“Sometimes hope returns to me. But sometimes it leaves, and I think that we are all going to die,” says Anastasiia Kiseliova, a 40-year-old mother of three, as she walks through the streets of Mariupol, voice-recording herself on an iPhone. “The city is gone,” she adds, her voice trembling. Kiseliova’s hometown, Mariupol, once populated by nearly half a million Ukrainians, was razed to the ground by the Russian army. Ceaseless bombardment and shelling didn’t leave a single building untouched, local authorities said. Thousands have already been killed by Russian attacks or even starvation and dehydration, as Russia’s blockade left the city without any utilities, food, or water. Despite Ukraine’s continuous efforts to evacuate Mariupol citizens, over 100,000 civilians remain trapped in the city. “Every day and night we have spent in the cellar,” Kiseliova says in the video, a few seconds after a round of explosions is heard in the background. “We cried, prayed, and really wanted to survive.” Kiseliova’s district of Mariupol, Prymorskyi, was under attacks from day one, when Russia launched a full-scale offensive against Ukraine on Feb. 24. “Schools, apartments, private houses, they dropped bombs on everything,” she recalled. Together with her three children and other family members, Kiseliova spent a week in a cellar under her house.
On March 22, a woman saw a nine-story apartment building burning in its entirety. She also saw three Russian tanks shooting at an apartment block. She knew she had to leave. “I was scared that they can come at night, rape us, take our kids and kill them,” she says. “We are pieces of meat for them. They hate us. I don’t know what for.” For days, her family walked through the city which became filled with graves, dead bodies, and burning houses. There was a car with a large pool of blood underneath. And a body of a man without arms and legs. “We were left with nothing but cold, empty boxes,” she said about people’s homes, each and every one of which soon became a target for Russian tanks and missiles. “No one counts the dead here. We buried people in our yard. There are cemeteries in every park. And how many people burned in their homes? How many died of natural causes and just lay in their flats? No one will find them.” On April 6, Mariupol City Council said the Russian military began using mobile crematoriums to burn the bodies of killed Ukrainians. Ukraine may never uncover the true scale of Russia’s atrocities in Mariupol.
