Escapees from Azovstal finally see sunlight again
Margarita was sure, up to the last moment, that she would be killed running for the buses waiting to save civilians such as her from months of terror under Russian bombardment in the holdout Azovstal steel works.
“I never thought I would see sunlight again,” the 23-year-old Ukrainian said on condition her full name not be published. “I was thinking if a bomb hits, please let it kill me instantly. I don’t want to be handicapped. I was afraid I could end up bleeding to death.”
A dramatic humanitarian effort is carrying to safety the last of the hundreds of civilians who were stranded in bunkers under the site, where Ukrainian fighters are making a last stand against Russians seeking full control of the key port city Mariupol.
But to escape they have had to pass through Russian “filtration” sites where evacuees said they were questioned, strip-searched, fingerprinted, had their phones scrutinised and documents checked – and checked again.
It was particularly risky for Margarita who said her father and husband are members of the farright Azov regiment that is central to the Azovstal battle against Russian troops, who consider the fighters their arch-enemies.
Figuring a degree of honesty would boost her chances of getting to safety and that the Russians would have a reasonable idea of who her husband was already, she did not dispute his affiliation when interrogators asked.
Margarita said the Russian animosity towards Azov fighters surfaced quickly when she asked they return her passport in the final steps of the humanitarian convoy that would finally reach the safety of the government-held city of Zaporizhzhia tomorrow.
“They told me ‘Why? You need it? We will send you the passport in a body bag with the corpse of your husband’,” she added. “They told me that they will send us photos of my husband killed and eviscerated.”
Several female evacuees said they were strip-searched by female Russians and checked for tattoos or scars, had photos taken and were subjected to questions ranging from their mothers’ maiden names to political leanings.
“They asked us if we wanted to go to Russia or to stay in [eastern Ukraine’s self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic] or stay and rebuild the city of Mariupol,” said evacuee Natalia, who spoke on condition her full name not be published.
“But how can I rebuild it, how can I return there if the city of Mariupol doesn’t exist any more?” she said of now devastated city.
Another Azovstal evacuee, Elyna Tsybulchenko, said the convoy was brought to a village east of Mariupol, Bezimenne, for “filtration”.
“They took us one by one. They took our fingerprints, took our photos ‘Turn left’, ‘Turn right’, ‘Look here’ – like we were some kind of criminals,” the 54-year-old former Azovstal worker added.
At the same time, worried family and friends of the evacuees waited for news at a shopping centre car park in Zaporizhzhia that was the convoy’s final stop, but the wait would stretch for days as the process unfolded.
“The Russians kept asking us questions, but there were armoured vehicles standing there with machine guns … What could we say? We only said that we wanted to go to Ukraine, that it is our country,” said Natalia, 63.
They had my old mobile phone and did something to it, I assume it may be tapped now.”
“They figured out very soon that among the women we had a lot of wives of men fighting in the Azov or military, so they started to interrogate us for information,” Margarita said.
She ended up telling interrogators she had separated from her husband. But while checking her phone, they covered messages between the two of them from March 1, including one in which Margarita told her husband she loved him. “They held me for four hours,” she said at emergency housing in Zaporizhzhia.
Then after a seemingly interminable wait, the convoy of white city buses came into view of the reception centre.
Evacuee Anna Zaitseva was among the people stepping off the buses into the crowd and she cried as she was met with hugs and kisses. “We are so thankful for everyone who helped us. There was a moment we lost hope,” said Zaitseva, holding her six-month-old baby.
“We thought everyone forgot about us.”