"We saw a tank through the window and heard, “Mariupol, surrender!"

“Gas supply stopped from the 4th to the 5th [of March]. We still managed to boil some potatoes and fry some meat. We were busy with that all day. We also boiled 19 litres of tap water,” Svitlana recalls.

On 12 March, at 7 o’clock in the morning, a tank marked with Z letter was moving along Pylypa Orlyka Street. Svitlana and her husband clearly heard the words, “Mariupol, surrender!” The tank was slowly driving down the street and soldiers were walking by.

They began to tape up the windows with electrical tape and plastic film. They looked out and saw a car burning near a residential block. A strong artillery strike hit the entrance hallway and fragments flew into Svitlana’s windows. She grabbed her husband a second before and shouted, “Come inside!” Otherwise, he would have died.

On 23 February, my husband returned from a business trip and, naturally, I met him with a fridge full of food. I cooked everything. At that time, news reports kept saying that president of the russian federation wanted to recognize the independence of the entire Donetsk region, recognize that the region belongs to the so-called DPR (Donets People’s Republic). Nevertheless, we remained calm because Mariupol had been under strong protection since 2014. We were sure that it would not go as far as such a horror that is happening now, that it would not happen. So on 23 February, I met my husband. Everything was fine. We had a nice evening and went to bed.

On the morning of 24 February, at about 10 o’clock, my son, who was on a business trip in France, called me and said, “Mum, where are you?” I asked, “What do you mean? We’re at home.” He said, “Mum, the war has begun.” I said, “What are you talking about? Everything is quiet here, everything is calm.” “Mum, the war has begun.” Naturally, we immediately turned on all the tablets, everything that was possible, and began to study the news. We found out that Kyiv was shelled.

We drove up, and, to put it mildly, kissed the door lock because the entire territory of Metro store was closed and it was impossible to get inside it. But thank God, Port City was nearby. We immediately ran to Port City. The atmosphere inside Port City was absolutely calm.

Well, people were buying a lot of food, but at the same time, there was no frenzy. At the same time, people said that in Shyryi Kum food store chain, only cash was accepted. Nevertheless, in Zerkalnyi, the entire network operated well and people paid with banking cards, and ATMs operated on the ground floor of Port City shopping mall. People stood in a long queue and withdrew cash. We realized that the banking system could be turned off for some time, and therefore decided to withdraw some cash too.

We brought the food home and then returned to the store. We joined the queue again. Basically, it took us about four hours to stand in the queue. We withdrew the cash money and returned home. At that time, everything was calm in Mariupol. Then, on 26 February, we learned that there was the first shelling of Sartana. So we realized that something was beginning. On 25 February, we were coming out of a store, my husband was coming out, to be more precise, and food was still available, but the shelves were gradually emptying, and cash payments were used more often. In particular, the same was in Eva store, that is, the one selling some household washing agents...

On 27 February, we left home several more times. Some stores were closed and only one or two pharmacies were open, while the choice of items on sale was very small and the queues were just extremely long. So we didn’t focus much on this because as a rule everyone has some kind of a first-aid kit with the most necessary medicines and the like at home.

On 1 March, we saw the first interruption in power supply. Electricity was cut off and Kyivstar phone signal was lost. However, my phone has two sim cards, so Vodafone was still operational and I could get through to those friends who also had Vodafone, while Kyivstar network was just down. My husband ran to our friends on Budivelnykiv Avenue across the road as they had electricity there. He charged power banks for us to maintain the telephone connection. Then in the evening, power supply was resumed, but my first thought was “if there is no electricity, then the water pumps do not operate, and hence there will be no water.” We have a very large corner bathtub. I filled it up with tap water to the very top. That is, a full bathtub of water. And we had some food in stock too. That is, we... naturally, we also had some meat [in the fridge]. On 2 March, power supply was resumed. We were glad to have electricity back. We cooked some food. In fact, we fried and boiled everything that was possible, so to say.

On 2 March, we were still in touch with my son over the phone. He said that he could not remain abroad. He said he was going to return to Ukraine because he loves his homeland and he could not just sit back and watch what is happening here. We spoke with him on the evening of 2 March and on the morning of 3 March, the mobile phone signal and the Internet were completely gone. Well, we were in Mariupol until 22 March.

