Having taken refuge in the cellars of buildings, the inhabitants of Mariupol have often been deprived of 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, held back by general mobilization. An estimated 40,000 civilians are trapped in this siege.
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In Ukraine, the rest of her family has been surviving under the bombs for 15 days. “My husband does volunteer work and he travels a lot in the cities. Sometimes he manages to send me some photos which are terrible”, she explains. The most recent is a photo of their building. More precisely from their apartment destroyed by one of the countless bombs that have been falling on Mariupol almost continuously for two weeks now. Nastya’s former neighbors live in hiding in the cellars of their buildings.
People go out between the bombings, they make fires in their courtyards, since there is no gas or electricity and many apartments are already destroyed. Stocks are running out. There is nothing to eat, nothing to drink.
Nastya, resident of Mariupolat franceinfo
What enrages Nastya more than anything are these 60 buses, loaded with humanitarian aid, blocked on the road for a week because the Russians won’t let them pass.
Since her Romanian exile, the mother of the family has been browsing social networks to find images of her neighborhood at war. 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 which separates two blocks of buildings. “They bury their neighbors in their yard, she continues. They’re trying to survive.”
The municipality of Mariupol estimates that 2,200 inhabitants have died in the past two weeks, victims of the bombardments, but more and more are also victims of fatigue, cold or hunger. On other videos broadcast by international channels, we see volunteers, like Nastya’s husband, throwing dozens of lifeless bodies into mass graves.