“Every seventh person in the city died”

Yevhen Tuzov was a warden, a supervisor of the largest bomb shelter in Mariupol. Six thousand people were hiding from shelling there. Before the war, Yevhen worked as a coach and his leadership skills were of help in that challenging matter. There is no saying how many people died before his eyes, how many people were buried in city’s courtyards.

Well, speaking about 24 February, at that moment I was at home, in the city of Mariupol. Well, from that date, from the moment we learned that their troops were moving towards us, everything was heating up and escalating, and something put pressure on all of us. In addition, the awareness of the full... Full awareness that this would happen, exactly what happened in our city.

We already know that, according to the Mariupol morgue, there are at least eighty-five thousand people from half a million population of the city. Let’s say, if we make some calculations with these figures, then every seventh person in the city died. Just imagine! However, we could not really imagine such horror, well, we really could not. Yes, we were getting ready for something. At that time, I had VAZ 2105 car. It was a bit out of the running order and I wanted... I asked my friend Gennady to fix it a bit so that I could take my mother and my dog, a French bulldog, to my friends in Dnipro.  Gennady, who, in fact, died… He was buried right in the courtyard of the nine-storey residential building (this is my yard and he was buried in the neighbouring yard).

To cut it short, he did not manage to fix it by the time when an active phase began. People began to leave the city after 24 February and we started to receive some news about the columns of military vehicles and that it was simply impossible to leave as cars were shot. I cannot say who it was because I did not see it. We only heard some rumours about it. That somebody went in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, in the direction of Berdiansk, and they were shot.

Somebody did not make it to their destination and others vanished completely somewhere. Later, when we were leaving at the end of March, closer to the end of March, we saw a lot of cars, civilian cars on the roadsides. They were burned down or shot through.

It turned out that this was really true, that people not just failed to get in contact, when there was no telephone signal, but they really were shot down or came under shelling probably. So, we started getting ready for sitting it out. Well, we thought that there would be a little of shooting and then politicians would [agree on] something between them... tugging war (rope pulling contest), as always. And that this was another case of manipulation. That they would frighten us a little and then everything would be back to normal, but “it did not turn out the way it was supposed to.” On the first night, when explosions were heard in the distance (we had a garage cooperative near our house), and a friend of mine had a basement under the garage there… So my mother and I went there to sit it out because we thought it might be shelling. We did not know what to expect.

I am a wrestling trainer, an MMA, mixed martial arts coach. I had rather a cheerful and solid team, which included almost everyone who was engaged in MMA in our city. Well, there were probably only one or two people who did not attend my sports gym, in fact. I had a team that consisted from both children and adults. We trained them and travelled to take part in various competitions. When it all started, one of the city’s gyms turned into a sort of a bomb shelter – it was called, it is called TERRASPORT. The gym had a large basement and the building was fairly strong because it was built some years ago, back in the 90s, when construction standards were more or less scrupulous, when there were no concrete slabs with voids, and everything was cast-in-situ.

A monolithic structure and metal reinforcement, and by the way, in one of that building’s rooms people tried to save their lives and they actually saved their lives... And one person among them was the woman who designed this building. Yes, a woman, she was a mother of my very good friend Sveta. The grandson of this woman was my trainee. He took part in sports competitions and was a promising boy in general. His name was Kyrylo Medushevskyi. We knew, basically, that this wall was quite strong. It was this, it was like that… One could knock out the gratings there and get out in case the walls collapsed. We collected and kept at hand some crowbars and everything else.

I came there and my trainees were there too. Firstly, there were a lot of mirrors and glass there. The first thing that struck my mind was, “How can they be here? If a strike happens, they can be hit in the first place...” While they were sitting with their backs to those mirrors. I thought, “They all will be slashed now”. At that time, shops were already closed down, and just by some miracle, I got in touch with the owner of the hardware store (it was located in this micro-district), and he gave me, you know, a large nylon bag with adhesive tapes, both painter’s tapes and various other types of tapes. We were even joking about it back then.

We pasted over all the windows, all the mirrors, everything. I said that even if a shell hit TERRASPORT, it would withstand it only because we pasted it over with tape.

When we realized that there was not enough space there any more, the highest occupancy figures reached from five thousand to six thousand people. In addition, a fairly large number of people who lived nearby, in the nearby houses, came to us and we gave them food – we shared our food, our bread with them, as long as we had them for sharing. At a certain moment, one of the main tasks was water, a toilet, because everyone used plastic bags for that purpose. We used plastic bags for going to the toilet, as we could not go out at night. If somebody went out and a car would just pass by and see some movement with a flashlight, they could just fire a burst and that’s it. A few supermarkets or food stores distributed food among local people. Sometimes the owners of frozen-food warehouses came to us. They came and said, “Guys, everything is going to defrost there now as there is no electricity. Take it indeed.”

My neighbour, uncle Yuriy Vasilyev, brought us some food quite often – some cheese and canned food. They had some warehouse. He had been in business for a long time, in food retail. While many others simply locked their shops up. I personally did not do that but I know people who drank the water drained from heating radiators. When we had especially many people, we switched to other water. Rotavirus started to circulate… Rotavirus or something like that. Well, in short, there was a spread of some infection, especially with small children.

And when you have a bunch of breast-fed babies, you can’t explain it to them. Grownups can say, “Let’s not eat today and maybe we can find something tomorrow. Everything is fine.” But you can’t explain it to a baby who is a few months old or two weeks old.

