War in Ukraine: Stories of those who escaped from Mariupol: “There is nothing left. Everything has turned to dust” | International

Sergei Zozulya asked the doctors to try to save his hand. Give him “a chance”. Lying on a stretcher in the Mariupol regional hospital, without water, without heating, with the glassless windows barely covered with sheets of wood and cardboard, Zozulya closed his eyes and with a sinking stomach he tried not to look. Drugs were in short supply even there, and the general anesthetic had worn off for days, the paramedics told him. They numbed his arm and part of his torso “with something,” he says. And they sewed him up as best they could.

Hours earlier, when he was trying to heat a pot of soup over a fire in the courtyard of his building, where the neighbors cooked as best they could, he felt a very strong blow to his arm and an explosion. “I fell to the ground and saw that my hand was no longer a hand,” she says in a low voice and calm tone. Afterwards, races, a tourniquet and to the hospital. There, lying in the operating room – one for several patients to save electricity from the generator that allows the center to continue operating in a city turned to rubble and without basic supplies – he heard a pregnant woman with an amputated foot being carried from the ankle and an open wound in the belly. “There was no baby anymore. The nurses commented that Russian planes had bombed two hospitals. One, the Mariupol maternity. It was March 9,” says Sergei.

It is the 24th day of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine and the Zozulya family no longer has a home. Sergei doesn’t even know if he will keep his hand. He wears his right arm in a sling with a tight bandage that has seen better days and is in dire need of a wash. But the 47-year-old man, his wife, Oksana, and his two children are alive and have escaped the horror. They have fled Mariupol, a city turned into smoking ruins.

They don’t know how long it will last, but for the first time in weeks they can stretch their legs outdoors for more than five minutes without having to run to huddle in the basement because of the shelling. Even if it is in the parking lot of a nondescript shopping center in Zaporizhia (in the still not too attacked central-southern Ukraine), transformed into a first response point to attend to those displaced by the invasion of the Kremlin. Especially from Mariupol, from where it is estimated that barely 20,000 people have escaped, according to the authorities. People who have lost almost everything. Like them, who until a month ago thought about the horizon of vacations, of family walks on the beach under the sun. From another day of work for Sergei, who rents bungalows on the sea of ​​Azov. Of another carantoña for little Nikita, a blond and chubby-cheeked boy of one year and eight months, or of the good grades of Igor, 13 years old, who walks like an uncaged beast around the enclosure.

The Zozulyas have taken almost a day to reach what still looks like a safe port, despite occasional attacks. They have arrived by car, with Sergei at the wheel, changing gears as best he could, with one hand, the left. They left Mariupol on Friday, when a bombardment reached their building and struck down the third and fourth floors in a flash and the flames began to devour the rest. “We had been living in the basement with the neighbors for weeks because the shelling and shooting were constant,” Oksana sighs as she tries to reassure Nikita, who cries in bursts as she looks around suspiciously. “Write that Russian planes are bombing the city aimlessly. Missiles and rockets fall anywhere. Even in a nursery”, asks Sergei. “They liberate us from who knows who,” says Oksana ironically. She wears two or three sweaters and a coat, but even so, the woman seems small and fragile. “Now the Russians are already in the city and they are trying to erase it to the ground. There is no remedy. Just leave, ”says the 43-year-old woman with a shrug.

After weeks of intense fighting, Ukraine has lost control of the Sea of ​​Azov. The Kremlin troops have taken over the port of Mariupol, the main one of those waters, and have already entered the strategic city. With just over 400,000 inhabitants, the port city is one of the key pieces of Putin’s aspirations. Control of it would allow Moscow better logistics of supplies and reinforcements to Russian Army units further west and facilitate a pincer operation to surround Ukrainian forces around Donbas. But above all, it would pave the way to complete a corridor from Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014, to the Donetsk and Lugansk territories, controlled by the Kremlin through pro-Russian separatists, whom it supports. for eight years and that are the basis of the argument for what Putin has called a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine and protect the Russophone population of Donbas, a region to which the besieged Mariupol belongs.

