‘The whole time I felt one minute from death’
AS PUTIN’S FORCES TIGHTEN GRIP ON MARIUPOL, FAMILY THAT ESCAPED RECALLS ‘APOCALYPTIC’ CONDITIONS
After being trapped for 56 days in besieged Mariupol, the Grinchuk family had two hours to make their way from the ruined building in which they were sheltering to the evacuation point on Taganrog Street.
Iryna Grinchuk, a 47-yearold woman cradling two chihuahuas, credited a tiny transistor with enabling her to escape with her family.
“It was our only link to the outside world,” she said this week from a processing centre for Ukrainians fleeing the invasion.
It would take yet another 24 hours for them to reach safety, however, navigating a gauntlet of over a dozen Russian checkpoints along a “green corridor” to the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya.
They were among 79 people to arrive on the first evacuation convoy to leave Mariupol since last week.
Ukrainian authorities had hoped to rescue up to 6,000 people — including civilians trapped inside the Azovstal steel works, the last bastion in the city Ukrainian forces are still defending.
But difficulties of negotiating terms with Russian forces and of communicating with the civilians trapped inside the city — some estimates suggest up to 100,000 remain — meant that only a fraction of those who want to leave are able to.
“We were afraid to take this ride. We knew that Russia had promised green corridors (and) then shot at buses. But we’d been cut off from civilization for over 50 days. We decided to take the risk,” said Iryna, as her dogs Tyson and Nike slept in her lap.
This week, Vladimir Putin announced that Mariupol had been “liberated” and instructed his army not to storm the Azovstal stronghold but rather seal it off, in an apparent bid to free up Russian troops for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian fighters holed up in Azovstal would be allowed to leave if “white flags” were raised “along the entire perimeter or in certain areas” of the plant, the Russian defence ministry said Thursday.
Video later emerged of Chechen fighters with the Russian army standing amid the bombed-out concrete ruins of the city, with fires still blazing in the background.
“Today, we can say for sure that the city of Mariupol has been fully cleansed,” the men shouted. “Russia is the power!” Grinchuk described surviving in “apocalyptic” conditions in basements and ruined buildings as fighting raged over the key port city whose capture would offer the Russians a land bridge between annexed Crimea and their statelets of breakaway Ukrainian territory in Donetsk and Luhansk.
“The whole time I felt one minute from death,” she said.
“Helplessness in the face of danger was the hardest thing to bear. For two weeks in the place where we were hiding, we were in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces.”
As fighting came closer they were forced to flee from one basement to another building in which only one apartment was undamaged.
“People from the DPR (the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic) came to the place we were staying and told us to leave — they didn’t care where to — as we were in a combat zone.”
After previous attempts to organize evacuation routes since the weekend failed, on Wednesday, Vadym Boychenko, the Mariupol mayor, spoke on radio to encourage those residents able to make their way to a prearranged evacuation point.
The Grinchuks heard the broadcast.
The pickup point was a 30-minute drive away and they had no car.
It would be too far for Iryna’s 72-year-old mother Valentina to walk.
Miraculously, Iryna found a woman with a Lada car that still had fuel.
“I was begging her, I had to pay her 400 hryvnya” — about $17 — “if I hadn’t convinced her we wouldn’t have made it in time,” she said.
They emerged into a hellscape of upturned cars and destroyed buildings.
“I love my hometown, but now it’s a ruin. It’s worse than Grozny,” said Iryna.
They left with the clothes they were wearing.
For Valentina that was slippers and a black fur coat.
She carried an old sequined handbag with a broken zipper.
After eating her first meal in over 24 hours at the reception centre, she filled her bag with biscuits and pastries before fastening it with a safety pin. “I’m an optimist so everything is fine,” she said, as she enjoyed a hot coffee.
“I believe in the best so I don’t get scared and I don’t panic. This was very important to get through this.”
At the same table inside a tent at the processing centre, brothers Bohdan and Ruslan Kagadi, 17 and 16, were gorging on biscuits and talking animatedly about their ordeal.
“We didn’t have an opportunity to leave until now,” Bohdan said.
“It’s been dangerous to drive out alone as the road goes out past the Azovstal steel plant.
“Some people got out in the middle of March but since then no one has got out from our district.”
The boys had been staying with their aunt and uncle while their mother lived in another apartment a couple kilometres away.
Their mother’s apartment had been hit by four shells, Bohdan said. “Two hit from the north and two from the south. It’s a miracle she survived.”
The boys eventually decided to flee at the next opportunity.
“There were meant to be three pickup places on the evacuation route but only one worked out,” said Bohdan, describing themselves as lucky to make it out at all.