The Heart of War

According to the Ukrainian authorities, all children, women, and elderly people had been evacuated from the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol by May 7th. Almost since the beginning of the war, hundreds of civilians had been seeking refuge in bomb shelters beneath the plant. When Russian forces were about to fully capture Mariupol, the plant remained the last bastion where the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Azov Regiment still held the defence – thus, it was also the main target of Russian weapons. Kholod tells the stories of Mariupol residents who survived two months of bombing trapped in Azovstal’s underground bunkers.

One of the fiercest battles during Russia's war with Ukraine was the battle for Azovstal, the most important steel plant in Mariupol. Russian troops bombed the plant, claiming that "Nazis" were hiding there and that there were no civilians in the plant. In reality, hundreds of Ukrainian civilians had been hiding for months in the catacombs of the plant. This investigation tells the story of how they survived. And the text also reveals the wider picture: the tragedy of the inhabitants of an almost completely destroyed city and their different attitudes to the ongoing war.
The text is signed by "Editorial Cold" for the author's safety.

On March 17th, 43 people – employees of Azovstal and their relatives – sat down to celebrate the birthday of Yevgeny, a rolling mill worker. He had turned 35. They managed to organize quite a feast: tinned meat, kasha, sweets from the plant’s canteen. There was drink, too – moonshine distilled from hand sanitizer in a self-made still cobbled together from a metal boiler and two buckets. With paper and pencils from the plant’s offices, children drew a congratulation poster.

By then, Yevgeny, his colleagues, and their relatives had spent almost a month in a bomb shelter under the Azovstal rail shop.

There was a gift for the birthday boy, too: a bottle of perfume – someone had taken one along when hastily packing for the shelter. As soon as the happy-birthday chorus started up, the lights went out. Everything began to shake; concrete fell from the walls; it felt as if the ground was being swept from under their feet, says Yevgeny’s colleague Andrey Vodovozov (name changed at his request – Kholod). A shell had hit the building above the shelter.

Fighting for Mariupol had started the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky, this city became the “heart of the war.” Forces of Russia and the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) had the city almost entirely under siege by mid-March, depriving the Ukrainian authorities of any chance to evacuate civilians and bring humanitarian aid to the city. According to official figures, 2,357 civilians had been killed in Mariupol by then; the city authorities say that this figure represents only a “tiny proportion”, that in fact the death toll is in the tens of thousands.

Andrey Vodovozov, a 31-year-old Azovstal electrician, found himself in the bunker under the plant on February 24th, the day the war began. Like every morning, he went to his workplace – only this time, he took his entire family with him: his wife, his two-year-old daughter, and their dog, a fluffy white samoyed named Maya. Shots could be heard in Mariupol by then, and Vodovozov decided his family would be safer in the shelter under the plant. At the time, he thought this would be “for a week at the most”: he was sure the conflict wouldn’t last long.

He brought his family to the bunker and joined his colleagues in mothballing the workshop where he had worked for four years: they switched off the equipment and, on military orders, turned off the lights so that they could not be seen from the street.

Azovstal is a huge steel plant, covering an area of 11 square kilometres – a fifteenth of Mariupol’s entire territory. In an interview with Current Time TV in mid-May, its director, Enver Tskitishvili, called it “the most powerful ferrous metallurgy enterprise in Ukraine”. Almost eleven thousand people were working there before the war. Counting in the contractors and their family members, he said, about 40 000 out of the 500 000 Mariupolians were connected with the plant.

Azovstal had been producing pig iron since August 1933. During World War II, the plant had been nearly razed to the ground by German troops occupying Mariupol, but rebuilt in the post-war years. Before the Russian invasion in February 2022, Azovstal was one of Ukraine’s leading iron-and-steel works: in 2020, for instance, it produced 3.8 million tonnes of pig iron – 18.6% of the country’s total output.

