Air bombs dropped by Russian aircrafts on a hospital with injured children. Dogs eating human remains on the street. A litre of water shared by seven people and one prayer for everyone. How not to go mad in that hell, how to survive and save others? Mykola Osychenko, a Mariupol resident, an IDP from Donetsk and the head of the local TV channel Mariupol TV, talks about this in his story.
He has given hundreds of interviews to tell the world about the fate of Mariupol and its inhabitants. Mykola describes in detail the three weeks of people’s lives in one of the 10-storey buildings in the city centre. He and his family managed to break out from the sieged Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia on 15 March 2022.
You know, I left Donetsk in July of 2014. On 19 July, after the well-known events in the city. I then led a bit of a nomadic life moving around the country for some time – between Mariupol, Dnipro and Kyiv. I settled down in Kyiv before 2019, and in 2019, I received a contract for the post of the head of Mariupol Television. So from 2019 to 2022, I was there. The house where I lived was in the very centre of the city. And notably, we should understand that for all these eight years Mariupol has been a city 20 kilometres from the line of contact in Donbass. That is, some explosions, but nothing more...
Well, in the morning everything was as usual. I got up, had a cup of coffee, and then, of course, began looking through the news feeds. And I realized that the morning was not really a usual morning. But you know, we are the media, and we had our own role in it. It was about informing people, about reassuring them.
And at that moment, no one could imagine the scale of this catastrophe. The whole city turned out to be in some sort of the Stone Age indeed.
Yes, we lived on instincts – those that were programmed in humans many centuries ago; clearly, the instinct of the hunter prevailed in men. I did not have a single day without this. I forced myself and I felt so much easier then. Every day, I had to get something for the people who lived in my house. To get some water, get some food, get batteries, candles, lighters… That is, everything that helped us survive.
There were a couple of days when I did not leave the house at all, because something [shells or mines] kept falling and landing right near the house… I felt bad on such days, but not because it was falling somewhere, but because I could not do anything for my near and dear ones. When a plane cruises above your house during the day and at night, every half an hour – yes, and you understand that any missile strike or bomb strike can hit your housing, that’s torn it. Yet, even in those moments, I tried to stay calm, so that my son, wife, niece, granddaughter (my niece’s daughter) could see my calmness, my peace of mind, and this soothed them, although inside I felt like [my days were numbered].
My friend and his parents moved in to live with us. They lived in the 23rd micro-district – a neighbourhood in the city that is closer to Port City, the only large shopping mall. There were active military actions there at that time.
The russian offensive was coming from there, and high-rise buildings were the targets for everything that was flying in from there. So they came to us. Why am I telling this? His mother, my friend Mykyta’s mother, she admired my wife and niece. She looked up to them, as they never had a nerve storm, not a single time. They were focused on arranging as much cosiness and comfort for the children as possible, without having the heating, electricity, water, without anything in principle. So they took on the monopoly role of housewives in the kitchen as much as possible. They were busy with cooking and distributed food among all the tenants who lived in our flat. And they were as collected as possible. Well, I mean, I am very proud of my loved ones because there was not a single moment when they would give up, fall into a nerve storm, panic or anything like that.
I am also very proud of my son. He is 12 years old. He grew up mentally during that week indeed, because he didn’t cry at all, not a single time. Even I myself could [shed a tear] when no one saw it, from time to time. And I saw his anxiety several times. It was clear that he was really worried about something. I asked him what the matter was and why. I thought it was because of the fighting, because of the airplane, or because of something else… But no, he was worried because he adequately counted how much clean water we had at home. He adequately counted how many people we had at home and saw that the water we had, even if used most sparingly, was enough for two days maximum. It was not clear what to do next – that is why he was so nervous.
I solved the issue with clean water, I got more water – and he calmed down. That is, he was like a man, like a young man, he worried about his loved ones. He almost did not drink any water.
He… well, you know what… I forced him to go to the toilet. He did not want to go to the toilet, because he knew that this meant… At the beginning of the war, everyone was still flushing the toilets in all the houses from time to time. And then, as far as I know, people almost did not flush the toilets in all the houses because there was no water. So it was hard for me to get him to go to the bathroom because he knew it meant spending some amount of water.
