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Now I am in England, in Halvergate. My name is Inna. On February 24, I was in Mariupol. This day probably started like any other. We all heard how it started. But I want to say that I woke up to messages from my friends in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Sumy.

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It seems to me that it all started a little earlier for them. But I didn’t have a strong feeling of horror because we had been hearing similar sounds for 8 years, and I didn’t want to believe that it could turn into something more horrible. But as time went on,

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it became clearer that the war was certainly escalating, with much more bombs, heavy artillery and missiles. Already on the 27th my parents – they live on Svoboda Avenue, the former Leninhradskyi Avenue – had their house destroyed.

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They were able to call us, although there was no communication on the left bank, it was only catching in some places. They were able to call us. We only heard some words and understood from the context that the house had been destroyed.

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My sister and I lived in the city centre, near the Central Market, and we went to pick up our parents from there. We arrived and saw the windows completely blown out. They have a private house, literally near the construction college.

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And the roof was damaged. Anyway, it’s winter and the house was unfit for them to continue to stay there. And we took the parents to the centre. I had a deep conviction that everything would end up on the left bank for some reason.

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I didn’t believe that something even worse could happen, something would happen in the centre. We tried to board up the windows, but we couldn’t do it because the missile attack continued. It was very loud and very scary on the left bank.

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We jumped in the car. My parents literally jumped out in slippers, they didn’t even have time to take anything with them. They took only documents, we got in the car and drove to the centre. And on the 1st – it was the last day when

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public transport was running – my mother and my sister went to that house. We had two dogs left there, and they wanted to feed the dogs and still somehow board up the windows. There was no active fighting in the centre,

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but it was very audible on the left bank. At that point, the electricity had already been switched off at our place as well. It was the first switch-off, which lasted until the evening or the next day, I don’t remember. But there was light on Kirova Street.

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And I went to my friend’s house to charge my phone, because, judging by the experience of the left bank, it could last for a very long time. I went to charge my phone and all the time I could hear the left bank being destroyed. It was very active there.

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Then I could not call either my mother or my sister, I just waited for a call. A few hours later, the call came. They got out of there on foot. So the transport stopped running. And a very heavy missile shelling started. They got there and could only sit there in the basement, and nowhere else.

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They tried to catch a lift to get out of the left bank. It wasn’t just the two of them, it was with our relatives. This is my niece and her mum. And they got into the car only the three of them, my mum crammed them into the car and was left alone to catch another car. She was picked up by the director of the Mariupol

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social service and taken to the city. On the way, they stopped at the “Komunalnyk” and in half an hour it was destroyed by several shells. I understand that my mum might not have survived if they had stopped there half an hour later. And so, from the beginning of March, active hostilities began to intensify in the centre.

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On the 2nd, the lights went out in the whole city. Then the water disappeared, then the gas, and it became more and more difficult to survive in Mariupol. And our house, our 9-storey building stands on one side of Novoselivka, it is a private sector, and it is not covered by anything from behind.

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And every day it was as if a ring was closing around the city, and active city fights began. And shells started hitting our 9-storey building from the uncovered side. We were mostly in the basement, but we often went up to the flat in order to somehow maintain the habits that we had, because without them you could go mad:

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brushing our teeth, somehow washing ourselves with the remnants of what water we still had. We collected water from rain pipes. It was very good when it rained. That is, water was pouring out of the pipes that are on the 9-storey building, and we collected it. In the private sector in Novoselivka we went to two wells.

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But, apparently, the goal of the occupiers was to destroy not only all the remaining infrastructure, but also the things that could help people to exist. One of the wells was directly hit for several days, and people in our neighbourhood were completely without water. So even if we wanted to get water somewhere,

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it was impossible to get it. Standing in a queue at a well was also impossible, it was a 50/50 trip, whether you would come back alive or not. Because already, according to my impressions, about 150 bombs a day were dropped on the city. And that’s just bombs, not including missiles and heavy artillery.

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We cooked food on a brazier, which was made by men. They all had barbecues in their yards. I think everybody knows that. But cooking was also a blockbuster, because if at first it was still somehow possible, then, starting from March 8-9, you had only a few seconds to put water, for example, and a few seconds to take it away.

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And it’s unclear whether you’re going to stay alive in those few seconds or not. Or a shell, which is flying, will burst near you – and you will be killed by some shrapnel. So the organism must have switched on the survival function, anyway. It was really scary and it was already clear that it was impossible to stay in the city any longer.

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There was so much fighting going on in our neighbourhood that I realised: if we stayed, we wouldn’t survive for sure. So on March 15 we decided to leave. Our garage was right behind a 9-storey building, but if before it seemed a very small distance, I don’t know how many steps you had to take to get to it,

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then at that time it seemed an impossible road to get to that garage and get the car out of there. My sister, who is the only driver in our family, was very hard to persuade to come out of the basement. She was in a very difficult psychological state after the missile attack on the left bank on March 1.

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At that time, they were literally walking over dead bodies, coming out from under the missile fire. And I couldn’t persuade her to go. She’d say: “I can’t go.” In the end, when we decided to make a run to the garage, we opened it and realised that we couldn’t drive the car out. The blast wave, even a few,

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must have really warped the gate, and we could only open it with a sledgehammer. On March 15 by word of mouth radio... Even from the 14th rumours were already spreading that we could somehow drive out towards Melekino. And we have a dacha on Bilosaraiska Spit, and we wanted to go there.

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And we did not get into these columns that were leaving. All the other neighbours were driving away from our driveway, and we did not get into this column because we could not open the garage. Unfortunately, no one agreed to help us. And I understand those people: they had to save themselves and their families.

