Svetlana managed, together with her daughter, to leave the martyred city of Mariupol. The two women lived a few hundred meters from the Azovstal factory where the last Ukrainian soldiers are still entrenched. Very precarious living conditions in the midst of shells fired by both sides.
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Svletlana and her daughter Olga lived palmost two months under the bombs, in a basement, without water, with rationed food. They lived in the Levo Berezhny district, just 300 meters from the Azovstal metallurgical complex. The industrial site today represents the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the martyr city of Mariupol.
While the rest of the port city has visibly fallen into Russian hands, around 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of civilians still live entrenched in the huge steel complex. “We were trapped between the Russian soldiers who were targeting the complex and the Ukrainians who were fighting back in the factorydescribes 75-year-old Svetlana. We were in the middle and the shells sent from both sides were falling on us. When a shell approached and then exploded, it was like an earthquake.”
The Russian military set up a siege and abandoned the idea of an assault after weeks of heavy fighting. At the end of March, his daughter Olga was also injured by shrapnel. Since then, the two women have been able to flee the martyr city on Tuesday, April 19, but it is the Russians who have imposed their conditions. “Mariupol was surrounded and the Russians showed us a way out”continues Svetlana.
“The Russians told us: either you die tonight because there will be an assault, or you leave.”
Svetlana, a resident who was able to flee Mariupolat franceinfo
“There were Russians and Chechen soldiers on tanks, resumes this mother. The buses arrived and then we left. We had no choice.”
Svetlana and Olga are now in Donetsk, hosted by family, but there too, living conditions are complicated. The water is accessible only two hours a day while the fighting is increasing in violence, only about ten kilometers away.
Svletlana and her daughter lived almost two months under the bombs in Mariupol – The report by Thibault Lefèvre and Anna Ognyanyk
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