I mean, my family is the people I am proud of, people I admire. Probably because we were so tightly knit together. Our whole house, where we lived, all the residents aligned themselves with us. They looked at what we do – whether we leave or not. We became a sort of a building block that consolidated this house, its community. We developed a superstitious belief that men cannot shave during the wartime.
It developed… (I do not remember the exact date) it can be traced back by the key events of the war in Ukraine and in Mariupol in particular. That was some three or four days before the maternity hospital was bombed. The maternity hospital was some 500-800 metres from our house. I could see it through the window. My neighbour Volodya, who lived in a flat above us, decided to go to the store in the morning. It was at the time when some shops were still open.
They worked in the following mode. Some people were let into the store, around 25-30 people. They had to buy quickly what was available there. And there was nothing special on sale. Well, at that time it was something phenomenal. They had to quickly pay at the cashier’s desk in cash, because the banking cards no longer worked then.
There was no network, no internet, nothing. Then, they had to leave and a new group of people were let in. That’s how it worked.
The shop worked from 8:00 o’clock either until 15:00 o’clock or until 16:00 o’clock the latest. Further on, the working time was shorter and shorter. All those people who were waiting for their turn to enter the shop, up to two thousand people, were on the site, on the square in front of the shop, and the queue moved slowly. My neighbour Volodya went there too. He shaved and decided to go to the store by 7:00 o’clock in the morning, an hour before the opening time, in order to take a place in the queue as close as possible. Other people came by 6 o’clock, so he couldn’t really take the place closer to the entrance door.
We still had concierges at work then. Three elderly women. Well, two elderly women by then. The third one was from the left-bank part of the city, so she did not come to us. We didn’t know what happened to her. I really hope she’s alive. Well, everything was tough there from the beginning. So we had two concierge ladies working in shifts, every second day. And here is a story as told by those elderly ladies, because only that concierge saw this moment.
Volodya left home in order to be there at 7:00 o’clock. The shop was some 800 metres from the house, maybe a little more. At 7:20, he knocked on the door and she [the concierge] unlocked it for him. He took two or three steps and fell. He fell down and a pool of blood appeared under his body. She screamed for all the neighbours to come out. Whoever heard it, they ran out of their flats. What happened to him… He went to the shop and joined the queue, and people in the queue were hit by either a mine or a shell.
The only thing that saved him was that he was a little further from the epicentre of it. So he got hit only by two fragments: one in the thigh and the other one under the shoulder blade.
He said that what he saw, where it fell, it was all really tough… According to him, it was butchery. He then somehow collected himself and made it from the shop to the house. He fell down only when he came in through the entrance door. And two absolute coincidences saved his life. Well, it was his second birthday. It was..., I don’t remember the exact day in March, well, it was early March. Number six comes to my mind (the 6th of March), but I am not sure. Basically, it was three days before the maternity hospital was shelled (now I will explain why), either two or three days before…
Yes, the first coincidence that saved his life was that a sanitary epidemiologist lived on the ground floor. His name was Volodya too… This sanitary epidemiologist studied in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg (Russia), back in the 80-ies. He was trained as a military field medic. Well, he did not become one, but all the skills remained. He ran out of his flat and knew exactly what to do, where to block, where to put pressure. He tried to pull one of the fragments out of his neighbour’s thigh. He put his hand in, but couldn’t get the fragment out. He left it to other doctors who treated Volodya. The bleeding was stopped, the wound was pressed as much as possible. We gave Volodya some painkillers, like Ketonov and Analgin. We gave him everything to make it less painful for him. And the second coincidence that saved his life was that we could not put him in the car and take him out. The second coincidence that saved his life…
A family of a police officer was evacuated to our house, evacuated in an armoured personnel carrier. As they said, while they were driving, they were under the rain of fire. It was tough. They evacuated his wife and six-month-old son. They stayed in the basement of their house for five days, as they could not go out because there was constant shelling. The only thing that saved the baby was that the police officer’s wife still had breast milk.
By some miracle, she also collected herself in order for her child to survive.
And so they were taken to our house. Well, we realized that they were taken out not for some humane reasons. No, they were taken out of pure pragmatism. He was a police officer. The policemen in Mariupol were people responsible for everything. They evacuated the wounded. They evacuated people from destroyed houses closer to the city centre. We thought it would be a good thing.
