‘Surviving in Mariupol like twisted game’
A COURAGEOUS Ukraine army chief, holed up in the Mariupol steel plant for 73 days, has given a harrowing account of how survival is like “some twisted game where you play the role of the target”.
Ilya Samoilenko, in charge of intelligence and reconnaissance at the Azovstal factory, had already lost an eye and an arm dealing with Russian mines earlier in the war.
The 36-year-old – full of praise for the doctors and his soldiers – told how three colleagues were killed and six wounded the day before his phone call with us.
He said: “We have been in a locked down place without replenishing our supplies.
“You go to brush your teeth in the morning and you know you might get killed. It’s like an extreme sport or some twisted game where you play the role of the target.
“One of our soldiers was killed. His mother received messages from his phone with photos of her son, executed by the Russian military – strangled with a bag on his head.They are not interested in witnesses surviving.The factory area is bombed out. It
resembles the surface of the moon.” Ilya added: “Each day bombs are dropped, shots are fired.We are not just living here in a blockaded area, we are fighting here. “The supply of medicines is limited as is the supply of provisions.
“These are bullet wounds, shrapnel wounds, mine blast injuries, fall injuries, compression injuries.These are people who have been rescued from the rubble. “Amputated limbs, arms, legs – not problems that can be easily solved in conditions of an improvised field hospital. “People ask how much food and water we have left, setting a counter until we die?” Ilya and his Azov Regiment have evacuated all the civilians who took shelter in the plant’s myriad of underground tunnels. But he said: “The problem is the Russians continued shelling while people were being evacuated people. This is a terrorist tactic.”
Yet Ilya insisted his troops – some 2,000 soldiers are thought to be inside – will never quit, saying: “Prisoners of war who surrender in large numbers are a huge gift to the enemy.We do not want to give them that gift.”