Ukraine’s Mariupol: Death is everywhere amid Russian attacks

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.

There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body.

There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field.

There’s a girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns and was among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red-and-gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric.

Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can because the less time they spend in the open the better their own chances of survival.

“The only thing [I want] is for this to be finished,” said Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this.”

More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up.

The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.

Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol — about one a minute at times — drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s drive to crush democratic Ukraine — and also of a fierce resistance on the ground.

In the nearly three weeks since Russia’s war began, two Associated Press journalists have been the only international news media present in Mariupol, chronicling its fall into chaos and despair.

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The children of medical workers warm themselves in a blanket as they wait for relatives at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.

An apartment building explodes after a Russian army tank fired on it in Mariupol, Ukraine.

A body lies covered by a tarp on a street in Mariupol, Ukraine.

Evgeniy Maloletka / AP

The city is now encircled by Russian soldiers, who are slowly squeezing the life out of it, one blast at a time.

Several appeals for humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians went unheeded, until Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that about 30,000 people had fled in convoys of cars.

Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school.

For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is simply nowhere to go.

The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone, and water is sparse, with people melting snow to drink.

Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, maybe hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

People burn scraps of furniture in makeshift grills to warm their hands in the freezing cold and cook what little food there still is. The grills themselves are built with the one thing in plentiful supply: bricks and shards of metal that was left strewning the streets from destroyed buildings.

Death is everywhere.

Officials have tallied more than 2,500 deaths in the siege. But many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling.

Families have been told to leave their dead in the streets because it’s too dangerous to hold funerals.

Many of the deaths documented by the AP were of children and mothers despite Russia’s assertions that civilians haven’t been attacked. Doctors say they are treating 10 civilians for every injured Ukrainian soldier.

“They have a clear order to hold Mariupol hostage, to mock it, to constantly bomb and shell it,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on March 10.

Yet, just weeks ago, Mariupol’s future seemed much brighter.

If geography drives a city’s destiny, Mariupol was on the path to success, with its thriving iron and steel plants, a deep-water port and high global demand for both.

Even the dark weeks of 2014, when the city nearly fell to Russia-backed separatists in vicious street battles, were fading into memory.

RUSSIANS KEEP PRESSURE ON MARIUPOL

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And so the first few days of the invasion had a perverse familiarity for many. About 100,000 people left at that time while they still could, according to Serhiy Orlov, the deputy mayor. But most stayed put, figuring they could wait out whatever came next or eventually make their way west like so many others.

“I felt more fear in 2014, I don’t feel the same panic now,” Anna Efimova said as she shopped for supplies at a market on Feb. 24. “There is no panic. There’s nowhere to run,. Where can we run?”

The same day, a Ukrainian military radar and airfield were among the first targets of Russian artillery. Shelling and airstrikes could and did come at any moment, and people spent most of their time in shelters. Life was hardly normal, but it was livable.

By Feb. 27, though, that started to change, as an ambulance raced to a hospital carrying a motionless little girl, not even 6 years old. Her brown hair was pulled back from her pale face with a rubber band, and her pajama pants were bloodied by Russian shelling. Her wounded father came with her, his head bandaged. Her mother stood outside the ambulance, weeping.

As doctors and nurses huddled around her, one gave her an injection. Another shocked her with a defibrillator. A doctor in blue scrubs, pumping oxygen into her small body, looked straight into the camera of an AP journalist who was allowed inside and cursed.

“Show this to Putin,” he said with expletive-laced fury. “The eyes of this child and crying doctors.”

They couldn’t save her.

Doctors covered the tiny body with her pink striped jacket and gently closed her eyes. She now rests in the mass grave.

Oleksandr Konovalov, a paramedic, performs CPR on a girl injured by shelling in a residential area as her father sits to the side after arriving at the city hospital of Mariupol in, eastern Ukraine on Feb. 27. The girl did not survive.

The lifeless body of a girl killed during shelling at a residential area lies on a medical cart at the city hospital of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine.