That is, the latest information was that Skhidnyi city district was shelled, and that the wounded, in particular those from Sartana, and even people from Volnovakha, were being taken to the city centre. But at the same time, we remained calm because when we still had the Internet access, we watched the address of our city mayor who said that we needed to stay calm, that we should not be nervous and should not interfere with the “work”, but better stay at home. “Do not go outside because public transport operates in smaller numbers and mainly delivers staff of enterprises, and it can happen that the city will be surrounded, but our defenders, our Armed Forces of Ukraine will protect us and everything will be fine.” That is why we were not even nervous and hoped that everything would fine.

On 2 March, my husband still went out to buy some bread, which was delivered to the shop. The amount of bread delivered was really small so he failed to buy one. And I went to Kosmos market where small stalls were still open and bought a little more of vegetables. That is, it was one or two stalls. Otherwise, the whole market, all the shops, at least those in our micro-district, were closed.

We also managed to fry the meat we bought. Although it took us a whole day. It took us about two and a half hours to boil the potatoes that are normally boiled half an hour. Nevertheless, there still was some small gas supply and we also had ordered some drinking water, which was delivered on 23 [February?]. I realized that there would be problems with drinking water and we managed to boil 19 litres of water from the bathtub (to make it disinfected), so that we could have some more drinking-quality water.

On 11 March, after 16:00, we heard some distant explosions. The rumble reached us from the side of Zaporizhzhia highway. Those were the first echoes signalling the beginning of the war, which we ourselves felt on 11 March. Oh, no. On 8 March, when some incoming artillery fire started. On 8 March, we went to our friend who charged us a power bank, and the houses along Urytskoho Street, school No. 63, 64, were partially without windowpanes. We realized that there were some incoming artillery strikes closer to us too. Firstly, it was cold and all the windows were closed. And this was also a kind of shock for us. From that moment on, people began to cook on the streets.

They made some wood-fired grills or braziers and even cooked borsch, soups and the like. When we went out on 8 March, our people [our neighbours] were very surprised because they thought that we had left. That is, we didn’t go outside much because, firstly, it was cold, and secondly, it was scary. In addition, the lift in our house did not operate. We did not have a bomb shelter in our house. That is, the bomb shelter was in the first entrance block, under the first entrance section. It was rather an ordinary basement, above which there was also a balcony. In order to go down there, one would need to crouch really low. And at the same time, it was the only exit.

They were very large and comfortable. We could take a reclining posture in them. We decided not to go out into the common hallway because it was very cold at that time and to be honest we were just afraid to get sick. So we just put on some warmer clothes, wrapped our feet in a down scarf, in warm blankets, and spent the nights in those armchairs in the hallway.

We normally took off our clothes and went to bed as usual, but as soon as we heard incoming artillery fire and explosions not far from our house, we immediately dressed warm and moved to the armchairs in the house. On 8 March, we went to my friend to check how they were doing and saw that the long houses along Urytskoho Street, near 63, 64 school, were partially without windowpanes, and there were no windowpanes in the residential buildings that are perpendicular to Urytskoho Street, before Pylypa Orlyka [Street].

As I said, there was no gas and people began to cook outside, on the street. And on 11 March, an incoming artillery strike hit almost near our entrance door. There is a single-entrance apartment block opposite to my house. And the fire strike was near the ground floor. Those were probably some shell fragments. It frightened us, but most of all it frightened the people who set up the brazier/wood-fired grill between our house and this apartment block.

After that, people tended to move closer to their entrance doors. And a brazier was placed near each entrance. Men began to cut trees or collect tree branches, and we all became like one friendly family. We cooked food together, all our tenants. On 12 March, at 7 o’clock in the morning, my husband said, “Come up to the window quickly and have a look.” A tank with the letter Z was driving along Urytskoho Street from the direction of Port City and four military men were sneaking next to it.

“Mariupol, give up!” and a tank that seemed to be sneaking down the street while we cooked our breakfast. It was a scene to remember. We then went outside and cooked some food. We prefer to have some cereals in the morning.

We had some dry cereals in stock. We also had some aluminium cup with very thin walls, and some candles. We lit the candles, warmed up some small amount of water and poured it into those cereals. When we were having our breakfast, we heard some kind of roaring sound. Naturally, we cautiously ran up to the window. Three or four tanks were driving at high speed and the military were sitting on top. We said, “Well, it is clear that our [military] gave them the works.”

So that is how we stayed there, went out into the street sometimes, and witnessed the rumbling. The rumble became more frequent and moved closer. While first these sounds were heard somewhere far away, then we heard them closer and closer. There was not any information.

I will go back a bit, because from 24 to 26 February, there was some information in the Internet that trains were still running from Mariupol, but we did not hear any calls for evacuation. And I told my husband several times, “Let’s leave, let’s go. We’d better come back later.” He said, “Come on, the city is protected. We were told that everything would be fine.