A system of bomb shelters – as the director puts it, “an entire multi-storey underground city” – has existed under Azovstal since the Soviet times. Until the armed conflict in Donbass in 2014, nobody at the plant thought that these shelters would ever be useful, Tskitishvili told the BBC in early May. But then the staff checked the archives and discovered a total of 36 shelters for 12,000 people at the plant. Five of these were said to be strong enough to withstand a nuclear strike.

In addition to bomb shelters, there are tunnels eight metres below the plant – some of them so long that you can get from one end of the plant to the other. Over several years, Azovstal’s managers had them cleaned up; a week before the start of the war with Russia, they stored food and water supplies there. “These tunnels themselves are not meant to serve as shelters, but they are deep enough to save people. So [after the Russian invasion] we made an announcement: everybody can come to us at Azovstal, we will feed and protect you all”, says the plant director. More than that: according to him, at the beginning of the war, plant employees drove around picking up their colleagues’ families and neighbours, helping them get to the bunkers.

The plant proved suitable not only for sheltering civilians. Surrounded on three sides by water (the Kalmius river and the sea), it became, in the words of the plant’s director, “a very convenient and strong fortification” for the Ukrainian military. In the very first days of the war, soldiers had taken up defensive positions at the plant; according to the authorities of the DPR, they were more than three thousand by the beginning of April.

The shelter where Andrey Vodovozov’s family found itself was spacious. It could accommodate up to 300 people sitting on benches, and only 43 actually lived there, so they had the luxury of sleeping lying down. “You put four benches in a row and you’ve got a great double bed”, he says.

Water was brought from the factory buildings – every summer, the factory stocked up on mineral water so that the workers had enough to drink in the heat. They ate dry rations stored in the bunker. Vodovozov has much praise for them: “A great set. Two kinds of kasha: barley and buckwheat. A tin of stew. And a whole lot of paper-thin crackers. Every day, we’d take two rations and cook soup for everyone, adding one potato and few noodles per bucket. If you were lucky and had a noodle in your bowl, it was truly a feast!” They had hot food once a day, at lunch: “We had hot water in the morning, hot water in the evening, and soup in the afternoon. Not as bad as you might think”, he laughs.

For tea, coffee, sugar, and salt, they had to risk forays up into the factory: “You walk there and just hope to God that nothing hits you.” Vodovozov describes his search for food in the Azovstal buildings where he used to work: “Say, a missile had blown up some duty room. You go in there, you see, the drawers have been split open – well, lucky for you!”

Occasional forays into the upper world were required not only for nourishment but also to learn at least something about what was happening in the city. Vodovozov recalls climbing onto the roof of a factory building, from where he could clearly see his parents’ neighbourhood – and watch their house burn down.

 

1. “There are no civilians at the plant.”

At the end of March, when fierce fighting for Mariupol had been going on for over a month and the city was almost entirely destroyed, the DPR proclaimed the Azovstal plant to be among the last pockets of resistance by the Ukrainian military. Mariupol authorities stated that, on April 18th, Russian military aviation started dropping super-heavy bombs on Azovstal. Two weeks earlier, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that the Russian and DPR militaries were “mopping up” the plant territory: “Heavy shells are bursting at the Azovstal plant. The hands of the artillerymen are finally untied: there are no civilians here.”

Actually, these shells were bursting right over the head of Anna Korchmina, a 35-year-old factory worker from Mariupol (name changed at her request – Kholod). She’s been living in a bomb shelter under Azovstal’s phone and dispatcher workshop with her parents, sister, aunt, and three-year-old daughter since March 5th.

Her father had brought her, her child, and her sister to the shelter when shells were exploding close to their house. He and his wife stayed back, hesitating to leave their home. But a few days later, they, too, came to the bunker: a shell had collapsed the roof of their house.

When shells fell anywhere on the factory territory, the ground would “sway under their feet”, Anna recalls. When they landed near the bomb shelter, the metal beams fortifying the bunker would give a deafening rumble. “It was like being in a cooking pot. Imagine some putting a pot over your head and banging on it.” 

