Until a few weeks ago, Roman Amelyakin lived with his family near the corner of Peace Avenue and Builders Avenue in Mariupol, Ukraine, a city now largely destroyed by war.
A strategic port on the Sea of Azov in the Donetsk region of southeastern Ukraine, Mariupol was a chief target of Moscow-backed separatists who have been fighting Kyiv’s forces since April 2014 -- but had remained under government control. Since February 24, when Russia launched an unprovoked, large-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has been hit harder than any other big city.
Much of Mariupol has been razed by bombs, rockets, shells, and gunfire. Evacuation efforts have been stymied at times by attacks, and tens of thousands of people have sheltered without power or running water for weeks. Hundreds are feared dead after a bomb hit a big theater where residents had sought refuge on March 16.
The total death toll in Mariupol, formerly a city of more than 400,000 people, is unknown. Officially, it stood at 2,400 on March 15, but the mayor said then that he believed the real figure was far higher -- and now it is higher still.
Amelyakin, who did volunteer work after the invasion began, stayed in the city for about three weeks before getting out with his family, making what was once a three-hour drive to Zaporizhzhya in about 24 hours. He spoke to RFE/RL’s Donbas.Realities about what he did and what he saw.
The First Attacks
At 5:30 a.m. on February 24, strikes hit the Mariupol airport and air-defense facilities. We all heard the strikes and knew that the war had started. But we’d been living on the front line for almost eight years and at first it was not very frightening, so in the first days of the war not too many people left the city.
The first neighborhood hit was Vostochny (East), which had suffered in 2015. [Russia-backed separatist fighters] started attacking from there. I helped a friend evacuate his family -- he had a store, and we took everything we could from there and brought it to the volunteer headquarters. Then the work began, with everybody doing what they could: bringing things to the headquarters or delivering hot meals to soldiers and civilians in need. People started flowing in from the eastern part of the city.
This work went on for several days -- but overnight on March 1, the bombing began, and the power grid was damaged by the air strikes. They tried to fix it but there was another strike on the infrastructure and the lights went out. And along with the lights, the water and heat went out -- though the gas was still on. Apartments were palpably cold, but at least you could get some warmth from the gas.
Water
Three days later a gas pipeline near Kramatorsk was damaged, and there was no more gas in the city. The temperature was below freezing. It’s important to mention that Mariupol doesn’t have much fresh water, and it’s now impossible to use the reservoir outside the city. People went looking for springs, or just scooped up snow. I saw people getting water from puddles after it rained, for household needs. The spring water in Mariupol is not good or very potable, even after it’s boiled -- it’s very hard and tinged with chemicals.
This is the kind of life that began: In the morning, people would light bonfires in the courtyards of the apartment blocks, heating scraps of food. Neighbors would gather with whatever containers they could and set out in search of water. The city tried to bring in water tanks, but many of the tanks were damaged. Then all the city’s neighborhoods came under massive fire, and the drivers were scared to ply the streets.
There were few long breaks between bombardments. Planes began bombing us from morning to evening, and at night. First it was one plane dropping several bombs, then another the next day. And then they realized that there was no air defense and started to bomb constantly.
It’s very scary when you’re sleeping and you hear the sound of planes and explosions. They drop very powerful bombs, destroying apartment buildings and private houses.
Food
There were no deliveries into the city under siege and many stores closed, only a few stayed open. Wholesalers with warehouses pretty much stopped supplying shops because of fuel shortages -- and because drivers were afraid to make deliveries. After a while food started running out, and people started looting stores -- supermarkets, pharmacies. At first, there were just a few instances, and the police tried to fight it, but then it became clear that the siege would not be broken quickly, and we’d be trapped for a long time.
Mariupol: Apocalyptic Images From A City Under Siege
Then the police began to open stores and let people in to get food. In the last days, it was done in agreement with the city council -- warehouses were opened if they could be, and food and medicine were delivered to bomb shelters.
As a result of the missile strikes and the bombardments, many of the roads were covered in shrapnel and it became very hard to get around. People would get flat tires and there was no place to fix them, so people would just abandon their cars.