They documented some cases of civilians on the streets while it was still possible to do so. They took dead bodies to the morgue, to other places, to warehouses, because the morgues filled up very quickly and did not have free space at all. That is, some warehouses or some other premises were used instead. Then, all of them were everywhere. At 8:00 o’clock, a car came after this police officer to take him to work. So we put Volodya into this car and they drove off to the emergency care hospital, but there were no more places there, absolutely no places at all, not even in the corridor.
They were told to go to hospital no. 3, which was this maternity hospital not far from our house. Previously, we, as representatives of television, took part in its opening a few months ago. This was a new children’s department. The maternity ward was on the third floor and paediatric traumatology department was on the second floor. The hospital was already filled with wounded children, and on the first floor medical care was given to anyone, both children and adults.
So Volodya was brought there; he was on a treatment course on the ground floor. He spent two days or two and a half days there. Well, he was discharged on the third day. He came home and all of us congratulated him on his new birthday. An interesting detail. This Volodya, who was wounded, and the other Volodya, who is a sanitary epidemiologist, they constantly tangled with each other previously on various sorts of household issues. Like the electricity meter was put up in a wrong place, etc. All the time, they had some sort of bickering. And when that thing happened, he, without any hesitation, began to give him first aid to save his life. And the other one trusted him without hesitation.
This is the war. It displays people, who is really worth what, indeed.
The next day after that incident, Volodya told everyone that it happened because he had shaved in the morning… One should not shave in the war. I later reconfirmed this too. So the whole house saw it, and the next day we were all at home. I do not remember now if it happened in the afternoon or before the midday. Well, it was daytime; it was not at night. A horrendous explosion thundered. It happened later, well, when a plane began to fly over the city.
The planes began to fly. First, they flew to the outskirts, dropped their heat flares and waited to see if they would be fired at or not. When they realized that no one attempted to shoot them down, because there were no weapons for that, they began to fly brazenly. They flew brazenly over the whole city, striking where they needed to. And so it was one of those moments when we heard the sound of the plane flying. You can hear it wherever you are, whether you are in the basement or not. You hear this wild roaring of a military plane, and one hundred percent that roaring will be followed by either a rocket shot or a bomb whistling. Well, either this or that.
At that time, it was a case with the bomb. The explosion was just colossal. The whole house, our 10-storey building, bounced. The windows bent in and out, but they did not shatter, thank God. At that moment, some glass shattered on the top floor, a couple of balcony windows burst open in people’s flats on upper floors, but otherwise everything was more or less intact. It was intact for a reason. As we found out later, the bomb landed in the yard of this maternity hospital, and our house was saved only by the fact that it fell… here is our house, the maternity hospital, and it fell behind it.
If it had fallen between our house and the maternity hospital, we would probably also have nothing left, no window glass or no windows at all. Maybe we wouldn’t be here either. Volodya, who was discharged from that hospital only yesterday, realized that he actually had another birthday again. He almost cried. Well, not almost, he cried indeed. He saw how many children there were. I mean, damn it, wounded children were on treatment there. These children already experienced it all and now it happened again there…
As far as I know, a young gymnast from Mariupol, an 11-year-old girl, died under the rubble there a few days before that. She and her father were buried under the rubble of the house when something hit them, and her mum and brother were wounded, and they were still alive. So that girl’s mother and younger brother, they were just taken to this [hospital]… Well, they were there. And as far as I understand, they are also gone. Well, this is just horrible stuff. And how many expectant mothers were there? How many people!? Volodya saw everything; he knew there were children there.
On 13 March, we realized that we were going to leave. On that day, I decided to shave. I went to the bathroom and shaved my face without shaving foam or gel. I moistened my hand with water a little to wipe off my cut bristle, my shaved hair from the face. I began putting an aftershave balm on my cheeks to feel as if there was nothing, as if it was all a dream, and as if now I was going to the office. And at this moment, all my training courses that I took in 2014-2015, I would say, were of no earthly use really, because I had just blind fear, I was stricken by wild fear. It paralyzed me; it made me rush back and forth.
A sound thundered that was many times louder than when the bomb fell on the maternity hospital. And that sound seemed to be everywhere, from above, from below, and from the sides.
An explosive wave in the bathroom pushed me in one direction. The wave hit the wall and pushed me again, in the other direction. I rushed back and forth. Well, that is, I did not know what to do; I did not know where to go and what it was.