When her three-year-old daughter woke up in the night to the sounds of bombing and cried, Anna would tell her that there were elephants upstairs. She ended up concocting whole stories: “These elephants would play soccer, and stumble, and fall down, and then they’d need a doctor. She’s at that age, she keeps asking ‘why.’”

They were in a bunker deep underground. It was “total darkness”, Anna recalls. At first, people walked around with torchlights. Then someone thought of attaching an LED strip to a battery, and the darkness became less total: “The lights were just enough to keep us from bumping into each other.”

The rooms in her bunker were cramped. Twenty-four people shared a small space with her, their sleeping arrangements stood chock-a-block. “Beds” or even “bunks” would be the wrong word for these. There were none – instead, Mariupolians would put a stretcher upon two boxes. It was very cold and damp, but Anna and her father managed to find some old jackets in the half-destroyed building and put them on top of the stretcher – with this self-made mattress, the cold was easier to bear.

Above Korchmina’s shelter, several flights of stairs led up to a cellar. In it, the inhabitants set up a kitchen. They put some bricks together, placed the grate from a fridge on top: this was a hearth; they went on to build another. On the grate, they placed the few pots and pans they had brought from their homes. They made forays into the ruined city for wrecked chairs and storage pallets to use as fuel.

One day in mid-April – Anna does not remember the date; indeed, she did not know it even at the time, there wasn’t enough electricity to charge her phone – she was cooking for her family in the basement. A woman next to her was frying dumplings. Suddenly, there was a roaring noise – and the dumplings were covered with crumbling plaster. A shell had landed in the building above the basement. The dumplings couldn’t be salvaged. “That was the worst, as food was scarce. Some people had no provisions”, Korchmina says.

To survive, one shared. “We had no nappies, and our neighbours had no food. We used to bargain, half in jest: like, three nappies for three potatoes. Three nappies meant three quiet nights. Food, clothes, fever syrups, nasal drops – people exchanged and gave away everything; after all, you can’t stand by while a child suffers.”

In March and early April, before shelling and bombardments became almost non-stop, people made forays to their homes to bring some food. For Korchmina’s family, the forager was the 62-year-old father, the only man in the family. Their flat had burned down, but the shed with provisions remained intact for several more days. “It was rarely calm enough to venture outside. But at first, some times tended to be quiet, especially the early morning, five to six o’clock. At that time, he’d run to the shed and fill a bag with canned food.”

Then the shed was bombed to pieces, too – but there was still the cellar where the family kept their preserves, mostly home-made. “The upper shelves were damaged, the lids on the jars had flown off; some things, like stewed fruit, had come to boiling. The condensed milk had burned, turned brown, but it was still edible.”

Ordinary, peacetime problems didn’t vanish, either: Anna’s three-year-old daughter had never been a good eater, and with the limited choices, her mother had an ever harder time convincing her to eat. Her neighbour helped her – she’d reward the girl for eating her breakfast or dinner by letting her feed her cat Basya: “A spoonful of porridge for you, a crumb of cat food for Basya.”

There were many children in the bunker, and many old people, too. A neighbour of Anna’s had ended up there – a retired librarian, she had been a friendly woman, often feeding stray dogs in the yard and giving candy to Anna’s daughter. A man who lived nearby had brought her along to the bunker. When the shelling started, she “went a bit mad”, Anna recalls: she stopped walking, couldn’t even get to the toilet; couldn’t control her bowels anymore. The man who had brought her in took care of her, feeding her, keeping her warm, bringing her boiling water, taking her to the toilet.

At first, Anna recalls, everybody in the shelter lived as one big commune, sharing their meals. When they ran out of food and water, they divided into smaller groups in order to forage. Surviving on one’s own would have been almost impossible. But feeding everyone at once turned out difficult, too: “Say, we’d cook kasha for everyone – but the babushkas would say it was all wrong, too hard to chew. At the beginning, not everyone was happy with just anything. When we first arrived, we weren’t like some starving homeless people yet”, she explains. “Not at first.”

