Life in Mariupol: As bombed city is besieged, those trapped fight to stay alive

Dr Eduard Zarubin has lost everything. But he does still have his life.

LVIV 

His street is destroyed, and his city, the southern port of Mariupol, is so far the greatest horror of Russia’s scorched earth war against Ukraine. Russian missiles decimated a theatre that sheltered more than 1,000 people. Another attack hit an art school where children were hiding in the basement.

Water is so scarce that people are melting snow. Heating, electricity and gas have disappeared. People are chopping trees for firewood to fuel outdoor cooking stoves shared by neighbours. To walk from one street to another often means passing corpses or fresh graves dug in parks or grassy medians.

On Sunday, Russia gave an ultimatum that Ukrainian fighters in the city must give up or face annihilation. Ukrainian officials refused.

Evacuation buses, including some carrying children, were shelled on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials.

Thousands of people have escaped the city, including Dr Zarubin, but more than 300,000 others remain, even as fighting has moved onto the streets of some neighbourhoods.

“If the war ends, and we win and get rid of them, then I think that there will be excursions in Mariupol, just like there are to Chernobyl,” he said of the abandoned site of a Soviet-era nuclear calamity. “So that people understand what kind of apocalyptic things can occur.”

The destruction of Mariupol, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, has been a siege and a relentless bombardment that for the last three weeks has left its population cut off from the outside world.