Let those people who have little children leave, those who have the elderly, maybe those from orphanages, and we will stay on a little more. Everything will be fine.” And so we stayed until the last moment, but the turning point was... it was on 12 March, closer to the lunchtime. Surely, we taped up all the windows with adhesive tape. When the adhesive tape ran out (my husband is connected with electrical engineering, so we had a lot of electrical tape at home), we began to tape the windows with electrical tape, and we still had some plastic film for wrapping food.

We taped up almost all the windows, except for one large window that was attached to the balcony and overlooked that apartment block across from our house. And at around 12 o’clock, my husband went to tape up this window too. We heard a huge explosion at the time when he was standing on the balcony. There was no power supply anymore at that time, so we kept all our food on the balcony. And when we looked out, we saw that a car, which was parked next to the apartment block, was on fire.

We realized that God protected him, and if he had stayed there for just a second longer, he simply would not be alive now. On 12-13 March, the shelling became more and more intense. We stayed in the hallway more and more often, almost not going to the rooms, and on 12 March, very strong and loud explosions began. So we moved into the hallway and wrapped ourselves in blankets, just having only our noses stuck out. We wore gloves and winter clothes, but due to the fact that our windows were not broken, the temperature was 8-10 degrees, while our neighbours said that they had 5 degrees and below. At that time, the thermometer showed almost 10 degrees below zero outside. It was the middle of March but it snowed and so the snow was still lying on the ground.

We were surprised when we looked out of the window and saw that people were really collecting snow into buckets. They carried this snow away somewhere. At first, we did not pay much attention to it. I had water, and I didn’t think about it.

Our neighbours are all great people. Everyone shared water and supported each other as best as they could. By 8 March, some looting began. We knew it because Pylypa Orlyka Street is right next to us and we saw cars loaded with potatoes, oranges, and canned food driving along that street. Or people, like barge haulers, carried some boxes placed on their shoulders. Then we learned that the warehouses that were not far from Port City came under shelling and people just rushed there to stock up on food, as the stores had been closed for a long time by then. And at that time, we also got to know that our neighbours from the third entrance section tried to leave and their car was shot at. Thank God, the wife and child remained alive, but the husband remained behind the car wheel, he simply died. She then came running and said, “I don’t know where to run, what to do, how to take him out of the car. We barely ran away but he stayed there.”

On 13 March, very early in the morning I think, I don’t remember exactly, we were sitting wrapped in the blankets, and at that moment our house just bounced. We prayed to all the saints, to all our late parents, asking that our house survives and the people who live in it remain alive. As it turned out later, a shell struck the shorter side of our house, hitting the second floor. A two-room apartment and a three-room apartment next-door were damaged. These apartments were damaged by one shell. There were no people in the apartments at the time of the strike. This is very good because people in our entrance section were mostly staying near the lift shafts on the staircase.

On 18 March, we again went to visit my friend. We came back home and our neighbours told us that some strange people came to us [while we were away] and said that my husband and I needed to be taken out urgently, given the experience of 2014 when people were simply abducted. We did not know what to think about, but we braced up...

The next day, some short man came who introduced himself as Maksym. He said that he was a volunteer and that he was given our address so that he could take us out to a safe place. And he said the password – “Filimon”. After that, my husband and I treated him with complete confidence because Filimon was the name of our cat who lived with us for 19 years. We realized that our son was trying to take us out of this hell. But closer to 18 March, shelling of our district ceased, all the armed hostilities moved towards the 17th [micro-district], and to Kuprina Street and Myru Avenue.

I mean... when the shell hit our house, its fragments damaged our enclosed balcony, well, but all the windows in the apartment remained intact, and this gave us confidence that everything would be fine with us.

On 18 March, when we went to visit my friend and came back then, we found a note made with a chalk on our door. It read, “Vadym, I am in the hospital in the 17th micro-district, on the 7th floor. Please come and bring the bag.” And Vadym realized that this was his friend. We took a big bag and went to the 17th micro-districts. That was when I saw the graves in the yards for the first time, as before that we didn’t go anywhere much, although the neighbours from our section told us about Podsolnechna Street, about Granitna Street with black, completely burned-out houses. It was just a nightmare. Well, until I saw it with my own eyes, I could not really imagine that this could be possible.

