At 3.50 on the cold morning of 24 February, Iryna Prudkova, 50, received a message on Telegram from her 24-year-old daughter, Valeria, who lives in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
“Are you listening to Putin?,” Valeria’s message read. “That’s totally fucked up. There is a special military operation”.
At 4.08am Valeria messaged once more: “Mum, Kyiv is being shelled.”
Sitting in her small flat on the first floor of a nine-storey apartment block in the leafy Kirovsky residential area of Mariupol, a port city on the Azov Sea, whose name has now passed into infamy, Iryna knew what she had to do.
She had already packed a small carry bag containing money, some jewellery to potentially trade for food and shelter, and family documents.
Her husband, Alexandr, 46, argued that morning that they could stay a day or two more to sort out their affairs. “I told him, ‘We have to leave, it is the last chance.’”
As Iryna hastily packed a suitcase, Alexandr took their Mercedes W212 to fill it with petrol at the Western Oil group station at the back of the apartment block. A long line of cars had got there first.
As Alexandr waited nervously, the night sky suddenly lit up with a deafening thunder, a noise unfamiliar even in a city close to the frontline of the eight-year battle between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists in Donestsk and Luhansk.
The war had taken its grip of Mariupol – and it has yet to let go.
This is a story, based on diary entries and interviews with those who have survived an unthinkable trial of endurance, of a swift and brutal destruction of a city in which the best and worst of humanity was on show. It is an ongoing story full of death, misery and heartache documented and told through tears.
As Iryna and Alexandr, along with his parents, a niece and her two-year-old son, drove north at pace from Mariupol on the Volodarskaya motorway, Nadiia Sukhorukova, 51, a journalist, was asleep in her apartment just over a mile north in the city’s centre.
Booms and explosions
“Even through a dream, I heard booms and explosions,” she wrote in her diary. “And then the editor, Galia, sent a message to the group chat, ‘That’s it guys, get up!’”
At 8.23am, the mayor of Mariupol addressed his city on television. He urged everyone to remain calm. “Due to the current situation in the city, the work of schools, kindergartens and other social infrastructure institutions, except for hospitals and healthcare centre, has been temporarily stopped,” Vadym Boichenko said. “We also open all shelters in the city. All utilities and public transport continue to operate.”
Within 20 minutes, seven buildings in Mariupol’s left bank were engulfed in fire after Russian shelling that took a day to put out, cutting down four people, including a child.
More shelling followed at 3.17pm. Three hours later, instructions as how to act under fire were published and the rules of a new curfew between 10pm and 6am were imposed. An additional train service was put on for those who wanted to leave.
Across the city, people were frantically checking roofs for “tags” after hearing that the Russians had earmarked buildings with signs so their jets could zone in on the targets.
Nadiia wrote that evening: “In the morning my brother’s wife was gathering my little nephews to the sound of gunfire. They were afraid and tried to act up.
“Children sat in the corridor on stools in jackets and caps with huge packages in their hands. These are their ‘emergency cases’.
“At my feet lay the kindest dog in the world, which was also very scared. Together they left the huge high-rise building for the basement of a private house. It is safer there during the shelling. They are afraid to return home.”
By the next crisp morning, many in Mariupol woke to find their electricity had been cut. By the end of the day about 40,000 were living in the dark.
Power lines on the city’s left bank had been damaged. Officials were adamant it was a temporary glitch. The council also decided to take water from a reservoir due to the main supply from Siverski Donets river having been cut. At 8.17pm, a Russian missile hit a school. It was empty.
At 7am the next day, the council again assured the population that all would be well and trams and buses were operating as normal. Four hours later, public transport was “temporarily stopped” for public safety. The village of Sartana, a few miles north-east of Mariupol, was being heavily shelled.
‘Crime against humanity’
Boichenko’s tone changed. The attacks were a “crime against humanity”. Everything was being done that could be done to keep the lights and heating on.
By the next morning, the internet was down. People on the Viber messaging service received anonymous messages, most likely from Russian hackers, informing them that all communications would soon be severed. Residents in Sartana were evacuated from their homes to what they believed was the relative safety of Mariupol.
By noon, there were reports of direct fire on civilians. Bombs rained down on apartment blocks on the central Peremohy Avenue and Horlivska Street. At 2.26pm that day a fateful announcement was made – the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre was opening as a shelter. By 9.35pm the council had to deny that Mariupol would soon be without water. Curfew was extended and saboteurs were being arrested. Reports of looting proliferated. The city was collapsing into disorder.
“The military, territorial defence and law enforcement will act as harshly as required by wartime,” Boichenko said. “Marauders and saboteurs will be eliminated on the spot.”
On 28 February, Nadiia wrote: “In the house we have no shelter, and those that are, are very far away. We just can’t get there. Therefore, during the shelling, the common corridor turns into Noah’s ark. Together with people, a cat, two dogs, a guinea pig – a local favourite and an impudent hamster are sitting out a terrible time.
“There is absolute unity in the corridor, even among those neighbours who could not stand each other before.
“One hundred per cent mutual understanding among those who were indignant that animals shit on the street. Now don’t care. Our Ukrainian cats and dogs are just perfect.”
By 1 March, the shelling was constant, a suffocating blanket of noise and fear. “We walked the dog under shelling and took a picture of my mother’s snowdrops in the yard. Spring came,” Nadiia wrote. But the tension was wearing. “I want to sleep all the time. Constantly. As if a sleepy elephant had moved into me. I nod, even during terrible shelling.”