At this moment human instincts [switch in]; they are the strongest from the old times, when people were afraid of thunder or of something else. I became exactly the same. Apparently, I was keyed up by my parental instinct. That is, I ran to where my son and wife were, where everyone was. At that moment, I met my friend’s mother in the corridor, who was also running in the same direction. Her husband was there, and my wife was running to me. She then followed me and that woman, who is my friend’s mother. At that moment, exactly the same happened for the second time.
That is, we were shaken by the blast wave. My friend’s mother was thrown to the floor. She fell down and my wife dragged her to the room where it was safe. I pushed her from behind. We didn’t even try to lift her. It was all very fast.
You… you have no rational thoughts on your mind. You act on instincts, only aiming to survive, and that is it.
Then the same thing happened for the third time, but we were already ready for it. We were just shaken by the wave a little bit again… We all jumped into that safe room and waited it out for some time there. We caught our breath, everyone was alive. My friend was on the 10th floor at that time, trying to catch the mobile network signal. Fortunately, his windows, I mean, the windows in the staircase, looked out onto the other side. We regained our breath, but we could not leave that room for quite a long time.
You rationally understand that you need to go out and have a look around: to see what, how and where. But your blind fear not just whispers to you, but rather outcries, “Sit still! Just sit down and squeeze yourself into the ground!” The children were very scared then, and so was I, well and so was everyone.
When we came out later, we learned, we realized… as I said, those sounds were preceded by the sound of a flying airplane. So we realized that the plane fired three missiles, and they hit 50 meters from our house. They did not even hit our house, just 50 meters away from it, and the funnels were not really big ones. The funnels from the bombs in the city were 10 meters [deep], they were very large. While these funnels were quite small, but apparently, there was a great cumulative force, some wild impact. Not only the window glass shattered, by the window frames were blown out. The metal-plastic window frames were twisted. It was such a force – the window glass was shattered everywhere. We had the interior door made of oak tree. I once invited a friend to help me unhinge that door in order to oil the hinges. We did it together. So this heavy door just flew through our flat. It was some really tough stuff.
That day we realized that there was nothing to tape up – no windows were left. And mines began to fly and land right near the house.
At night, some two full rounds of Grad MRLS rockets landed there. There was nothing to tape up, there was nothing to seal. All the windows were blown out. There was one window left in the kitchen as it was on the other side, and one in the bathroom where I shaved. Miraculously all the people in our 10-storey building survived, even though everyone was at home. They tried to do something, of course. Everyone told me it was because I shaved. Volodya, the one who survived that day, said, “Mykolo, I asked you not to [shave]…” I said, “Now, I am not going to do it anymore, for sure.” I made a decision for myself – that was it, we needed to leave, because now it landed 50 meters from the house, and the next rocket would hit the house, and that’s it. I said that we were leaving tomorrow. Basically, everyone left with us.
There were only four families who stayed at home. And everyone had their own reasons for that. Volodya, who was wounded, and his wife did not leave because they tried and wanted to pick up his wife’s mother from the 23rd [residential block], near Port City shopping mall. However, even the police officers did not go there. Well, one could not go there even on an armoured vehicle. Several more families did not leave.
A woman, Tetiana, who was about 60 years old, also stayed. Her mother was a lying case and she could not be transported. She had to be taken out on a stretcher, put in an ambulance, and that’s it. We had neither a stretcher nor an ambulance, and Tetiana, even when everything was knocked out, when everything [windows and doors] was blown out, she stayed and slept near her mother at home. We all slept in the basement, where we arranged a bomb sheltered for ourselves, and she slept near her at home.
She said, “She’s my mum.”
Her mother had many diseases and a mild form of dementia, or maybe not very mild one by that time. She could not recognize her and didn’t understand who she was. Tetiana loved her. It was her mother, she slept near her, she wrapped her up in every clothes possible. Tetiana did not go out. On 13 March, when all the windows were blown off, she put on all the sweaters that were at home. She was a reckless person; she worked as a senior manager. Well, basically, everyone was equal there. It did not matter whether you are a boss or not. She had all the sweaters on, two coats and a fur coat on. She wore this all days long, and she slept near her mother. She did not leave either then.
