
“These numbers will only get worse,” Boychenko said. “But this is the sixth day of air strikes in a row, and we cannot get out to pick up the dead.
“They say they want to save Ukrainians from being killed by a Ukrainian [state] but they kill,” Boychenko said. “Listen, our brave doctors have been saving lives here for 10 days in a row. They live and sleep in our hospitals with their families.”
Boychenko spoke about the humanitarian corridor, which was canceled on Saturday.
“We had 50 buses full of fuel and we were just waiting for the ceasefire and the roads to open so we could get people out of here,” he said. “But now we have only 30 buses left. We hid these buses in another place, away from the shelling, and lost 10 more there. Thus, we were left with 20.
“So when this humanitarian corridor finally opens up for us tomorrow or ever, we may not have any evacuation buses left.”
Boychenko said that saving the city was out of the question. “The only task now is to open a humanitarian corridor to Mariupol at any cost.
“All this talk is a lie,” he said. “All this is being done, I repeat for the thousandth time, to destroy us as a nation.”
Boychenko insisted that morale was strong in Mariupol, but they were “just holding on.”
“We have the hope that maybe tomorrow at dawn a tiny drop of love will splash on the inhabitants of this city,” he said.
“The city of Mariupol has ceased to exist,” Boichenko told a YouTube interviewer, “at least the city you once saw.”