There was only one toilet in the bunker – a big hole. The first time Korchmina saw it, she did not understand how to use it. A few days later, she knew why the hole had to be so large.

When the pit was filled to the brim, the men would shovel the contents into large sacks. Then, under fire, they’d drag the sacks away from the shelter’s entrance. This, they had to do three times in two months. “We all laughed about having to run with these bags”, says Korchmina. “Things were bad enough as it was; you didn’t want this stuff lying around in front of your entrance on top of everything else.”

The people of Mariupol did their best to improve life in the bunker, Korchmina said. They even created a lounge in the basement above the shelter, using easy chairs from the factory offices. People would sit there, laughing and chatting, as long as there was no shelling.

The children and adults in the bunker had their haircuts done perfectly: one of Anna’s shelter neighbours was a hairdresser. She had run to the shelter after her house had been shelled twice, taking only the bare essentials, which did not include her tools of the trade. “But my father ran into her flat and back and brought her scissors and a trimmer”, Korchmina says.

Getting a proper wash was impossible, though. There wasn’t even enough water to drink: “We had some water stored in our shed for the case of a power cut – to wash our hands, water the flowers, this kind of thing. So we dragged this water to the shelter. That’s what we all drank at first; when it ran out, we began to collect rain water. Every rain was a joy.” Collecting water was dangerous, “but here, you have to choose: you either risk dying under a shell, or from dehydration.”

Some laundry needed to be done, too, especially when Anna’s daughter “had a little accident”: “So you’d save water: you use a bit to wash your hair, and then you do your laundry in it.”

This was not the end of it, either: after the laundry, the water was poured into five-litre bottles and later used for handwashing. At first, Anna Korchmina was squeamish about the dirty, soapy liquid. But after a few days, she emerged from the darkness of the shelter into the sunlight and saw that her hands were black with filth. “So I realised these hands had nothing to lose”, she says.

 

2. “That’s it, I must run now, a plane is coming”

On April 19th, the self-proclaimed DPR announced that it would begin to storm Azovstal. Ukrainian authorities immediately reported that there were about a thousand civilians in bomb shelters under the plant. The DPR replied that this was a lie. The head of the unrecognized republic, Denis Pushilin, said that the Ukrainian military had invented the alleged civilians in order to force Russia to create a humanitarian corridor, which would actually serve to remove “mercenaries from various countries” from the territory of the plant.

“They [the Ukrainian security forces] will use any kind of fake news that’d help them survive. A girl, a boy, a wife, a woman, a grandmother – for them, it’s all just a pretext to demand to stop shelling the territory and not to storm the facility. I think everything is done for this purpose”, said Eduard Basurin, a spokesman for the DPR People’s Militia.

Meanwhile, the Azov regiment published a video from a bunker near Azovstal on April 18th: it features civilians, mostly women and children, saying they had been living in a bomb shelter under shelling for many weeks.

It was in this video that Svetlana Kadkalo saw her mother – for the first time in a month and a half. The old woman was sitting in front of the green wall of the shelter, wearing factory work clothes, and swaying from side to side – probably in pain, Svetlana believes. Her mother has a bad spine and a serious brain disease, cerebellar degeneration. “She needs painkillers, she needs calcium. We had her on therapy, she had her pills, was wearing her special corset; she had a course of treatment. We supported her, helped her walk, so she wouldn’t become paralysed. It cost us a lot of effort, and now she’s been without treatment for two months – I don’t know in what condition she’ll gets out of there.”