A symbolic city for the Kremlin also because its conquest would mean the defeat of the ultra-nationalist Azov battalion, and now part of the Ukrainian national guard, at its own base, its headquarters, its headquarters, says Alexei, a programmer for 27 years old, who has just arrived with his wife, his mother-in-law and her four-year-old son in Zaporizhia. “The fights are brutal inside the city. The Russians shoot and Azov they respond. From anywhere. From within the city, from flats, from apartment buildings. And us in the middle of everything, ”she says. “There are artillery fire and shelling every half hour. You go to sleep with bombs and you wake up with bombs.” A sound that penetrates to the marrow. Like fear.

Alexei, a young man with large almond-shaped eyes and a shy look, recounts his hell point by point. Almost minute by minute. With disturbing chronological precision. Since the day that Putin launched the invasion and that he had a job interview that never took place. When a bomb destroyed the apartment of his mother-in-law, Viktoria. When he lost contact with friends with a car who were supposed to pick him and Tatiana, 26, up. When they put all their things in a few bags and left their apartment never to return. First, in the vehicle of some acquaintances. Then hitchhiking. When they washed their face and hands, after three weeks. “We have left everything behind. All our memories. The photographs…” he lamented. In the 24 days of invasion he has forged new memories. So many to fill several lives. Many memories and great nightmares. “There is nothing left of Mariupol. Everything has turned to dust.”

Danilo Yevmanchuk and Valeria Moscovtsova fled hell on foot. They packed what they could into three suitcases and started running. They had been without water, electricity and heating for 22 days. They walked more than five kilometers from their Mariupol shelter until a car with other fleeing people stopped them. Seven crowded into the vehicle to a nearby town and from there, they hitchhiked to another point. Going through Russian checkpoints in which Putin’s soldiers checked their cell phones for some kind of clue, and they searched their necks, arms, shoulders, knees, looking for “nationalist-type” tattoos, Danilo says. Then another car. Other help. And one more. Until the nondescript shopping center of Zaporizhia, where the bucolic garden furniture, which still has its price, and the advertisements for offers of yoghurts and bedspreads for the price of one, contrast with the tired and anguished faces of dozens of people trying Now to decide what to do with what’s left of your life.

The siege is like a belt that is getting wider and tighter. A string that strangles. Or like a snake undulating to try to catch its prey. And Danilo and Valeria, 25 and 23 years old, have been running from that snake for weeks. First, a shell hit their building and they moved into the basement. Later, worried about her grandparents, who could hardly go out to fetch water, to heat food, they moved into her apartment. “There we still lived like normal people, like people, we slept with mattresses on the floor, even in pajamas. Then everything turned to hell. Planes began to fly over our area. To shoot. And we had to go down to the basement. We have been 10 days. 10 days drinking snow and juice”, says Valeria. She says that they have left, leaving the family behind. The grandparents, octogenarians, left them no choice. “There was almost no water. They knew that if we stayed, we would probably all die, ”says the young woman, who wears a comical pink hat with bear ears on her brown hair. Another contrast between the horror of her.

Valeria wishes that everything that has been said about Mariupol was a lie: that they melt snow to be able to drink; that they cooked, until the bombardments became continuous, on bonfires in the street; that there is no food, no medicine; that in addition to the neighbors who broke the windows of supermarkets and pharmacies to take what they needed to survive, there were looters who took televisions, even in a city without electricity. That the corpses, in the best of cases, are buried in graves, or in parks and gardens, and others lie uncollected in the streets: “The main cemetery is outside of Mariupol and it is impossible to get there because of the bombing. But even being able to: who would spend fuel that is reserved to be able to flee for that. If it were my body, I wouldn’t want someone else to risk it. Such is war. You have to survive.”

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