"No one could assume that Mariupol would be wiped off the face of the earth"

Dmytro Kuzminskyi knows exactly what he will do on 18 March each and every year. Together with the neighbours, they decided: no matter where they are on this day, they will call each other and remember how they stayed together in the most difficult days. In the basement of a five-storey building in Mariupol, they survived shelling attacks, searches and threats together, and even celebrated a birthday.

If we speak about the invasion, then for me it began like for everyone else, on 24 February 2022, with a telephone call from my mother at seven something in the morning. She told me that all of Ukraine was being bombed and that the war began. My first reaction was a brain freeze. It was not that I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t understand it. My brain didn’t want to realize that this was actually the reality but I understood from all external factors that it was true. My first reaction was like all other people’s reaction, at least those people whom I know.

I returned home and went on the Internet. I immediately started to surf through the news feeds and was once again convinced that, unfortunately, this was true. Few of the Mariupol residents left in the first days. I think that those were the most prudent or insightful people. Well, I think that 99.9% of Mariupol residents remained quite calm. The reason was that we had gone through all this in [20]14, and we knew that there was no other so well-protected city than Mariupol, maybe, except for the Ukrainian capital.

And this was probably the safest city in Ukraine. This is no exaggeration. I mean, you could walk around the city at any time of the day or at night and not be afraid of anything at all. All the security, defence and law-enforcement agencies were broadly represented in Mariupol. Let’s say, this was the situation after [20]14. While Kramatorsk hosted the regional council, it was one part of the regional authorities, then the entire security, defence and law-enforcement branch of power was concentrated in Mariupol. Absolutely everything, starting from the SSU [Security Service of Ukraine], police, the regional police department, and ending with the military, border guards, well, every military and defence authority.

That is why we were sure that, in principle, nothing threatened us. We thought that it would be according to the scenario of 2014. Well, like some fighting somewhere near Mariupol. Well, I thought I would go to work, to film something, and that it was nothing special. No one could assume that the city would be wiped off the face of the earth. For me, the war began probably on 2 March when the power supply disappeared... Well, the electricity disappeared first. I don’t remember the exact date when it was gone. A day later, the power supply was resumed. Well, it happens. We were not really concerned about that. The Internet and the telephone connection were gone. Well, we thought again that it was because the power supply was cut off. After some time, power substations switched off and that was why the telecommunications were turned off too.

Well, we all were used to artillery volleys in Mariupol, we all got used to hearing the sounds of artillery on the outskirts. We have been hearing it since [20]14, and basically, this did not frighten us. In fact, we all were used to it, especially I in my work. And when it started to thunder really clear and loud, I understood that it was getting closer, closer, and closer. Then I already became a little anxious.

My brother’s house, where I was staying with him, yes... It happened so that on 6 March the house was hit. Well, panic started to grow in Mariupol a little earlier because everything closed down much earlier. Shops and everything else did not work at all, and local residents actively engaged in looting. Obviously, grocery stores were ransacked the first. Well, that was before 6 March, and my brother’s house was hit exactly on 6 March, at 05:50 in the morning.

The day before, I sent my brother to spend the night in the basement because I believed that we needed to hide in the basement. Artillery shells landed closer and closer, some of them even reached the territory of the regional hospital. And it is not far from us, I could see it from the window. We began to take shelter in the basement but we did not yet spend the whole night there. We just went down to the basement during the shellfire and went back up to our flat to spend the night. On 5 March, I sent my brother to the basement while I myself went up to the flat and stayed for the night there. I thought that it would be better that way, and so on 6 March, at 05:50 in the morning, I was standing in the kitchen and looking out of the window.

The central entrance caught fire, the lining caught fire and some cars were on fire too. I thought that I should run to the basement, run to the hospital and help to put out the fire, and my second thought was “what was I doing near the opposite wall?” I was covered with some pieces and fragments, and I could not understand anything because it hit the fifth floor and I was as close as on the third floor. I was thrown back and shell shocked. I don’t think it was a strong impact but still a shell shock. Surprisingly, I did not get any cuts either by pieces of glass or fragments, although they crumbled all over me. I didn’t understand: it was just a blow, a hit to the house, but I didn’t understand that I was thrown back.

I don’t know, maybe it was a blast wave, a recoil, because cracks went along the walls immediately. Everything was affected by the explosion, all the cupboards. Well, I mean, I understood that something strong hit the house but I understood it up to a point. Because I got back to my feet and went around our flat to see what happened. I tried to put some things back to order, to tighten something up. I took a big fragment out of our door. It was hard to pull it out. I almost tore it [the door] out of there. I screwed in some screws, stood there for some time brain-frozen, looked around and then saw that people were running down, just like a river flowing down. There was another hit.

