His sunken face testifies to his exhaustion after trying weeks. Alexander is responsible for hospitals in Mariupol where he has just spent a month. A port city, located in the south east of Ukraine, shelled and besieged by Russian forces since the beginning of the war. He tells of the absence of water and electricity in temperatures down to -11°C. This doctor was in the Mariupol maternity ward when it was bombed, and he helped evacuate patients. The doctor has that dull look that you see in the survivors of Mariupol hell who arrive in Zaporizhia.
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After Boutcha, the Ukrainians fear finding other scenes of war crimes in the towns occupied by Russian forces and which they have just liberated. Particularly strong fears concerning Mariupol, even if the situation in this port of the Sea of Azov is different from that of Boutcha. The city is not fully occupied. Fighting is still going on right now, neighborhood by neighborhood. The Ukrainian forces are resisting and the front is constantly moving.
According to this doctor, the Russians did not have the opportunity to commit these abuses throughout the city, but this would already be the case in the neighborhoods they occupy. “The first to enter are the separatistssays Alexander. Next are the Buryats of Russia. They loot everything they can. And in the third wave, we saw the Chechens. They liquidate the people who are in the cellars and all the men who pass before their eyes. They kill them.”
“Mariupol is not Boutcha. The city has not been completely occupied, but what is happening in Mariupol is simply an extermination of the civilian population. A genocide.”
Alexander, Ukrainian doctorat franceinfo
Alexander uses the term used by President Volodymyr Zelensky who, since Boutcha, has denounced “war crimes that will be recognized by the world as genocide”. The doctor continues: “I have a question for you, what is a war crime? When helicopters fire missiles at apartment buildings, do you call it a crime or not? When entire villages, there’s nothing left, just like burnt fields of several square kilometres, is that a crime?” And Alexander responds in stride: “These airstrikes, all day long on buildings, these bodies of children and their shredded parents, it’s a crime, plain and simple.”
“They are destroying us psychologically. They have set out to destroy every part of humanity in man. They want to make beasts of us. to die, to have no way out.”
Alexander, Ukrainian doctorat franceinfo
Russia prohibits the access of any humanitarian aid. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which still hopes to enter the city to evacuate civilians, has had to give up conveying food and medicine while the remaining population, around 100,000 people, lacks everything. The humanitarian situation is terrible, according to local authorities and international organisations. For Alexander, in any case, there is no room for doubt. Before leaving us, he insists again: “All of Mariupol, he said, is the object of a war crime. They terrorize us, they want to exterminate us all.”