Svetlana had lost contact with her mother on March 2nd. She herself had fled Mariupol in mid-March, after a shell hit her house. Kadkalo recalls how, “within a second” of hearing the roar, she managed to throw the children onto the floor from their beds and cover them with her own body. “Soot, dust, darkness. In the morning, [I saw that] half the windows were gone, the car had more holes than a sieve, the other half of the house war demolished.” The next day, her husband’s parents went outside in search of mobile phone reception, and they, too, came under fire. “My mother-in-law was hit by shrapnel, she had a laceration. So we made a decision – it was her whom we took along. Two children, my husband, me and her – it took us 20 hours to get from Mariupol to Berdiansk.”

It was not until March 17th that Svetlana’s sister Daria was able to reach her on the phone – she said she was in the Azovstal bomb shelter with her husband, mother, and two children.

Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, argued that civilians could not have entered the plant of their own free will: “Civilians could only find themselves at this facility if they were used as human shields.” But Kadkalo’s relatives – like everyone else Kholod talked to – had fled to the Azovstal bunker from the shelling: “Nobody forced them. They were just fleeing from those who were demolishing our houses.”

Since that day, Daria managed to get outside to call her sister only four more times. The conversations were brief, Svetlana recalls: “There is food, everything is fine, must run now, a plane is coming.” After a week, Daria stopped calling. As for Svetlana’s mother, she didn’t call a single time – for her, getting out of the bunker was too dangerous: “Mum just wouldn’t be able to run back inside soon enough.”

While people who had managed to escape from Mariupol were trying to find out if their relatives at Azovstal were still alive, the shelter dwellers existed in informational isolation. In one of the bunkers, the occupants managed to tune in a radio receiver. A businessman from Mariupol, Roman (29), who spent almost all of March in the shelter with his wife, was less fortunate. The only scraps of information he got about what was happening in the city came every three or four days over the walkie-talkies of the men employed at the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who lived at the same shelter.

Some of this ministry’s units in Mariupol were disbanded when the war started, Roman says, but those involved with rescue remained at Azovstal as volunteers: “They had a fire truck and used it if something happened. On Azovstal Street [near the plant], people in a bomb shelter got trapped under wreckage – these guys went there and pulled them out.”

The rescuers used walkie-talkies to contact their colleagues who remained in Mariupol. “Sometimes, a bit of information slipped in. Once, we heard there was a green corridor. We packed in a flash, threw our bags into the car – but just as we were getting inside, the walkie-talkie said, ‘Oops, no green corridor after all, that information was false.’ So we got out again.”

Above all, Roman wanted to find out whether it was possible to leave the factory territory without getting under fire. He also worried about his parents, who had remained in their private house on the left bank of the Kalmius river – in the most dangerous area. “They were under fire. From all sides. I wanted to save myself and them. I didn’t think about the country or the city. At that moment, I didn’t care much who’d win.”

Tired of waiting for a green corridor, Roman left the factory at the end of March. By then, the only food left in his shelter was canned kasha, one portion a day, he says. “Before, we had had some chicken bones for soup, at least. But without electricity, everything was rotten.” Sometimes, the military would bring provisions, but that didn’t help much: “They brought candy for the kids, tea, coffee. No proper food.”

The soldiers who were defending the plant did not let Roman out at once: several times, they turned him away, explaining that it was dangerous to enter Mariupol. Still, he, too rejects the Russian authorities’ accusations that civilians were held in Azovstal’s bunkers by the military as “human shields”. “They never used us as shields. What they did was tell us that [they weren't letting us out] for our own good, because of the military action going on out there. But [on some days] they did let people leave. It wasn’t like they closed everything down completely and would never let anyone out.”

Finally, Roman got out into the city with one of his shelter neighbours, an employee of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, in his car. Looking out the of the window, he saw “burnt buildings, a destroyed city”. His flat, too, had been damaged by fire. The family business he had shared with his parents consisting in salting, drying, and selling fish – the warehouse where they used to store it had also burned down. A shell had hit his parents’ house, but they were unharmed.

He left Mariupol and says he’ll never return. “My flat is a charred empty box now; my parents’ house has neither roof nor walls. Just a bunch of bricks scattered around. Like in a war photo. Now I have to start my life again somehow. It’s not easy.”