He was not let out of the basement immediately because they were afraid that he could come under fire. Well, he came for me and took me out, as my mind was not really clear at that moment. The sixth of March was the first day when I started to live in the basement, and this went on for three weeks. For us personally, living in the basement was... [For] us it was…, no matter how funny it sounded, it was a mixture of scare and fun. We had a large and friendly commune where we took care after and helped each other. It was a group of people from our section of the house, about 30 people. Children, some elderly people, women, seven men, a dog, a rat, a cat, and a parrot.

At first, we kept charging our phones reflexively, out of habit, as we thought, “In case the telephone signal reappears.” Then we charged them in order to use them as a flashlight, and just to keep them charged. We charged them up and immediately turned them off – they were useless. But the very fact that my phone was charged warmed up my soul a little bit. At first, we took water from the heating pipes.

We collected snow. Well, as I already mentioned earlier, people in our basement were friendly and supportive. At that time, shelling attacks were very intense and sounded very loudly. Nevertheless, people ran out and followed the queue. They placed their empty buckets and help others, even unknown people, to carry their full buckets. There was a constant communication, contact between people. Then, the situation with water worsened. It worsened to the point that people simply scooped up water from puddles for their technical needs. Not for drinking but at least for some technical needs. As for the drinking water, the situation varied. Some people made some stock of drinking water at home. Well, shops came into play too. That is, looting, all this happened. On 6 March, when the fifth floor of our house was hit, one flat was destroyed completely. I am not a resident of this section of the house. I came to my brother. I did not know who lived in this section. We made acquaintance only on 6 March when in the basement.

Everyone was sure that there was no one in that flat, that a mother took her daughter a couple of days ago, and that the flat was empty. But on 7 March, guys went up to the fifth floor to check what happened with their flats because all the walls collapsed there.

My brother ran to the hospital to ask for help. There were a lot of military there and he was told that nobody would be able to help. They knew about our house. Because it was the first one damaged in our district but all the doctors were fully busy as there were many wounded civilians. I don’t know about the military but many civilians were wounded. My brother ran back and told everyone that we needed to do something ourselves. We stood there for some time and thought what we could do. Because if the victim had a spinal injury, we had to take him out appropriately, while the flat was littered with construction debris to the half of my height as a result of the explosion. We just thought how to take him out of there. We are not doctors and it was just a bit scary to go up there to the fifth floor.

We went upstairs. We were five men and one fearless woman who urged us. When we backed down a little bit, she said, “Come on. Let’s go, go ahead.” And we took him out. He was seriously injured. He had one of his eyes gouged out. We put him on a blanket, took him downstairs and carried him to the hospital. The walk to the hospital seemed to me like the road of life.

Firstly, it was hard physically, just physically, as my fingers cramped. Secondly, everything thundered, people stood in a queue for water and cast their dazed looks at us, as we were carrying somebody, just like in some movie. We took him to the hospital and placed him on a wheeled bed immediately. The military showed us the way where to roll the wheeled bed. The patient was taken to the neurosurgery department and we went back home.

Every day in Mariupol was a story of survival and luck. We cooked food outdoors. We went out of the basement at 7 o’clock in the morning and went back in when it got dark. Men were busy with all sorts of things like finding firewood, water, and cooking. Women were busy with cutting, slicing food, serving, laying the table, distributing portions of meals, as we could not allow ourselves to eat a bellyful, although, in principle, our situation with food was not bad. As I know, there are stories when some people had nothing to eat. So, thank God, we had enough food. We chipped in everything we had at home. First, by small bits, and then, when we realized that all this would not end soon, we started bringing much bigger amounts. Well, basically, our storage was full, we had plenty of food.

Well, it so happened that I celebrated my 41st birthday in the basement.

But people knew it was my birthday. I mentioned, probably a couple of times, that it was my birthday. And again, as I said, people in our basement were really so friendly, but I did not expect that they would organize me a party. One girl made several cakes. She took some ordinary waffle shells or crusts and spread some condensed milk on top of them. But the second half of the basement struck me the most. Our basement was divided into three sections. One section was taken by a large family and their friends. The second room was occupied by the rest of the people from our section of the house.

Where my brother and I were too. And the third room was used as a storage. So the girls from the first room were singing Ukrainian songs. They were great. They sang them so loudly that I was even a bit afraid that somebody could come to us. Yet, they kept signing and did not care at all. Come what may, they just sang. And the girls managed to bake a real cake on a fire. They made it from a dry mix for cooking pancakes, and they made it without saying a word. I was surprised. I spent all the time outside, and sometimes I went to get some firewood. Well, they found some time and made a cake. They decorated it and even found candles somewhere. The children blew up yellow-blue balloons and wrote a birthday wish on them. It was all so emotional. It was very cool.