We left on 15 March. Usually, it took me two and a half hours to get to Zaporizhzhia. I liked to drive fast. But on 15 March we drove for 15 hours. It took us 15 hours to get to Zaporizhzhia. A lot of cars left the city. According to various estimates, it was from two to two and a half thousand cars. All cars had various “Children” signs placed on them.
We believed it would protect us: if someone saw that there were children inside, they would not shoot there. The Drama Theatre case showed that it did not work.
On 16 and 17 March, while in Zaporizhzhia, every day I tried to get through to my neighbours who were there. I hoped that they would go up to the 10th floor and would get a message that I called them. Then I could see that these people were alive. They would see that I was alive. There was nothing. On 18 March, I phoned that sanitary epidemiologist, just mechanically, without any hope. Well, in those weeks we became quite closely knit. Before that, the whole house was like… well, people who lived there were some senior managers or supervisors at their workplace, middle management, a little higher, so everyone was constantly busy, everyone would come home and no one would talk to each other. During those weeks, everyone became friends, we became the closest people. We shared food, water and alcohol. I’ll tell you straight: why not? We could not get valerian drops or pills. Everyone had alcoholic drinks though.
So, I managed to get through to Volodya. I was insanely glad to hear his voice. From the background noise, I could hear that they were on the way. I asked, “Have you left?” He said that they were very envious of us as soon as on 15 March. When we left, mines began to land and hit near the house again.
They stayed until 18 March, until the morning, and early in the morning, they hopped in the car and left, including that old woman. They took her out.
Somehow, they folded the seats in the car, as there was no choice left, after all. He said that a flat on the 10th floor was destroyed at night – the one where I used to stand and catch a telephone signal. I thought that even if something happened, I would move behind the wall and everything would be fine. Well, thank you, God, nothing happened to me there.
A flat on the eighth floor was gunned through. A piece of the garbage chute on the seventh floor was knocked out; this was also part of the house. And the worst thing was… well, we were able to leave for a certain reason. We had cars. Basically, in order to leave Mariupol, in order to get out of there, you should pull out three lucky tickets. The first lucky ticket is to have a car, not everyone has one. The second lucky ticket is that the car had to stay more or less intact during those weeks of hell. I mean, it had to be in a working condition; the engine had to be intact. Basically, here in Zaporizhzhia I met cars without windshields. People did not give a damn about that, they just drove in order to leave the place. And the third lucky ticket was about gasoline, as I said earlier. You had to have gasoline.
What saved us was the fact that we had an underground parking under the house, so the cars remained intact. Our thrifty nature saved us there. Our cars were with gasoline. In addition to all that destruction and damage caused to the building, one Grad rocket broke through the parking lot and destroyed one of the cars, so they decided to leave. They left, and you know, a great miracle… the more I think about it, the more I believe in it, that all the people who lived in our house are alive, only Volodya was wounded. That all of them are alive, all the children, grandmothers, grandfathers, even that bed-ridden woman. May God grant her a long, long life. Everyone is alive.
You know, I mentioned earlier that everyone who lived in the house occupied some more or less managerial positions at their workplace. I mean, those were some well-educated people, cynical people, let’s be straight, people who were tough in some sense. When mines and shells began to fly in closer to the city centre, well, it was on or around the fifth day of the war, or maybe even earlier, all the women in our house gathered downstairs and made a decision. They wrote a prayer for protection of our house, and every evening at 20:00 o’clock all the women read it. Someone recited it in the bomb shelter – the one we arranged ourselves [in the basement].
People who lived on the upper floors slept there. Because it was scary on the top floors. You see it all, and everything flies nearby, so they were in the basement for the night. Women in my family read that prayer at home, by candlelight. And so at 20:00 o’clock, the whole house, all the women, prayed using the same text at the same time. I told this story to the Washington Post, and yesterday I received a message from Philharmonic in Poland. They read my interview to the Washington Post and asked me to share the text of this prayer. I sent it to them. They want to put music on it and sing it, to make it a song. I asked them to send it to me later. I would like to keep it for my life-long memories. That’s how it is.
The toughest part of that 15-hour trip was the first half hour. It was the toughest thing that is etched in my memory very hard.
I did everything, as much as possible, for my son not to remember it, and I think that parents in other cars did more or less the same, because children were in all cars.
