Ukraine’s Mariupol ‘Worse Than Hell’

(Destruction in Mariupol shown in another photo by survivor Anastasiia Kiselova)

The city of Mariupol has been turned into a place that’s “worse than hell” by the constant devastation and terror committed by the Russian military.

City of Virgin Mary Coveted by Mad Vlad

Russians are preparing to launch a tsunami of an attack in Eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainians aren’t just defending themselves successfully, but they are also exposing the true horror of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Russians in recently liberated areas, such as Bucha, and other towns north of Kyiv.

About 25-30% of the territory of Mariupol is estimated to remain in Ukrainian hands. The city was turned into a hellish place early on after Russians managed to besiege it.

Mariupol is crucial for the Russian dictator because it is the connection between the two regions he occupied after his first “partial” invasion of Ukraine back in 2014: the Crimean Peninsula in the south and the Donbass region in the east.

After Mariupol, whose Ancient Greek name means “city of the Virgin Mary”, got cut off from the rest of Ukraine, its population was left for weeks with no drinking water, food, electricity, heating, or medicine.

To make the situation even more shocking, tens of thousands of Mariupol’s residents have literally been abducted by the Russians at gunpoint and taken to labor camps in Russia, even as far away as Siberia.

The barbarity of the Russians has thus turned the city into a place worse than “hell on earth”, according to accounts by survivors who managed to escape it, per a report by The Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian English-language news site.

(Destruction in Mariupol shown in another photo by survivor Anastasiia Kiselova)

‘We Got Really Lucky’

One account of the hell in Mariupol comes from Anastasiia Kiseliova, 40, a mother of three, who managed to make it to Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine, last month.

Kiseliova was interviewed in a beauty salon in Lviv, where her children were being treated after developing acne from all the stress and trauma they experienced.

The 40-year-old Ukrainian mother recalled how the Russians would just drop bombs on anything in Mariupol: schools, apartment buildings, houses, hospitals.

She hid with her three children and others in a cellar beneath their house for about a week, but decided to make a run for safety after a Russian missile hit the house, but didn’t explode.

Her husband was working abroad; for two weeks, he thought his entire family was dead because he had no way of contacting them.

Another witness account is from Maria Ruban-Vaskevich, 44, a mother of two. She didn’t want to leave the besieged city of Mariupol until she saw a person get killed.

Walking for days through the rubble of Mariupol, her family saw a car with a pool of blood beneath it and the corpse of a man whose limbs had been destroyed.

Eventually, her family went to a line for evacuation, at which point a stranger offered to give them a ride to Zhaporizhzhia, a city in Ukrainian hands. That is how they got lucky, as this saved them from potential deportation to Russian labor camps.

“We got so lucky,” the Ukrainian woman is quoted as saying, adding the situation in Mariupol is so horrifying it isn’t “even comparable to hell.”

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