Moreover, I know some cases when it was not possible to ensure the stock of baby food and everything like that. In addition, I forbade lactating women to go upstairs for their breast milk not to drop or disappear. I know cases when a woman, a mother of a new-born, less than one-month old, lost her breast milk. She could not find any baby formulas and her baby died from hunger, simply for the fact that he did not eat.

What can I say about it... Yes, some people broke into closed stores. I’ll tell you honestly, there were various categories of people, including those who broke into those stores. Well, to be honest, at first, there were some guys who went into some stores (I know two of them), and they... By the way, I don’t even know where they are now, after 16 March. They left a note written on a piece of paper, “Good afternoon, here is our phone number. We took this and that...” They left this note somewhere near the cash register but then it became meaningless. We gave people some meals no less than twice a day. I don’t know if it was good or not during such a time, but I don’t think anyone could offer more. We simply tried our best to provide people with some food, to ensure that they have access to some water, and ensure that people’s immunity would not weaken, that’s what I mean. Because there was a problem with medications.

We… when that virus started to spread with water, when it started coming from everywhere, especially in children, we began to look for some [treatment] methods. There were no medicines for treating it. Some elderly women told us about an old technique of using boiled pomegranate peel, which gives an anastaltic effect. Then we came to a solution where a person had to drink a glass of Coca-Cola. I did not even know about it before.

That’s a life hack I share with you, my friends. If somebody feels like his or her stomach is going to churn, take a glass of Coca-Cola. It helped our children.

Well, once a woman came to us. Somebody probably sent her to us, perhaps those were some forces. She said, “I am the owner of two pharmacies. Two pharmacies have been ransacked, and we just opened another one recently. There was no “Pharmacy” sign on it yet, only a shutter on the door, and I think, it has not yet been opened.” She went there, to that pharmacy, with one of my friends. They came back and said, “Someone broke into that pharmacy too. We came there and saw that the shutters were torn off. Everything was torn there, everything was broken and medications were stolen.” She had some kind of a locker there, which did not have a handle or something, and they [the perpetrators] did not have a clue how to get inside it.

The locker remained standing there intact. She opened it and found some more medications inside. They took them out and brought with them. The doctor checked them and found five or seven jars of suspension to treat the stomachache. So our people lined up in a huge queue, each with his or her own spoon, and the doctor poured a spoonful of this suspension to each of them. Either this suspension helped us or we just got used to it, but that problem with water ceased to bother us. I mean everyone had upset stomach.

I am going to tell you and kindly ask you not to cut it out from my story. Six people with the most acute phase of COVID were brought to us and you know, we had several thousand people sleeping back to back. Can you imagine that no one died from COVID, and lung ventilator was of no use to anyone?

As far as I remember, the worst day for me was the day when I learned that my best and probably the most capable student from Mariupol, Suren [Surenchik], died from a mine.

He was 19 years old and he was a dental student. We had been travelling all over Ukraine with him for two and a half years without a single loss in the MMA contests. Notably, he was in a very interesting weight category – 71 kg. This is quite a specific weight category... They punch hard there and speed is needed too, as well as everything else. We never lost to a single rival anywhere. At the competitions, everyone even learned how to pronounce his name, Gadzhanyan, without mistakes. There were several terrible days and, in fact, I got a sense of that fear after the events because...

The fear came from the understanding that I could not help – that’s why it was creepy.

I remember the moment when a man ran up in hysterics. He was hitting his fists, his hands and his head against the wall. He was shouting that his daughter was in the neighbouring yard under the rubble, and he was begging for help. While mortar shelling continued there. We just saw incoming mortar strikes there, explosions followed by smoke. There were a couple of boys with us who were real madcaps. I would never in my life think that they could dare to do such a thing. “Yevhen, we can run there.” I said, “No!” I did not allow them. I told them, “I will then have to take you out of there. “If you run there now and a couple of mines hit, I will have to run there for you. Not only she but the three of you will be there too.” I said, “Let’s at least wait for a pause, so that we could see that no mines fly there. It will not fly to one point all the time.” There was a pause of about seven minutes maximum.

I remember it, as my friend smoked a cigarette during that time (we were standing there under a canopy at the entrance) and then we ran. We ran in vain because, as I understood, that girl died... Well, she had no chance already after the first hit, when it happened. The rubble covered her and her leg was broken. Her leg was broken badly and she died from blood loss... The rubble squeezed her body and her leg was broken. There was a puddle of blood. Her body was of blue-grey colour already by the moment when we ran in and we could not help her in any way.

If all this ends and the time of peace comes, when there is no shooting any more, when it is possible to develop freely, to engage in some peacetime activities, then I have a dream – I would like to travel around the world on a sailboat.

I was on a sailboat once. I worked as a head of a lifeguard team on a cruise ship. Alternatively, to go on a clipper motorboat with a sail, well, to travel around the world. That is what I want, I think. I would also like to do something not only for people, but also for our planet, probably. I would like to plant several million trees on the planet. Sometimes I feel like I am about to lower my hands, to give up. It is the same like in boxing – if you lower your hands, they will not reduce the punching strength, but on the contrary, they will try to hit you in the head much harder in order to knock you down quickly. It is the same in life. The tactics is simple, the answer is simple here – you must keep your hands higher.