 

3. Death was near either way 

On April 21st, the third day after the storming of Azovstal began, Russian President Vladimir Putin met his defence minister Sergei Shoigu and ordered him to stop storming the plant – “to preserve the lives and health of our soldiers and officers.” Putin and Shoigu mentioned civilians in a “maybe” manner: the minister reported that Russia had agreed to a ceasefire for two hours a day for two consecutive days and had prepared buses and ambulances to remove civilians “if there were any” on the factory territory. But, Shoigu continued, no one had used these humanitarian corridors.

A day after this conversation, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that Russia had only opened a corridor for the surrender of military personnel; there had been none for the evacuation of civilians. The Russian authorities denied this: Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in particular, claimed that it was the Ukrainian troops who “prevented people from leaving Azovstal by intimidating and blackmailing them”.

On April 25th, the Russian Defence Ministry proclaimed that it was unilaterally stopping combat operations and withdrawing troops to a safe distance from the plant, “guided by purely humanitarian principles”. According to the Azov regiment, Russian troops went on to carry out 35 air strikes on the territory of the plant the very next night, hitting several civilians.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk accused Russia of refusing to cooperate in the creation of a green corridor. “A humanitarian corridor must be opened by bilateral agreement. To announce a corridor unilaterally does not guarantee security”, she said, adding that there were no agreements on corridors at Azovstal yet.

In late April, Deputy commander of the Azov regiment, Svyatoslav Palamar, told the BBC that civilians in the plant’s bunkers did not believe the Russian authorities’ claims regarding humanitarian corridors. “I can tell you that, a couple of days ago, when Russian troops were making claims about an evacuation corridor, the shelling did not actually stop. If people had taken the risk, they would have come under fire. They would have died, for sure.”

He went on to say that the evacuation of civilians from the plant could have been guaranteed by third parties, such as the UN, the OSCE, or the Red Cross. According to the Italian press, even the Pope unsuccessfully tried to get involved in rescuing people from Azovstal’s bunkers: in late April, he offered Russian authorities to rescue civilians by sea on a Vatican vessel, but Russia rejected the idea. On April 26th, UN Secretary-General António Gutteres tried to negotiate with Vladimir Putin about evacuating people from Azovstal. After the meeting, Gutteres’s office reported: the Russian president agreed to have the UN and the Red Cross participate in the rescue of civilians from the bomb shelters. The Kremlin immediately denied this: presidential spokesman Dmitriy Peskov said that the proposal “would be considered”.

On April 29th, Andrey Rudenko, a military correspondent of the Russian state-run channel VGTRK, published a video in which the Savin family – Natalia, Mikhail, and their daughter Yelizaveta – described their escape from the Azovstal bunker. According to them, Azov fighters had not tried to hold them back: “They said: of course you can evacuate at your own risk. But don’t expect a warm welcome [from the Russians].”

Evacuating at their own risk was also the decision made by the parents of Kristina Dyachuk (surname changed at her request – Kholod). On April 2nd, they left the Azovstal shelter. They had ended up there in early March: they were trying to leave for a safer area of Mariupol, but their car broke down right in front of the plant’s checkpoint, and employees offered them to wait out the bombing in the bunker.

April 2nd was not their first attempt to leave the Azovstal territory. “But every time, our [Ukrainian] military brought them back because of heavy bombardment. Several times, they tried to leave only to turn right back”, Kristina says. “On the fourth attempt, my cousins evacuated. But there wasn’t enough room in the cars for Mum and Dad.”

It was not until the fifth try that Kristina’s elderly parents managed to leave Azovstal – on foot. The Azov regiment soldiers gave them some food rations to take along – but the bags were so heavy that they ended up leaving them behind, says Dyachuk: “My Dad has trouble with his legs. He even had to throw away his laptop.”

