“Death is the only thought we had in mind”, testifies this father who managed to flee the besieged city of Mariupol

It may be -4 degrees and snowing lightly, Sergei prefers to stay outside, enjoy the open air and a sky without bombs. He has spent most of the past three weeks holed up in a basement in Mariupol.

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It was in this city, besieged by Russian troops for weeks, that the city’s theater was bombed on the 23rd day of the offensive launched by the Kremlin. The NGO “Human Rights Watch” refers to the number of “at least 500 civilians” present in the building during the bombardment, where according to a satellite photo, the word “child” was written in large letters on the ground, in Cyrillic, near the building.

Sergei was not in that area at the time. But he says that in this city in eastern Ukraine, not ten minutes go by without an artillery fire. Before letting go of his obsession, it was the air raid. “First there is the sound of the jet plane. And then five or ten seconds later, the explosions of the bombs. It was every half hour or every hour. The day and the night. Death is the only thought we had in mind: the next bomb may be ours.”Sergei breathes.

“It was just a nightmare”

In the morgue where he works, he saw 48 dead, just for the first three days of bombing. The town hall now deplores more than 2,000, as after the bombing of a maternity hospital. The medical examiner tells of the corpses that remain in the street, some buried in building courtyards… and his ravaged neighborhood. “Around us, there were destroyed houses, eight-storey buildings on fire… 70% of homes no longer have windows. It was simply a nightmare.“

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Tight to 25 in the 40 m2 of their shelter, Sergei, his family and his neighbors have rationed their food: no more electricity, no more gas. They made fires outside to cook a little. The water also quickly ran out.

“We did everything to find water, in abandoned wells… We also melted the snow, but we mostly took water from the heating system”

The result: no heating. So he says that everyone bundles up to withstand the five degrees of the shelter.

There, they are cut off from the world, without a network. Impossible to find out about a possible humanitarian corridor. Tuesday morning, Sergei’s family takes the road despite everything. “It was a risky decision. We were in a column of a few hundred cars. 40 km from the town of Zaporizhia, there were rocket attacks on the convoy. I saw a dozen ambulances pass.”, he blurts out.

After having sheltered his wife and two grown children, the father of the family wants to return to work in the Donbass. In 2014, he had already had to flee Donetsk. But in his eyes, the war of eight years ago, “that’s 1% of what’s happening today“.