‘I want to see sun’: Children trapped under steelworks plead for their lives
WOMEN and children trapped in a labyrinth of tunnels beneath a vast steelworks in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol pleaded for their lives last night as Russian bombs rained down.
Some 1,000 civilians are holed up at the Azovstal site with 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, officials say.
The Kremlin said last week that it would ‘seal off’ the whole site rather than bombard it, but Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych claimed that Vladimir Putin’s forces had resumed air strikes and were trying to storm the complex.
‘The enemy is trying to strangle the final resistance of the defenders of Mariupol in the Azovstal area,’ he said.
At a press conference last night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that he would abandon peace talks if Russia kills those taking refuge in the steelwounded. works. ‘If our men are killed in Mariupol, Ukraine will withdraw from any negotiation process.’
It came after harrowing footage, apparently from inside the plant, showed women, children and elderly people who have been hiding there for weeks as their homes and city were reduced to rubble by Russian bombardment.
The five-minute video, thought to have been filmed on Thursday and released by the Azov regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard, showed the word ‘children’ scrawled in red paint on the wall as soldiers descended a gloomy staircase to deliver food to civilians.
The sprawling Soviet-era industrial complex, which covers four square miles, has been described as a ‘city under a city’ because of its vast network of underground shelters and tunnels.
Children hiding there said they passed the days playing on their parents’ smartphones but have little food and supplies of water are running out. One little boy, aged about three, said: ‘I want to go home, I want to see the sun.’
Another, who seemed to be about seven, said: ‘We all want to go home so badly. We want to go home alive. We want to see our relatives. We all miss them very much.’
Ukrainian officials have been desperately trying to set up safe humanitarian ‘green corridors’ to allow citizens safe passage out of Mariupol, but sustained aerial bombardment has trapped an estimated 100,000 civilians in the southern port city. A fresh evacuation effort yesterday failed when Russian troops dispersed around 200 people who were waiting for buses to whisk them to safety.
Food and water supplies in the city are increasingly scarce and local officials believe more than 24,000 citizens have died during the siege.
In the steelworks video, a blonde woman, still wearing make-up but dressed in a steel worker’s jacket, said she had been cowering in the facility since March 5.
She said: ‘We have been here for a month and a half. What day is it today? ... I am not an employee, we just ran here after our house was shelled, we expected a green corridor, and got stuck in bomb shelter.’
Another woman clutched a toddler and choked back tears as she said: ‘We want to go home. Our house is probably ruined. Let’s hope for the corridors. Let’s hope because we’re running out of food.’
Another graphic video emerged yesterday showing the bodies of more than 20 civilians lying along a main road outside the steelworks. It was unclear when the footage was taken or how they died.
The UN confirmed it is investigating hundreds of allegations of civilians killed in the invasion.
‘We want to go so badly – and go home alive’