Graves
At first, the city council and the funeral bureau tried to gather the dead. There was an old cemetery in the city center -- a trench was dug there, and people were buried right there in a mass grave. The trench filled up [with bodies] very fast and they tried to dig another, but shells started falling there, so they decided to dig a mass grave in the city park. But that didn’t work out because even the people who volunteered to help gather the dead were frightened of bombardments. And the person responsible for this at the city council was wounded during a meeting. So, the dead were buried in the yards of apartment blocks, and in gardens -- and often just wrapped in a blanket and left by the roadside.
There are no statistics because nobody was counting the dead. Many people died in rubble that has not yet been cleared, because bombs and shells were falling. For example, there was a store that was open on Builders’ Avenue -- a missile struck while people were standing in line and the line was very long -- a few hundred people. After the store was hit, people scattered, but they returned after a while to pick up groceries -- and another rocket hit. Some of the people at the store were killed.
There are very many dead, and, as of now, nobody is in a position to count them. It’s a good thing the temperatures are freezing, and the bodies aren’t decomposing, but it will warm up soon, and that will be another problem.
Ruins
If you walk around the city, there are very few undamaged buildings. We went around to various parts of the city -- almost everything has been hit. And it doesn’t matter whether there was some military facility nearby or not -- every neighborhood has been hit.
When we brought supplies to the military hospital that’s set up in the regional oncological hospital, a man with a punctured tire asked me for a pump. While he was filling the tire, we were talking: He said that he and a neighbor had let their children out to play. And while they were leaving, a rocket hit the building, and the children were killed. The two men took them to the hospital, but there was no chance. And they stood there with these dead children and didn’t know what to do, because there are such big problems with burials.
You know that a bomb hit the Drama Theater, where there were a lot of people. I was at that theater [before the bombing] and there really were a lot of people three, in the basements and in the seats in the auditorium. I think there are a great many dead -- though it’s possible that some who were in the basements survived. A missile [also] struck the Neptune swimming pool -- people were also sheltering there, too.
Escape
There was no fuel, the gas stations were closed because there was no electricity, so pumping gas was a problem. People were getting fuel however they could, dipping buckets straight into the tanks.
Because of the lack of communications and Internet service, people didn’t know where the fighting was, where they could go and where couldn’t go if they got out of Mariupol. It wasn’t even clear whether we’d been captured or were still fighting.
At the beginning of March, the so-called humanitarian convoys were set up to evacuate people, but these efforts were in vain. The first convoy that tried to get out came under fire on the way, and only after March 14 people started to leave via Mangush, headed toward Berdyansk. [Another] corridor never worked.
My home is in the city center, and when I was leaving, the fighting had reached the area. In the first days of the war almost nothing was hitting the area and we lived in our apartment on the fifth floor, not even going down to the basement. We all stayed in one room for the warmth. That’s when there was still gas.
In the morning we would take the children to their grandmother, then pick them up before the curfew and stay home overnight. We played with the kids and told them the explosions were fireworks. The little one -- he’s 2 years old -- would wake up at night because of the explosions and cry. The eldest, who is 16, understood everything. The middle one was scared.
After the first “green corridor” was announced, we got ready to leave. We got fuel when the gas stations were looted: Everyone was collecting gasoline and we had a diesel car, so we managed to get two canisters of fuel -- and that was enough.
We continued to do volunteer work. In the evening we’d go home, heat water on a bonfire and somehow survived. It got harder and harder. Every morning there was a meeting at the city council, and on March 13, several rockets hit the building during the meeting. I was inside and my wife was on the street outside. After that, she demanded that we leave.
By then we were living with my mother-in-law, because several shells had hit our building and the windows of the apartment were blown out. There was fighting at the intersection of Builders Avenue and Peace Avenue -- right where my home is.
We managed to get out in the third wave -- about 2,500 cars. We took everything we could because we knew we would probably not be able to return. It took us almost 24 hours to drive to Zaporizhzhya. There were 16 checkpoints on the way. As we drove, there were bombardments -- a piece of shrapnel struck the car behind me, and a high-rise apartment building in front of me was hit. Most of all they were firing at the city center. They dropped a bomb on Hospital No. 3, and another on the Drama Theater.