While they were walking to their house, shelling began. “Earth was falling on top of them, they had to crawl. They crawled on their hands and knees. My father is 56, and my mother is 65”, says Kristina.

Her parents’ house survived – only the windows were blown out by the shockwave. When they went inside, they saw that the DPR military was living in there. For three days, Kristina said, her father and mother lived with the soldiers. On the third day, the soldiers left – but a few days later, Kadyrov’s people came in instead, “bearded men with very bad Russian”. These Russian soldiers, says Dyachuk, shot the lock off the gate and pointed guns at her father: “They said: ‘Where are the weapons, give us the weapons!’ But why would two old people have weapons at home? Dad said all he had a shovel and a crowbar. They went through every storage room, took what food they could find, and left.”

Kristina’s parents stayed in their house for a fortnight before deciding to leave Mariupol. First, they went to Russia via the DPR. From there, Kristina helped them escape to Spain, where she had fled when the war began. She met them at the airport – “skinny, exhausted, dehydrated.”

At first, neither of her parents could hold down normal food, she says. A mother of three, she hopes that spending time with their grandchildren will help them recover. “My mother cries all the time. They keep saying: ‘We can’t believe we’re here, that we’re together, that it’s over. When we came out of the bomb shelter, when we had to crawl, we thought we wouldn’t make it.’”

The Azovstal electrician Andrey Vodovozov left the plant with his wife and daughter on April 4th. Shortly before that, he says, Azov fighters had set up an artillery point next door to the building under which his bunker was located. If the Ukrainian army was firing so close to him, the Russian army would shoot right back, he thought. So he decided to flee.

He and his wife discussed the plan with two other families and agreed to leave together. On the morning of April 4th, they woke up, packed their bags, and walked across the whole factory territory to the central gatehouse, where the Ukrainian military was on duty.

“We said: ‘We’re leaving’. And they said, ‘What are you doing, you’ll get killed’”, Vodovozov recalls. The families were told to go back to the shelters. “For us, death was near either way”, he says. “To go back meant to walk across an open area, almost along the entire factory.” At a loss, the three families took refuge in a military warehouse not far from the gatehouse.

Half a day later, the Vodovozovs met another Ukrainian military officer, who helped them get out. He asked his colleagues at the checkpoint to let the family through and explained which road to take. “At at the end, he added: ‘Don’t get caught by the Russians! If you do, they’ll kill you.’”

“We were in a panic, holding our baby and all those bags”, Vodovozov goes on. “There was crying and screaming, but we left, running.” They were lucky: there was no shooting while they ran.

On their way through Mariupol, they met some people who had stayed in their homes and were on their way to collect water. They showed the Vodovozovs an empty house where the family could spend the night: “They said: you can live there while it’s empty, take a rest.”

That same evening Vodovozov saw Russian soldiers in the yard of the house – and ran toward them: “I wanted to ask whose territory we were on.”

They first took aim, “poked their guns” at him. But when he explained that he was a civilian, they answered: “The zone is under Russian control, but sabotage is still possible.” Vodovozov said that one of the soldiers gave him a can of stewed meat and one of kasha from his personal reserve.

A few days later, Vodovozov’s family was taken to Russia. They were offered no choice. Like most refugees, they had stomach problems due to poor nutrition. In Russia, Vodovozov’s wife went to a hospital to check her health. When she returned, she told her husband that she was pregnant.

Though Russian troops had destroyed their city, the Vodovozovs decided to raise their child as a Russian citizen and applied for citizenship themselves. Vodovozov explains that he wouldn’t want to live in the DPR – but in Russia, he says, the economic situation is much better.

 

4. It will get worse, and it won’t end soon

The organised evacuation of civilians from bomb shelters at Azovstal only started on April 30th – two days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with UN Secretary General António Guterres and said he was ready to immediately negotiate the rescue of people from Azovstal and implement all agreements – as long as Russia gives its consent. Civilians were removed from the plant with the mediation of the UN and the Red Cross. Some of them were taken to the territory controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, others to Zaporizhzhia.