That is what I said at the beginning – your life is worth nothing, but the life of your child is worth all the money in the world. Destroyed city… in order to leave, you had to drive from the centre through the city districts and on the way out. Some people had to drive from one suburb to another. We left the house at 9 o’clock. Cars with signs and ribbons all over were moving out of all the yards, courtyards and gates, wherever possible, and the streamlets of cars merged into one stream. We drove very slowly and had time enough to contemplate the city.
There were no houses and windows left intact – naturally, utility poles were down, hanging on broken wires… you ride under them and think that they can fall, damn them. You go around [shell] fragments as you don’t want to have a flat tyre – you still have a long way to go. And the fragments are not those small pieces, but all sorts of metal elements. There are a lot of them. It was dangerous as you could drive onto a power line. Why? Because, having driven a car wheel on a wire, it could be wound on a wheel and that’s it. You do not go anywhere any more. I mean, you get stuck.
But the most horrible thing was that you drove around bodies of dead people, civilians, children, women, old ladies. Their bodies were lying on the roadsides and right on the road.
Everyone tried to distract their children’s attention, “Look at the sun there; look, there’s a car like uncle Sasha has.” Something like that, for the children not to see it. For them not to remember it, because it will affect them in many years ahead. Their mental health is already broken clearly.
A girl told me…, well my niece told me about a girl who also attended the kindergarten together with her daughter. They exchanged some messages with her mother. They left for Dnipro at approximately the same time when we did. The age of the children is about the same, like three- or four-year-old kids. And that mother told her about her daughter, “I enter my daughter’s room and she is telling someone how airplanes bombed, she describes the war, etc.” And she asked her daughter, “Who are you talking to?” “I’m telling all these people about the war.” There were no more people in the room. Well, that is, the child’s mental health was affected, as she saw some people around her. And she was telling them everything she had seen. Well, whatever it was, these kids are still very lucky, as they are alive. This is just great.
So, this is how we came our way. It was scary at the checkpoints, because you don’t know what questions you could be asked. I am a senior manager at television, so to speak. I would obviously get questions to be answered. I don’t know by what miracle, but somehow on this particular day it worked out ok for me. My fingers were checked for any sort of callus or blisters that usually develop from pressing a gun trigger. Some of my belongings were checked but rather superficially. My phone was also checked, but there was nothing on it. It was clean.
My mum, dad, my son… well, my wife was driving in front of me, and I think it was at a checkpoint in Tokmak, yes Tokmak, where everyone was asked to show the gallery on their phones, even my son: what could he have there? Well, I said okay. And I saw that my wife was talking to that dude for quite a long time. Many of them were with the letter Z [on their uniforms]. It was obvious that they were ashamed, well, that is, some of them even hid their eyes. So she talked to him for quite a long time. Then she came out and showed him the trunk of the car. She closed it and said in such a tone – women know this sort of tone: “all the best,” This is the tone when all the curses and damnations possible are conveyed in it.
A little later, we stopped while we were in a traffic jam. I came up and asked her, “What happened?” And I, as a man under the thumb of my wife (self-ironically), know the fear a man feels in front of a woman. It is even stronger than the fear from the artillery shelling.
The man at the checkpoint asked her to show him the photos on her phone. She said, “I don’t want to show you the photos on my phone. On those photos, I’m in a swimming suit, in the fitting room and the like.”
She said, “I won’t.” He said, “But we have an order, we have to…” So she gave him her phone, but with such a… that he will remember her for a lifetime, surely. These were some experiences we faced.
During those 15 hours while we were driving, we didn’t even go to the toilet. We were terribly afraid to leave the car. The car was our evacuation resource, and our whole lives depended on this car. There was no home anymore; there was nothing left. This [the car] was everything we had. So we went to the toilet only upon arrival in Zaporizhzhia.
What I’m doing now? Well, I have not had a day off yet, and I should probably thank God that I do not have a day off, because if I get one now, when I have more time to lie down and think about something, I will either go on a drinking spree or will do anything else. I’d better keep myself busy.