That day everyone was ordered to turn off boilers, refrigerators, electric stoves, kettles, air conditioners and heaters to allow lights to remain on. The traffic lights were switched off. “The light is interrupted, there is no water, no heat either,” Nadiia wrote. “Dead silence in Mariupol. The city seemed to be in shambles. Raindrops are pounding on the windowsill.”
There were 14 hours of uninterrupted shelling on 2 March from truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers, mortars, howitzers and initially single-seat, twin-engine jet aircraft, before the Kremlin turned to low-flying SU-24 attack jets, a supersonic, all-weather Soviet plane.
They struck the maternity hospital and apartment blocks. It was, the mayor said, the “hardest and most brutal day”. Mariupol’s lights would not go on again.
On 5 March, a humanitarian corridor was seemingly agreed. People could leave in their cars. Along the way the Russians mockingly peppered those fleeing with artillery shells in the Zaporizhia region, north-west of the city. Those hopeful of escape were told to run back to shelter. The same happened the following day. And again, and again.
Mariupol: a ‘hero city’ in ruins
By 7 March, Mariupol received that most unwelcome of garlands, being named a “hero city” by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. No streets were intact. Bodies littered the ground, unburied and rotting among the ash, glass, plastic and metal fragments. Blank eyes staring back at horrified children.
“One woman had her arm, leg and head torn off,” Nadiia wrote. “I’m sure I’ll die soon. It’s a matter of days. In this city, everyone is constantly waiting for death. I just wish it wasn’t so scary.”
Families hunkered in city centre basements were left to drink water from puddles or collect dribbles from drainpipes, and share scraps of food rescue from burnt-out homes. The only salvation being volunteers who filled barrels from a canal with dirty water to distribute from basement to basement.
On 8 March, a six-year-old child died in Mariupol of dehydration. She had been buried under the rubble that killed her mother and was discovered too late. The next day, the children’s hospital was bombed.
The civilian death toll was officially 1,207 but as if to mock the pretence that this was close to the dreadful truth, a Russian pilot dropped a bomb on the theatre, used as a shelter by 1,300 people, and clearly marked to those above by the word “children” painted in white on either side.
About 1,000 of those were under the stage of the theatre. Despite every effort, nothing has been heard of them since. Only those elsewhere in the vast building were able to stagger out, some holding their limp children in their arms. The council said on Friday that at least 300 people had died as a video emerged of the carnage inside immediately after the strike.
Mikhail Vershinin, the head of patrol police department in the Donetsk region, told the Guardian: “We were some 200 metres from it, there was an airstrike and a massive explosion, and another large explosion … We were going along an adjacent street and we didn’t know the theatre had been hit.
“One of my troops witnessed what happened just after the explosion. He saw people carrying their children covered in blood. It hit him really hard, and he was unable to perform his duties when he saw it. He broke down.”
Attempt to escape
Nadiia, by now bombed out of her home and surviving along with nephews and nieces in a basement below a block in the city centre, could no longer venture out to walk the dog.
“I opened the entrance door, pushed the dog out and watched in doom as she first ran down the stairs, trying to find a place among the fragments on the scorched earth, then the big-eared one squatted but then a close mine squeaked disgustingly and exploded and she ran back. We waited a minute and started again. I stood in the doorway and cried.”
On 14 March, she wrote of the bittersweet emotions as some in the shelter made the decision to risk escape.
“Next to us was a family – an adult son and his elderly mother. They were very calm and reserved, they treated our children with sweets and cookies, they gave us butter and lard, because they were going to leave.
“Our children were so scared that they hardly ate anything. But sweets and cookies were devoured immediately. It was a real treasure and a little joy in a gloomy dungeon buzzing with explosions. They even had fun.
“For the first time since the beginning of the war, seven-year-old Varya asked me to tell her about Peppa Pig and even believed me when I promised to buy her any doll as soon as we left the basement. The little one only clarified: ‘The stores robbed everyone, how will you buy me?” I replied that not a single toy store was touched and all the dolls were in place. I looked at her round face, matted hair, small nose, neck wrapped in a scarf and thought: ‘What if I’m deceiving her?’ I kissed her cheeks and dirty hands, and my heart skipped a beat with pain. I wasn’t sure we’d make it through tonight.
Nadiia went on: “Her brother Cyril barely spoke to us. He was very scared when we were in another basement in a private house and there was a direct hit on the roof. The roof caught fire and everyone had to leave. We fled to the garage under terrible fire. Around everything howled and exploded, and Cyril shouted: ‘Mummy, please, Mummy! I want to live! I don’t want to die!’”
Ukrainian troops are outnumbered by five to one in Mariupol and the husk that is left of the city is likely to fall in days. About 100,000 civilians remain.
Back in February, at the start of the war, it had taken Iryna three days to reach the relative safety of the western city of Lviv. She has since been helping to organise escapes. Some get through. Others not. Two women escorting eight children, aged one to eight, went missing four days ago.
“My neighbour said God had left Mariupol,” wrote Nadiia on 18 March. “He was afraid of everything he saw.” The following day, she and her son risked the Russian artillery to escape for Odesa, 600 miles west on the Black Sea, where Russian warships also prowl.
“I keep telling myself that I’m not in hell any more, but I keep hearing planes roar, startle at any loud sound, and pull my head into my shoulders,” she wrote. “I’m scared when someone leaves. There, in hell, not everyone who left returned.”