One girl signed two books for me and we decided that on the second day of the month we would have a collective phone call of all the people who were in the basement. No matter where we are. I took those books from Mariupol to Chernivtsi, through all the checkpoints. From time to time, separatists made some attempts to seize them, well, in a sort of polite manner, asking me to lend them the books. But when I told them where the books came from and when they opened them and saw the gift signature, even they did not dare to take them away from me.

They came on 11 March to persuade my brother and me to leave together with them – we refused, and that’s all. We did not call each other until 18 March. And on 18 March, I just had some gut feeling for some reason. I went up to the fifth floor and tried to catch the telephone signal. I was lucky, as I was able to catch a weak signal, just one bar on the indicator. I got through to my mother and this was the most important [birthday] gift for me because I got to know that they were alive. They left Mariupol and it was morally easier for me to survive because I knew that my loved ones had left. My brother and I stayed.

The Russians came on 11 March, right at the time when my mother visited us. I ran to see off my mother. I ran out onto the road to help her get in the car. She got in the car and when I ran back into the yard, I saw that a guy from our basement was standing there, pointing like this with his hands and saying, “Don’t shoot.” At first I did not understand what was going on. It was very noisy around. I turned my head and saw a group of soldiers. I realized that they were not our soldiers – the uniforms and white armbands. At first, I and other men were just standing, staring at them and discussing whether they were our soldiers or not. They also stared at us. Basically, they went into the yard an hour later. It was a reconnaissance group, Russian marines. They were not “DPR” soldiers. It was evident from their uniforms and their dialect. When they came up to us and spoke to us quite correctly, I attacked them verbally very harshly and with anger,

This made me even angrier and I asked, “Which Azov? We see them once a year at the military parade and they don’t give us any pain.” This made them a little angry and they began to backlash, “Are you from Azov yourself?” Well, the men from our basement deflected their attention and they left me alone. Well, they went upstairs, floor after floor, checking the flats and looking for Azov soldiers. No one expected that the Russians would come so soon and I did not remove all the pro-Ukrainian symbols and emblems from my flat. In fact, I had quite many of those. There were flags, red and black ribbons in every room, Azov and Right Sector magnets on the fridge, and stuff like that. I did not remove them. When their commander entered my flat, he just walked around it, turned around and left. He did not say a word about it.

I think if they paid attention to the fridge... But they just saw the flags and that’s it. So they left. Later, my gut feeling prompted me to do something, as Russians were already in the city. And not only Russians were in the city. The Russians passed through the district and left, while soldiers from the so-called “DPR” (unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic) came to replace them.

They were totally against the residents of Mariupol in general. They were irritated by Mariupol that was like a red rag to a bull. Because the city was beautiful. It was a showcase. It was said everywhere that Mariupol is an outpost of Ukraine, and in addition, it is the base of Azov regiment. Mariupol means or equals to Azov [regiment], and Azov equals to Mariupol, and for them it was a huge irritating factor. A couple of days before the “DPR” people came, I went up to my flat and took off all the flags, but I did not have the heart to throw them away. I simply folded them and hid them inside the sofa.

They appeared in our yard under the pretext of checking the flats for the presence of Azov soldiers and soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They visited flat by flat. At first, they behaved quite adequately – like “we are your liberators”, and they said that they have been bombed for eight years and so they know what it is. That was their favourite phrase. They first went flat by flat. And everything was more or less adequate. They came in and left. They came to our flat, for some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe they did not like my appearance. They did not just go through the flat, they searched it.

I was taken to one room and my brother to another one. Well, classically, we were taken to separate rooms and the interrogation began, “We are going to shoot you in the knees.” I went through absolutely various things. When they found the flags, they made me undress and checked my body for any tattoos. They found what they wanted. I have a map of Ukraine with a trident on my hand, which was made 16 years ago, when I was 25. They found it and realized that they found who they wanted, and the fun part began. They tied the flags around me and took me out into the yard. First they said, “We are going to take you to a place where you will be digging trenches, and then we will shoot you down.” When they tied the flags around me, I immediately remembered a woman. Unfortunately,

I don’t know her name. She was also tied to a street post, her body wrapped in flags, in Donetsk back in 2014. I immediately remembered her and realized that things were going to be bad now. Basically, my neighbour from the basement saved me, for the most part. She saw this situation. She went to her relatives. She was the only one who was not afraid. She came up to us and said, “What’s going on here? Why do you touch our Dmytro?” They replied, “Well, he is a fascist, a nationalist and we are going to kill him now.” And she talked to them. At some point, they calmed down and sort of turned kind-hearted. They told me, “Get lost.” The only thing, they told me to take off the flags and burn them. I took them off and was standing with them. They said, “Burn them.” I did not dare to argue at that moment because I understood that I probably would not have a second chance.