We walked along Shevchenko Boulevard. It was partially blocked by buses, which we happily used earlier to move around the city. There were some caterpillar tracks of some tank, some kind of water carrier vehicle, some cars and burned-out houses along Shevchenko Boulevard in the direction of the 17th micro-district. In the 17th micro-district, there was some kind of abandoned car and it was not clear what was in it.

Later I realized that there were dead bodies inside. We saw about four people digging a mass grave, which was just very large. And from time to time, on the way to the 17th micro-district, we passed by some graves with crosses. By the way, we had a funeral services shop at our Kosmos market, and it was probably looted. Or maybe it was just left with the door open. Well, the graves looked very tidy and it seemed that we were walking along Starokrymske cemetery, where people were buried recently, and not in the 17th micro-district, where the huge market was located. We came to the 17th micro-district and saw a partially destroyed hospital. It was a building with operating rooms.

We went up to the seventh floor where our friend was. At that moment, our micro-district was already controlled by the so-called “DPR”. As far as we understood, the russian troops came first and after they cleared some part of the city, as they said, then the so-called “DPR” police entered. And the latter raided the houses in particular. They came to our apartment too, to our part of the building.

He said, “No.” “Do you serve in the military?” He said, “No.” “Whom are you hiding?” – just a question asked point-blank. We replied, “We are not hiding anyone.” He went in, flashed all the rooms with a flashlight, looked under the bed, and checked that there were no military men in the apartment. That is, they went through our entire micro-district with a raid, and realizing that, we had such an unpleasant, nasty feeling inside us.

As those people came and dictated what we should do and how we should live. After that, we saw those graves, destroyed kindergartens, schools, and houses completely burned out...

We went up to the hospital to see our friend. The hospital was also supervised by the so-called “DPR”. They let us in without any questions. We went up to the seventh floor. Before that, my phone was in flight mode all the time. I turned it on from time to time – suddenly it caught the network. And when we came up to the seventh floor, messages from my son rained down on me, “Parents, are you out of your mind? I ask people, they risk their lives to take you out, and you loiter.” I replied, my eyes welling up with tears, “Dear son, take us out, take us out of here.” Meanwhile, our son returned to Ukraine from abroad. He was with his family in Chernivtsi. There he wanted to enrol in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He was simply told that as he had not done a military service, so he did not have the skills for using weapons. Hence, they did not need him as cannon fodder. “Go and do what you can for our victory.”

And so he engaged in volunteering. He got in touch with some volunteers from Melekine through some acquaintances of his. Those volunteers kept coming to Mariupol during more than a week and evacuated people to Mangush and Melekine. I will probably pray all my life for the health of those guys. When he said... my son said that we should be ready for 22 March. He told us to have as small bags as possible, to take some warm clothes and wait till they come for you. The guys came.

When we passed by the police school, the whole of Novoselivka was in smoke. We walked some 500 metres and I was coughing all the time. I had a scratchy throat because of the smoke. A cloud of black smoke was just hanging behind the nine-storey buildings along Budivelnykiv Avenue. As we later learned, it was a very large shelling attack on Azovstal and Kirova [Street]. Well, we almost had no information. It is certainly difficult to imagine that in our time you do not know what is happening in the city, and in the country. The guys took us out to Melekine where we then stayed for two weeks. We hoped to go to Dnipro because we were told some stories that there were no volunteers in Berdiansk, and that even if there were some, people lived there and stayed for the night in some poor conditions, and only God knew where and how.

Well, in fact we loitered and delayed till the first day of “filtration” came. We realized that we had to drop everything and leave. We realized there would be no life there. We hired a car and drove through the fields. We saw some burnt cars on the way. Nevertheless, we slipped through to Berdiansk, but two days later, the russians did not want to open the humanitarian corridors in Berdiansk. People could not leave. Thank God, we had some money with us, so we hired a driver and were taken to Zaporizhzhia. When we were going to Zaporizhzhia through those checkpoints, their attitude to our people was like “Why do you go there to Zaporizhzhia at all? A happy life awaits you here.” They searched us and checked our bags. It was humiliation coupled with moral pressure.

We believe only in victory. If we did not believe in victory, we would have left Ukraine through the territory of russia, but we believe in our victory. We are now helping our son. We are engaged in volunteering. We are trying to ensure that our Armed Forces of Ukraine are protected as far as possible, that is, that they receive some protective equipment. We want Ukraine to win firmly, and not to have any deals, nothing of the kind. This is our territory. We are fighting for our land.

We are fighting for our homes. We are fighting for our language and for our homes. Well, this is our homeland. How can you let an invader into your house? How can you interact with him, greet him or take something from him? I don’t understand it.