The same geography that for so long worked in Mariupol’s favor had turned against it. The city stands squarely between regions controlled by the Russia-backed separatists — about six miles to the east at the closest point — and the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. The capture of Mariupol would give the Russians a clear land corridor all the way through, controlling the Sea of Azov.

As February ended, the siege began. Ignoring the danger, or restless, or maybe just feeling invincible, as teenagers do, a group of boys met up a few days later, on March 2, to play soccer on a field outside a school. A bomb exploded. The blast tore through the legs of a boy named Iliya.

The odds were against him,and increasingly against the city. The electricity went out yet again, as did most mobile networks. Without communications, medics had to guess which hospitals could still handle the wounded and which roads could still be navigated to reach them.

Iliya couldn’t be saved. His father Serhii dropped down, hugged his dead boy’s head and wailed out his grief.

Serhii, father of teenager Iliya, cries on his son’s lifeless body at a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine.

Arriving at a hospital in Mariupol, Marina Yatsko (left) runs behind her boyfriend Fedor while carrying her 18 month-old son Kirill, who was fatally wounded by Russian shelling.

Medical workers unsuccessfully try to save the life of Marina Yatsko’s 18 month-old son Kirill. — Medical workers try in vain to save the life of Marina Yatsko’s 18 month-old son Kirill.

Marina Yatsko and her boyfriend Fedor comfort each other after her 18-month-old son Kirill was killed by Russian shelling March 4 in Mariupol, Ukraine.

On March 4, it was yet another child in the emergency room — Kirill, the toddler struck in the head by shrapnel. His mother and stepfather bundled him in a blanket. They hoped for the best, then endured the worst.

“Why? Why? Why?” his sobbing mother Marina Yatsko asked in the hospital hallway as medical workers looked on helplessly.

She tenderly unwrapped the blanket around her lifeless child to kiss him and inhale his scent one last time, her dark hair falling over him.

That was the day the darkness settled in for good — a blackout in both power and knowledge. Ukrainian television and radio were cut, and car stereos became the only link to the outside world. They played Russian news, describing a world that couldn’t be further from the reality in Mariupol.

As it sunk in that there was truly no escape, the mood of the city changed. It didn’t take long for grocery store shelves to empty. Mariupol’s residents cowered by night in underground shelters and emerged by day to grab what they could before scurrying underground again.

Serhiy Kralya, 41, after surgery at a hospital in Mariupol on March 11. Kralya was injured by Russian shelling of civilian targets in the eastern Ukraine city.

At a hospital in Mariupol, medical workers treat a man wounded by Russian shelling.

On March 6, in the way of desperate people everywhere, they turned on each other. On one street lined with darkened stores, people smashed windows, pried open metal shutters, grabbed what they could. A man who had broken in to a store found himself face to face with the furious shopkeeper, caught redhanded with a child’s rubber ball.

“You bastard, you stole that ball now. Put the ball back,” she demanded. “Why did you even come here?”

His shame obvious, he tossed the ball into a corner and fled.

Nearby, a soldier emerged from another looted store, on the verge of tears.

“People, please be united,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is your home. Why are you smashing windows? Why are you stealing from your shops?”

Yet another attempt to negotiate an evacuation failed. A crowd formed at one of the roads leading away from the city, but a police officer blocked their path.

“Everything is mined,” he told them. “The ways out of town are being shelled. Trust me, I have family at home, and I am also worried about them. Unfortunately, the maximum security for all of us is to be inside the city, underground and in the shelters.”

People lie on the floor of a hospital during shelling by Russian forces in Mariupol, Ukraine.

A Ukrainian serviceman guards his position in Mariupol, Ukraine, which, under siege by Russian forces, has been left with no electricity, gas or water but a growing despair.

And that’s where Goma Janna could be found that night, weeping beside an oil lamp that threw light but not enough heat to take the chill off the basement room. She wore a scarf and a cheery turquoise snowflake sweater as she rubbed the tears from her face. Behind her, a small group of women and children crouched in the darkness, trembling at the explosions above.