And as soon as we threw the flags into the fire, a damaged, clapped-out car without license plates and with “Z” signs on the side drove fast into the yard. It was clear the car was stolen or seized. Their commander hopped out of it. He was a short and angry man of non-Slavic appearance. He was very aggressive. He got out of the car with such a look as if they caught the Azov commander, “What is it about him? Where is he? Where are the flags? They said, “We burned them.” He responded, “Are you morons?” Then he turned to me, “Show me your tattoo.” He was told over the radio that I showed my tattoo earlier. He understood that I had done it a long time ago. He realized that but still hit me a couple of times in the stomach with a screwdriver, not hard though. It did not go through but was rather unpleasant. His second assistant, a 19-year-old rookie, racked the slide of his pistol gun and cocked it. My first thought was that if he shoots, I am done then. Nothing good. Well, he wanted to scare me.

Thank God, somebody remembered that there was a beauty salon on the other side of the house, which was already damaged and ransacked. We went there and found a tube with black paint, found a tattoo machine, found a package of sterile napkins and simply amended my tattoo manually. As best as we could. However, they did not come.

We did not leave with my parents for two reasons. Because I did not believe in “green corridors”. Debaltseve and Ilovaisk showed that the Russians cannot be trusted. And the second and main reason was our basement brotherhood, and if I go, I kind of leave the other people behind. And if we were holding on together, then we needed to stay on together. Well, on 6 March, when our house was hit, a minivan of one of our neighbours was parked nearby and it was terribly hit by shrapnel. Also, when the Russians came, they cut his vehicle’s wheels. They even spent the night inside it. We were sure that it was not in the running condition. Well, when it became very uncomfortable to be in the basement, the vehicle owner tried to start it.

And thanks to some magic words, he managed to start it [the vehicle]. It was a sort of a token. We managed to keep the vehicle engine running for half an hour, to charge up its battery, as previously it was used to charge the phones. When we started up the minivan’s engine... The day before, a completely unknown family joined us – three kids, two girls 6 and 8 years old and a one-year old boy, who had hearing problems. Two elderly men, and a mother and father – a couple in their 30s. They spent a night at our place and we gave their children some sweets. So this family asked us to evacuate them too. That day we decided that we were going to leave. We took off two wheels from a minibus parked nearby and drove to a broken fuel station. With the help of a wire and a plastic bottle, we managed to drain about 40 litres of diesel fuel and gasoline from the underground fuel tanks. And so, having said goodbye to everyone, we left, at our own peril and risk.

And when we left Mariupol, “DPR” checkpoints started to appear on our way. There were no Russians anywhere at the checkpoints at all, only the “DPR” people. Apparently, that was the only job they could be trusted to do. They checked everything very thoroughly. My phone and notepad. They asked men to undress, but not all of them. I was unlucky one. They asked me to undress at every checkpoint. They looked at my knees for traces of using knee pads. They checked my shoulders for traces from a machine gun and body armour, and checked my body for tattoos. Sometimes I managed to take off my jacket in a way so as not to show my arm, my shoulders, chest, and that’s it. I covered my arm with a jacket.

They were not military. They did not even know how to properly approach a car. Well, I mean, there is a rule of how not to get caught in the crossfire. There are some standard rules of how to work at checkpoints. They were just thugs. And this “rollercoaster” took a lot of our strength. The first large peaceful city was Melitopol. It was occupied by the Russians but still I saw a city there that was all intact, a living city. We arrived at night, during the curfew hours, but the city was lit up. It was alive.

The first large Ukrainian city was Zaporizhzhia, then Dnipro, and then Chernivtsi. Well, the air raid warnings, the sirens or alarms are everywhere. Sirens in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Chernivtsi are a little different than in Mariupol. We did not have them at all. We just had constant sounds of incoming artillery shelling. You would go to sleep at night and you could have just an hour of silence for the whole night. Something was constantly thundering and exploding. Everyone was terribly afraid of aviation [airplanes]. We knew that if a bomb comes…, when the plane flew in, it scared everyone so much, because if a bomb flies in, it would be fast and hard.

The good will always defeat the evil, and in my opinion, if you ask an adequate person who is who here: who is good and who is evil, that’s obvious. For one simple reason, we have...

This can be exemplified by our volunteer movement, which knows no equals in the world, and hopefully will remain second to none, by God’s grace. I observed it in [20]14, in 2015, and what is happening now, and also the number of volunteers who joined the Armed Forces and the territorial defence units. This number really runs high. It is a challenge to get there now, even if you want to. That is why we will win. Certainly, I want to return to Mariupol. While previously Chernivtsi was my second favourite city, now I constantly think about Mariupol. Marik [colloquial short for Mariupol] means everything to me. Marik. It was a nice city, really good. Not perfect, but cool. We have what we have.