The last residents of Mariúpol who have been able to be evacuated “from hell” recount the “brutality” of the invaders and the streets “full of corpses”
The mechanics with the corpses was as follows: the Russian Army picks them up from the streets and transports them in trucks to the Mariúpol industrial estates. Then he deposits them in the refrigerators of the companies that the soldiers have previously selected for the capacity of their cold rooms. Before February 24, most were engaged in food storage and distribution. No one ever thought about the horror of the last two months.
The soldiers bag or wrap the bodies with cloth as their colleagues dig the graves. Finally, they are loaded back onto the trucks and thrown from there into the graves. The few witnesses affirm that in some of them up to three rows of corpses are stacked one on top of the other. A chain of death absolutely structured to avoid images like those taken in Bucha of the avenues turned into sown with blood. The Ukrainian authorities fear that at least 20,000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol.
The mayor’s adviser, Petro Andryushchenko, now tells how these last weeks of siege have been. No light, no water and almost no food. Just death and destruction. He considers the city to be the symbol of the new holocaust. With most of its territory under Russian control and considered a conquest by the Kremlin, signs of the massacre are now beginning to emerge. The worst of them are the satellite images that traveled the world yesterday, showing a huge grave where, according to the authorities, between 3,000 and 9,000 bodies would have been buried. It occupies an area twenty times greater than that discovered in Bucha after the withdrawal of the Russians.
“They destroyed everything.” It is the testimony of one of the 79 residents who could be evacuated on Thursday by bus to Zaporizhia, 150 kilometers away. Several buses left, but almost all of them were held up at Russian roadblocks. “It has been a miracle,” commented an older woman upon her arrival in Zaporizhia, whose districts also show the punishment inflicted by the bombing. Fear chased the buses. Yesterday, none of those rescued wanted to give their names to the journalists who tried to speak with them. Before the war Mariupol had 400,000 inhabitants; now there are about 100,000, trapped between the military fence and the lack of agreement on the establishment of humanitarian corridors.
“There is no food. We practically ate dry grain,” recalls one of the civilian victims, while explaining that she and other neighbors hidden in a basement did not even dare to go outside in search of water to cook food for fear of missiles and snipers. .
“There is no trace left”
Most of the testimonies agree on “the brutality” of the occupants who entered house by house in search of their tenants, especially men of fighting age. “We spent the whole day hiding underground because of the bombing. The earth trembled. They have erased everything and there is no trace of the city,” lamented a woman.
Mariupol, virtually under siege since the start of the invasion, is seen by Ukrainian forces as having received possibly the heaviest aerial punishment of the entire war. Residents evoke the “explosions” that fell endlessly day and night on residential areas causing devastating fires. “Many people have burned in their houses because they couldn’t escape,” said an older man, for whom the war leaves images as terrible as that of “the corpses lying in the street for days” or the fleeting and run-over burials “in the gardens so as not to get shot.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.