Svetlana Kadkalo’s relatives – her sick mother, her sister with her husband and two children – left the bomb shelter on April 30th on their own, without waiting for the buses. “Those who were with them [in the shelter] said they no longer believed anyone would come and get them; they just walked out while things were quiet”, she said. The military took her relatives to the DPR. After they are “filtered” (people who are taken from Mariupol to the DPR are released only after their fingerprints and photos are taken), Svetlana’s sister is going to take their mother to the hospital. Deprived of medicine, the elderly woman had suffered greatly from the two months at the shelter.

Civilians from the basements of houses near Azovstal had been evacuated by the Russian military earlier in April and brought to Russia and the DPR. One of the evacuees was Anna Korchmina – the exit from her bomb shelter was outside the plant.

Russian soldiers appeared in their bunker on the day of Easter – April 24th. Korchmina, her family and others in the bunker were trying to celebrate, to cook up something festive from whatever they could scrape together. One man even assembled a brick oven to make Easter cakes. After breakfast, says Anna, “we heard that the military had come”. Soon, the inhabitants of the shelter crowded around the Russian soldiers and were told that they’d be evacuated.

Before that, the Ukrainian military sometimes came into the bunker – but they never mentioned evacuation, Korchmina recalls. She never asked, either: she had hoped to stay in the shelter until the shelling ended and then return to her life in Mariupol. Somewhere in the city, her old grandmother remained. For two months, while she and her family were in the shelter, she had no news of her grandmother’s fate: there was no communication, no information source. Anna’s plan was to wait until it was safe to go out and look for her grandmother. This is what she told the Russian soldiers, too: she’d stay in the bunker. “I wasn’t afraid to stay, I was afraid to leave. We knew so many stories of people who’d been safe as long as the stayed in the bunker. They’d bolt – and... that was that.”

“We had a lot of stuff with us, too”, she goes on. “First, we brought things from the flat to the shed, then from the shed to the shelter. The first time, we ran carrying nothing but the clothes we had on. But by and by, we had sort of settled in the shelter. Leaving everything behind again would mean losing everything a second time.”

But the military told her that she couldn’t stay: “It will get worse, and it won’t end soon.”

Anna still knows nothing for sure about her grandmother. Once out of the shelter, she did manage to get in touch with a neighbour – who said that a shelling had burned down the grandmother’s flat. She may have been home at the time.

The evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal shelters took a week, from April 30th to May 7th. All this time, while civilians were still in bunkers under the plant, fighting went on at Azovstal. The parties blamed each other for disrupting the evacuation process. On May 3rd, Azov regiment commanders said that Russia had resumed air and artillery strikes – and that two women were killed by the bombing.

By May 7th, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that all women, children, and the elderly had been evacuated from Azovstal’s bomb shelters. Azov battalion deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar, however, could not confirm that all civilians had been removed – some may have remained under the destroyed buildings: “As no international organisation or authority or Ukrainian politician has [been allowed to] enter Azovstal, there is no special equipment to remove the rubble.”

While civilians were being evacuated, Azov’s deputy commander asked Volodymyr Zelensky to also take care of the wounded soldiers at the plant, “who are dying in terrible agony from inadequate treatment”. Ukraine negotiated with Russia to evacuate the wounded defenders of Mariupol and exchange them for captive Russian soldiers. On the night of May 16-17th, the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine] general staff announced 264 Ukrainian fighters to have been evacuated from Azovstal, 53 of them seriously wounded. They were all taken to the territory of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic to be returned to Ukraine in an exchange procedure.

However, the speaker of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said that the soldiers evacuated from Azovstal should not be exchanged but “tried as war criminals”. As early as next week, the Russian Supreme Court will consider the request of the Prosecutor-General’s Office to declare the Azov regiment a terrorist organization and ban it in Russia.