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Everyone was afraid to take an extra step. Everyone jumped into their cars and drove away. But the neighbours left us a sledgehammer. They failed to open the garage and left us a sledgehammer. And then one of the neighbours did manage to help us for a while. He literally opened the garage in 30 seconds.

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He smashed the doors with a sledgehammer. We drove the car out, drove it under the driveway, and in what we were... It was almost impossible to pack a suitcase. I could not even go into the room where my things were kept, because there was a very heavy shelling from the side of Novoselivka.

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And it was impossible to choose a quieter time for the trip, because you cannot guess when it will be quieter. It was no longer calm, there was no silence. I couldn’t count to five. I counted on purpose and I couldn’t count to five. There was no silence. We jumped into the car and got into the next column – a civilian column,

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with civilian cars, moving away from our driveway. We got somewhere, I don’t remember exactly, some bandages, some white bandages, a sign saying “children” – and we jumped into the car: me, my sister, my parents, whom we had taken from the left bank on February 28, and drove towards Melekino.

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And that’s when I saw for the first time the state of the town. Because I had never dared to go further than the well. I saw the city centre, and it was a terrible shock. I knew from the sounds that such a thing was possible, but it was hard to imagine it at all. Then we got to the port area of Mariupol,

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and we saw just an unreal number of cars there. People were trying to get out of the city. I don’t know exactly, but I think there were thousands of them. We probably stood in this traffic jam, the so-called traffic jam, for about 3 hours. We had aeroplanes flying past us. They were flying over and dropping something in the centre.

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It was very scary to stand there, but I looked at the Primorskyi district and it seemed to me that there were not such active hostilities there. Compared to other districts, it looked more intact at that time, let’s put it that way. If we drove through the centre and there was not a single living house there,

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they were burnt out or the windows were completely blown out, in the port area there was no such thing at that time. We left in the direction of Melekino and went to our dacha on Bilosaraiska Spit. Then it turned out that there was no light there either. Of course, there was no food delivery there,

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because all deliveries there went exclusively through Mariupol. We ran out of petrol. The thing is that it was only enough to get to the spit. Our neighbours, who lived earlier in the 4th entrance of our 9-storey building, went to the dacha with us. They were on two cars. And they offered us: if we want to leave,

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they will leave tomorrow for Dnipro and can take us with them. And we, not thinking long, agreed. I got connection. There was a connection on the spit, but I got connected only in the morning, because there was no light there, and I could charge my phone in the morning. A couple of text messages to my friends,

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to tell them I was alive. Because it was a shock for everyone. No one from Mariupol could get in touch, there was no information about anyone at that time. I managed to give information about myself. And it turned out that, according to the official version, March 15 was an official humanitarian corridor,

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allegedly from the Red Cross. There were no corridors approved for the 16th, but we still decided to leave the spit to Dnipro, because all the time it seemed that we were not going to get somewhere in time. It seemed to me that we were not going to get anywhere in time, that they would get us here,

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that now they would start bombing here too, and we had to go somewhere else. So we left in the morning in two of their cars to Berdiansk, because we realised that we would not reach Dnipro in one day. But we didn’t manage to get to Berdiansk either. There was a crazy column of cars moving through Portovske to Manhush,

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and there were already checkpoints with occupants, with military men representing the aggressor country. It was very difficult morally to pass these checkpoints. And we spent the first night in the field, we were not allowed to go to Berdiansk. For what reason? I don’t know. We were some thousandths in the column. 

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For some reason we did not enter Berdiansk at night. The column stopped, and we just spent the night in the field. And at 6 a.m., 6-7 a.m. approximately, we entered Berdiansk, an already occupied city. And the drivers who were taking us, our neighbours who were driving, father and son, were resting there.

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We spent the night there in order to go further on the road. And in Berdiansk for the first time we saw light, we saw bread for such a long time. We could buy some food. But the city certainly didn’t seem particularly peaceful either. You could see that the supplies to the shops were not as usual, not all the shops were working.

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And that the war was going on in the whole country, not just in Mariupol. But I have never seen anything like it in Mariupol. We spent the night in Berdiansk and moved on to Zaporizhzhia. We went to Dnipro, but we had to stay in Zaporizhzhia, because again we did not have time before the curfew.

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In Zaporizhzhia we were sheltered by the parents of my... not a classmate, but a friend with whom I lived. She studied in the same course with me, at the acting faculty in Kharkiv, and her parents sheltered us for the night. They welcomed us very warmly. We were in a catastrophic moral state.

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And we left immediately in the morning for Dnipro. I started to consider options where to move to. I have two 70-year-old parents, and to put them at risk... They don’t run fast. I didn’t want them to go through basements, sirens and everything else again in Dnipro. It was impossible in principle,

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it was necessary to take them for some time to a country where there is no war. I looked at some options, I was in a panic, I didn’t understand what exactly it could be and why I should go somewhere. But I knew I had to go. I kept... It kept coming for me. It seemed to me all the time that now and here... I didn’t feel normal in Dnipro.

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Nobody did. All the time it seemed that after every sound of the siren the bombs would start falling on the city again. So we decided to go to England. And so on May 13 we were here. It is impossible for me to single out one emotionally difficult moment. At all. Emotionally it was difficult on a daily basis.

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Probably the hardest emotional moment was when you thought: tomorrow would be better, but tomorrow was worse. Worse in the sense that you thought: it would stop tomorrow, but the next day it got worse. The hostilities were intensifying.

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There was no relief either during the day or at night. That’s probably the most difficult emotional moment: you thought it was going to be over, that we were going to win, but it didn’t happen. I am sure that the war will end with our victory.

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Both the general Ukrainian victory and the fact that, of course, Mariupol will be returned. No one doubts this, it seems to me, anymore. So the war will end with our victory.