Mariupol: Survivors and drone footage reveal the scale of destruction
Mariupol city council said on Tuesday that an estimated 2,000 private cars have been able to leave the city, and a further 2,000 vehicles are parked on the main route out of Mariupol as of 2 p.m. local time Tuesday.
The departures took place despite the ongoing failure to formally establish safe corridors to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, which has been besieged since March 1.
As many as 2,500 civilians have died in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials estimate. About 350,000 people are trapped in the city, with officials warning those who remain are without electricity, water and heat.
Two women who managed to escape to the Zaporizhzhia region, about 140 miles away, on Monday told CNN about conditions in Mariupol and the frightening journey out.
Lidiia, who did not give her surname due to safety concerns, told CNN that she decided to leave Mariupol after Russian bombardments started hitting closer to her home.
“We left the city under shelling — there is no silence in Mariupol,” the 34-year-old said. “Today we talked to our neighbors, they said that the situation now is even worse, so no one knows whether people will be able to leave Mariupol today.”
She said she had spent two weeks in a basement with about 60 other people, adding she only left occasionally to retrieve items from her apartment.
Describing the journey out of the city, Lidiia said: “We stopped several times and hid the children because the airplane was flying very low directly above us. We were afraid that we would come under fire. But it was no longer possible to stay in the city. Mariupol is now just hell.”
Svitlana, who also did not give her surname over safety concerns, told CNN that she let 17 people shelter in her house after their homes were destroyed, and cooked soup in her garden using rainwater.
“When the war started, I didn’t want to leave. But when shells began to fly overhead around the clock, it became unbearable to stay there,” the 57-year-old said. “My son stayed in Mariupol, I am very worried about him, but he decided to stay. I could not persuade him to leave.”
Speaking about the conditions in Mariupol, Svitlana said: “There are still many people left in the city. I told my neighbors that it is possible to leave, but they are afraid that everything is mined.”
She added: “Yesterday, the last grocery store in the city was bombed, I wonder how will people survive now?”
As the city is reduced into a battlezone, a Ukrainian official accused Russian troops on Tuesday of holding people captive at Mariupol’s Regional Intensive Care Hospital,
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Head of Donetsk regional administration, said doctors and patients were being held against their will, adding that one of the hospital employees managed to pass on information about what was happening.
“It is impossible to get out of the hospital. They shoot hard, we sit in the basement. Cars have not been able to drive to the hospital for two days. High-rise buildings around us are burning … the Russians have rushed 400 people from neighboring buildings to our hospital. We can’t leave,” Kyrylenko said on his official Telegram channel, quoting the employee of the hospital.
Kyrylenko said the hospital was…
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