UkraineRussia war, in Mariupol “we fight street by street, house by house”. There are “saboteurs everywhere” and “no place is safe”. This was explained to Adnkronos by Vittorio Rangeloni, a thirtyyearold resident of Lecco who has lived in Donetsk for seven years. Yesterday he managed to invade Mariupol together with the popular Donbass militias and saw that “surgical operations are underway that will lead to the complete control of the city” by Russian forces. But “the Ukrainian military is hiding in the basements along with the civilian population” and “the people I spoke to told me they felt like they were being held hostage”. Rangeloni also argues: “If the goal is Russia’s control of the city, there would be no point in razing it to the ground. It would lose value.” One thing is certain: “No place is safe. The soldiers move from one building to another, “so they could all be potentially dangerous.”
In Mariupol, “all the buildings, all the buildings bear the marks of the fighting,” are “destroyed” or “charred, blackened by the flames,” Rangeloni explains. “The upper floors where the fires broke out were particularly affected.” These are “apartments where the Ukrainian military met the Russians or from which snipers fired.” According to Rangeloni, the people of Mariupol “were forced to surrender their apartments to the Ukrainian military” who “converted the upper floors of the buildings into fire stations”. And that is why they have become military targets from “residential buildings”, from which “the Ukrainian military shoots”.
For Rangeloni, “it is unfair to attribute the destruction of Mariupol to just one party”. He, who last year published his book “Donbass. My war chronicles,” he explains, “that it is very dangerous to enter these buildings, but as soon as the situation stabilizes, they want to go to the apartments that have been converted into military targets, to see with my eyes if there are military ones rations, bullets there.’ ‘.
“A tragic, dramatic situation” with “scenes from the apocalypse”, continues Rangeloni. “I was in one of the districts west of the city and I saw a scary situation,” he tells Adnkronos. ” I entered Mariupol yesterday, but it’s difficult to get around. They told us a building was safe and then there was shooting nearby,” he says. For the time being, it is impossible to reach the theater that was hit by a Russian airstrike on Wednesday and to which a thousand people are said to have fled. The same applies to the bombed children’s hospital.
“The theater area is still controlled by Kyiv and it is very dangerous to go there,” says Rangeloni, who is moving with the Donbass militias. “I hope to be able to reach that area soon to try to find witnesses. There is a lot of propaganda, everyone is trying to draw water from their own mill,” he says. Still ”unreachable”, ”the hospital” was also hit by a Russian air raid. “The main street is closed to traffic, wrecked buses and trucks have been placed in the middle to block traffic,” he explains.
There are ”many dead bodies along the streets” of Mariupol and ”many are civilians”, hit by ”bombing, gunfire, victims of housetohouse fighting, bombs, snipers, shrapnel, that cannot be known. ”. Rangeloni says he’s met “people who have been living in the basements of their respective homes for the past few days” who “told me they can’t speak beyond what’s happening on their block. Moving is too dangerous.”
” I’ve spoken to dozens of people who, in order to survive, chose not to leave the dungeons. For many of them it was the first time they had seen the light in several days,” he says. But even going out becomes necessary at some point. ”Hundreds of people stormed a huge warehouse supplying the city’s main supermarkets. Paradoxically, there is no shortage of food and water,” he says, saying that “many people roam the streets of Mariupol with shopping carts to get whatever they can. I can’t say they’re starving.” From what he saw, “People are preparing food in the garden on the fire. However, harvesting wood is not easy either, because there is a risk that the parks and forests have been “mined”.
”Thousands and thousands of people are leaving the city in cars, minibuses or bicycles. I saw that yesterday in Mariupol,” continues Rangeloni, who decided to live in Donetsk in 2015, “to tell what people are experiencing in Donbass, to make their voices heard.” In Mariupol, he says, “many people have no papers because they were blackened by the fires or lost to the destroyed house. It’s therefore more difficult for them to move around.” Also, he says, “I found out from talking to the people of Mariupol that after 20 days, many in the city didn’t know that humanitarian corridors were being created. They told me they felt abandoned, at the mercy of events. There are ”400500,000 people in Mariupol, according to some they want to use them as human shields,” Rangeloni continues, saying that ”no one intends to commit slaughter”. Besides, he adds, “a few hundred people decide to stay in the basements, not to leave Mariupol. They say: ‘This is our home’ and rely on fate.” Above all, “women and children” want to leave the city. The elders don’t, they say it makes no difference to die here or die elsewhere. Better at home””.
In Mariupol, however, it is a “matter of a few days”. Then the city will fall into Russian hands. At least that’s what Rangeloni predicts, according to which “the ring around the city is getting tighter and the more peripheral districts are already under the control of the Russians and the popular militias”. In addition, “there are no corridors that would allow Ukrainian soldiers to reach them with supplies”. So ” in the center of Mariupol, where the soldiers of the Azov battalion are barricaded, there is a shortage of ammunition and food. They’re running out of food, they’ll have it for a few more days”. According to Rangeloni, “Many Ukrainian soldiers are leaving their uniforms and trying to flee through the humanitarian corridors, mingling with civilians.” But there are “Russian checkpoints around the city” of Mariupol and these “military” are identified, for example, by tattoos. Every day dozens of people are stopped and sent to the police station for investigation. Then it will be checked whether they are “soldiers who have committed crimes, who bear responsibility, who belong to the category that Russia wants to fight,” he adds.