Goma Janna was in a deep plight saying “Why shouldn’t I cry?”. She wept by the light of an oil lamp below ground, surrounded by women and children. “I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children.”
Goma Janna was a representative of thousands of people of Ukraine. The country has been facing a humanitarian crisis that was deliberately let by Russia. An attempt to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine through a designated safe corridor failed, with Ukrainian officials saying Russian forces had fired on the convoy before it reached the city.
Nearly two weeks into the invasion, Ukraine’s coastline in what could establish a land bridge to Crimea was also advanced by the Russians. It was the same bridge that Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014. Mariupol, which sits on the Azov Sea, has been surrounded by Russian soldiers for days.
The corridors to safely evacuate civilians have tripped over amid continuing fighting and objections to the proposed routes. Ukraine has rejected Moscow’s offers for rescuing its citizens that lead them to Russia or its ally Belarus.
The Russian military has denied firing on convoys and charged that the Ukrainian side is blocking evacuation efforts.
One evacuation did appear successful Tuesday, with Vereshchuk saying that 5,000 civilians, including 1,700 foreign students, had been brought out via a safe corridor from Sumy, an embattled northeastern city of a quarter-million people where overnight strikes killed 21, including two children.
Natalia Mudrenko, the highest-ranking woman at Ukraine’s U.N. Mission, told the Security Council that the people of Mariupol have “been effectively taken hostage,” by the siege. Her voice shook with emotion as she described how a 6-year-old died shortly after her mother was killed by Russian shelling. “She was alone in the last moments of her life,” she said.
People loot everywhere for food, clothes, even furniture, with locals referring to the practice as “getting a discount.” Some residents are reduced to scooping water from streams.
With the electricity out, Many people are relying on their car radios for information, picking up news from stations broadcast from areas controlled by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists due to the lack or disconnection of electricity.
“We don’t have electricity, we don’t have anything to eat, we don’t have medicine. We’ve got nothing,” said Ludmila Amelkina, who was walking along an alley strewn with rubble and walls pocked by gunfire, looking skyward.
Thousands are thought to have been killed across the country, both civilians and soldiers, in nearly this couple of weeks of fighting. Russian forces have seen their advances stopped in certain areas — including around Kyiv, the capital, where a vast armored column has been stalled for days — by fiercer resistance than expected from the Ukrainians.
Late Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy released a video showing him standing near the presidential offices in Kyiv. There were piles of sandbags, a snow-dusted fir tree, and a few cars behind him.
It was the second video in 24 hours showing him near the country’s seat of power, apparently made to dispel any doubts about whether he had fled the city.
“Snow fell. It’s that kind of springtime,” he said in a soft voice. “You see, it’s that kind of wartime, that kind of springtime. Harsh. But we will win.”