“I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children,” she said, sobbing.

In line with Putin’s goals, the siege of Mariupol is a military tactic popularized in medieval times, designed to crush a population through starvation and violence, allowing an attacking force to spare its own soldiers the cost of entering a hostile city.

Instead, it’s the civilians who are left to die, slowly and painfully.

Putin has refined the tactic during his years in power, first in the Chechen city of Grozny in 2000 and then in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2016. He reduced both to ruins.

“It epitomizes Russian warfare, what we see now in terms of the siege,” said Mathieu Boulegue, a researcher for Chatham House’s Russia program.

People settled in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine.

A woman holds a baby inside a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine.

People line up for hot food at a improvised bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine.

A man plays with a baby at a bomb shelter in Mariupol.

By March 9, the sound of Russian fighter jets in Mariupol was enough to send people screaming for cover — anything to avoid the airstrikes they knew would follow, even if they didn’t know where.

The jets rumbled across the sky, this time decimating the maternity hospital. They left a crater two stories deep in the courtyard.

Rescuers rushed a pregnant woman through the rubble and the light snow that was falling as she stroked her bloodied belly, face blanched and head lolling listlessly to the side. Her baby was dying inside her, and she knew it, medics said.

“Kill me now!” she screamed as they struggled to save her life at another hospital even closer to the front line.

The baby was born dead. A half-hour later, the mother died, too.

The doctors had no time to learn either of their names.

Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from a maternity hospital in Mariupol that was damaged when Russian forces bombed it on March 9. The woman and her baby died.

Another pregnant woman, Mariana Vishegirskaya, was waiting to give birth at the maternity hospital when the strike hit. Her brow and cheek bloodied, she clutched her belongings in a plastic bag and navigated the debris-strewn stairs in polka-dot pajamas. Outside the ruined hospital, she stared, motionless, at the crackling flames.

Vishegirskaya delivered her child the next day to the sound of shellfire. Baby Veronika drew her first breath on March 10.

The two women — the new mother and the one who died — have since become a symbol of their blackened, burning hometown.

Mariana Vishegirskaya walks down stairs March 9 at a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, that was hit by Russian shelling. Vishegirskaya delivered her child the next day to the sound of more bombing.

Mariana Vishegirskaya in a hospital bed after giving birth to her daughter Veronika amid Russian bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.

Facing worldwide condemnation, Russian officials said that the maternity hospital had been taken over by far-right Ukrainian forces to use as a base and emptied of patients and nurses.

In two tweets, the Russian embassy in London posted side-by-side images of AP photos with the word “FAKE” over them in red text. They said that the maternity hospital had long been out of operation and that Vishegirskaya was an actress playing a role.

Twitter has since removed the tweets, saying they violated its rules.

The AP reporters in Mariupol who documented the attack in video and photos saw nothing to indicate the hospital was used as anything other than a hospital. 

There is also nothing to suggest that Vishegirskaya, a Ukrainian beauty blogger from Mariupol, was anything but a patient.

Veronika’s birth attests to the pregnancy that her mother carefully documented on Instagram, including one post in which she’s seen wearing the polka-dot pajamas.

Two days after Veronika was born, four Russian tanks emblazoned with the letter Z took up position near the hospital where she and her mother were recovering.

An AP journalist was there with a group of medical workers who came under sniper fire, with one hit in the hip. The windows rattled, and the hallways were lined with people with nowhere else to go.

Anastasia Erashova wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child. Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child, and Erashova’s scalp was encrusted with blood.

“I don’t know where to run to,” she cried out in anguish that grew with every sob. “Who will bring back our children? Who?”

In recent days, Russian forces seized control of the building entirely, trapping medics and patients inside and using it as a base, according to a doctor there and local officials.

Orlov, the deputy mayor, predicted worse is soon to come, as most of the city remains trapped.

“Our defenders will defend to the last bullet,” he said. “But people are dying without water and food. And I think in the next several days we will count hundreds and thousands of deaths.”