Escaping the Ukrainian city of Mariupol

Wednesday marks four full weeks of fighting. In the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, near-constant Russian bombardment has created devastation.

Many residents are still stuck inside, but some are getting out, describing the horrors they left behind.

Local officials in Mariupol say at least 23-hundred people have died, the real number likely much higher. Their loved ones bury them as best they can, but some of those killed remain exactly where they died.

32-year-old Artur Shevchenko was in Mariupol just four days ago. He and his wife endured weeks of constant bombing. “There were no safe place because shelling was everywhere, from every place.”

For the first five days of the war, they stayed in their apartment, which bears the scars of the siege. They decided to relocate to a building near the sea, a place far from any military units or strategic infrastructure, where they thought they would be safer. They were wrong. Shevchenko says the building was damaged by shelling. “I guess every apartment or building was somehow destroyed.”

For two weeks they stayed on the ground floor, with about 60 other people,
without heat, electricity, or much food, under the constant threat of sudden death. “It was like, I don’t know, some post-apocalyptic feel.”

Shevchenko says people were desperate to get out, hoping humanitarian corridors would open. “Every day when we woke up we were waiting, today is the day, but there were no corridors.”

Finally, he says they heard thousands of cars were getting set to make a run for it. Shevchenko had hidden his fueled-up vehicle for exactly this moment. He, his wife, her father, his parents, his 88-year-old grandfather, and his parrot all went along.

Shevchenko says they went to Berdyans’k where they passed a Russian checkpoint and spent the night in the city which he says was empty. “No city lights, no people, no cars, it was like a Stephen King novel.”

The next day, with no gas stations and running out of fuel, he reached a friend further up the road, who uses a rope to tow him to Zaporizhzhia. From there he borrowed some fuel and headed out of the city at speeds over 120 kilometres per hour because Russian shells were falling all around them. Clear of the danger for the moment, he continued on to the relative safety of western Ukraine.

Ukraine says Russian forces seized a humanitarian convoy headed to Mariupol today,
accusing Russia of holding captive 11 bus drivers, four rescue workers, and their vehicles.

Ukraine’s president estimates 100,000 people are left inside Mariupol.

Several agreements to create humanitarian corridors out of the city have been unsuccessful, with Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the failures.