The first thing I do is I am trying to find, to take out my people, staff members – those who are still there, unfortunately. Of the 89 people we had before the war, today I learned that two more girls are alive. They called their relatives from the phone of a Russian soldier from some hospital in Mariupol. It is not clear where, but it is important to me that, as of 29 March, they were definitely alive – so they are still alive now. No need for me to worry. So, for now I know that 44 people are alive. That is, almost one half. As for the others, I don’t know where they are, what happened to them, but I keep trying to find them. The second thing I do is giving interviews to foreign media. I don’t remember how many interviews I have had. I tried to count them, I tried to save those video links for myself, but then I gave up, as it was an endless stream of interviews: the United States, the UK, Japan, Germany, Belarus, Ukraine, and even South Korea. I do not know why, but it is also very important to them.
Yesterday I gave an interview to a Russian opposition media. They have started to take interviews too. I tell everyone that this is a real hell. It is not just a humanitarian catastrophe, a war zone. No, it’s hell that broke loose.
I seek to share my sad experience. I lived a week with local volunteers there. I explain to them that there are volunteers there who were involved in volunteering in 2014-2015. I explain to them that this is not the same; this is not the case at all. This is a completely different reality. You need to be ready (trained) as a volunteer. I simulated some situations for them and looked at the reaction even from a verbal description of the situation. Shelling. You, as a volunteer, have a child with a punctured lung in your arms.
You need to plug/seal the child’s lung with something to keep him/her alive, while the child’s mother will be beating you hysterically because she sees you holding her bloodied child. You are an enemy for her. And you need to somehow save the kid, fight off his mother, and take the two of them out. I look at people’s reaction even from the description of that scenario, and some of them do not understand this, some of them will just give up.
There is even a selection process for volunteers here now – those who will be able to and those who will not. I mean, it’s one thing to feed a homeless kitten, and another thing to deal with this sort of things. I communicate with local authorities, I try to be as useful as possible – this means to find my people.
To outcry about Mariupol to the whole world, because the concern of the world community is a great thing, but people die every day there, people are buried in the yards between the houses, in group graves. Horrible things happen there, and we do not know how many elderly women and men died there, just passed away quietly at home. Yes, the lack of food, water, insulin, medicines against high blood pressure, heartache medications, other medicines. We realize that no one can put the pregnancy on hold, for example.
I mean, the war does not put life on hold, and women continue to give birth in basements, on the streets, under shellfire, somewhere else, and you cannot even wash it, that newborn child. You have no warm water; you have not had any water for several weeks there.
Well, and that happens every day, while the world expresses its concern. People keep dying from shelling, from hunger, from stray dogs etc.
Now coming back to that shelling of the queue at the store. Volodya, my neighbour, he made it back home. And the police officer who drove around in the area later, told me that many people did not come back home. Those who did not die right there, on site, they, like Volodya, tried to make it back home, to crawl to their house.
They did not make it; they didn’t crawl back, so their bodies were lying here and there, as they were coming their way – that’s how it is… This is what that police officer saw, and I drove there the next day, as I went to the office. I had some small bottles of water for visitors in the office. I decided to pick them up, as, even though they were small, that was water, the most precious thing. When I was returning from the office, where I went for water, I drove along the route that my neighbour Volodya took, and I saw bloodstains left where the bodies lay. They were collected and removed. Apparently, the bodies were taken out, and the brains remained lying, human brain.
Some remains of human brains were left there and a dog was eating them; and I can understand that dog too. It had nothing to eat either. But a horrible thing was that dogs saw not only brains. There were more and more bodies every day, and dogs had less and less dog food. Certainly, they will eat the remains of human bodies, of those civilians who have not been buried.
And it is horrible that a dog, having tasted human flesh, will get used to its smell. Dogs will start attacking people, children, and elderly women, those alive. That’s terrifying.
I think that the most important thing is for Mariupol to hold out, for people to survive, God willing. Mariupol will have to be rebuilt. This will happen… It has to become a whole new city, with everything new.
I keep in touch with Mariupol residents who leave the city. They all want to come back. We understand that hundreds of thousands of people have become homeless in fact. They have nowhere to live. There are some more or less young people like me, even younger, they have a chance to start all over again and get settled down somewhere. While the elderly, they have lived in an apartment all their lives, they have nothing more, they do not even have children who could shelter them. What can they do? That is why I really wish all people could find their mission, their designation in this life, so that they could have a place where to live. In fact, Mariupol is a city of hardworking people. There are no lazy-bones there.
So I hope they would have the opportunity to start their lives anew, and they will make every effort to do so.
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