60th day of the war

Today is exactly 2 months since the war began. At first we still had hopes that it would end in a few days, but with each passing day we realized that it is for a long time
It is very difficult to go through this ordeal emotionally. Every day can be the last, rockets fly to all cities and there is no safe place anywhere.
The first real evacuations from Mariupol began. About 100 people were able to leave the city by evacuation buses. It is very little, but every life saving is a great victory. In western Ukraine, we meet rescued people and provide all necessary assistance. The terrible thing begins ... people start telling their stories from life in the occupation. It's a very long post, but I decided not to cut anything and leave the full story of the family that recently left town.
Half a million more such stories are a real genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Nikita, Nastya and their 5-year-old daughter Veronica in 2015 had already fled the war. They lived in Zugres. This is a small mining town in Donetsk region. When the "Russian Spring" came there, they packed up and went to Mariupol. They settled in the Left Bank district. They took root.

Before their eyes, the Left Bank began to turn into a comfortable and beautiful area. Nikita and Nastya walked the renovated Veselka Park almost every weekend, and when the renovation of the City Palace of Culture, which is located near their house, began, they dreamed of how their little daughter would take care of it.

Veronica still got to the City Palace of Culture. But she did not dance or sing there. She hid there from enemy shelling.

"We went to the basement of the city palace immediately after the war," says Nikita. - We lived in an old two-story building next door. There was, of course, a basement, but it was not adapted at all. We were looking for a place where our child would be relatively safe and that he would hear explosions as little as possible.

The basement under the City Palace of Culture was so deep and reliable that there were no explosions at all, except for those that hit the building directly. The basement was clean, dry. There were three exits, which is very important in the event of a collapse. There was a toilet and water. So we decided to hide there.

At first there were not many people, but TV-7 came, they filmed a story about us, and the next day our shelter was filled with people. More than 200 people were hiding right there.

During the day we went home, rested, washed, and in the evening, when the shelling intensified, we returned to the shelter. "

But on March 5-6, the shelling intensified. Began to fly directly to the palace. Around this time, water disappeared on the Left Bank. So Nikita and his family stopped going home, and their whole life began to take place in the basement of the City Palace of Culture.

"On March 6, I last visited my own apartment," says Nikita. - I managed to pick up a hard drive with family photos. The house was already damaged. The rocket hit one wing, but the windows flew all over the house. In our apartment, a metal door with a frame vomited.

In the evening of the same day, the rocket hit our palace. The house survived, it is very strong, but the roof began to burn.

The guys and I went on duty. We had nothing to put out the fire. But the building was made of brick, there was not much to burn. There were only wooden beams on the roof. They fell down, and the boys and I dragged them out with a rake so that nothing else would catch fire from those beams.

We thought we were in control of the situation. We thought the fire would go out and we could stay there. But a police patrol car was passing by. The boys saw that we were on fire, went down to the basement, looked at how many of us there were, and ordered to leave the shelter immediately.

Patrols on the walkie-talkie called for help. And we received an armored car of the National Guard, another special purpose vehicle and an ordinary bus "Bogdan". All people were put in this transport and taken to the Left Bank District Administration.

It was already full of people. They have been hiding there since March 1.

We were personally met by the head of the Left Bank District Administration, Mr. Ocheretin. He allowed us to sit on the ground floor. We occupied the archive. They began to take down papers and folders in the neighboring rooms, and to equip their beds.

We lived there for three weeks. Everything was very well organized here. Volunteers and the military brought food and water. Oleksiy Filimonenko is a patrolman who took us from the palace, stayed with us in the district administration and helped organize everything.

One day we woke up from burning. The north-eastern wing of the building was on fire. We all ran to a nearby house on Miklouho Maclay Street. There was a long basement, but it had only one exit. It was very dangerous. We stayed there until the flames in the district administration went out, and returned. But some people stayed there.

That's how we lived. In general, not bad. But the day came when no one came to us - neither the police, nor the military, nor volunteers. And no one brought us water.

We started to open offices of the district administration, took away the remains of water. When this water ran out, we realized: we need to look for water. Because we will not hold out.

One morning I saw people from the house where we were temporarily hiding moving somewhere with water lumps. I asked where they were. And people replied that they were going to the bakery. Like, there is water. When they returned, I asked where exactly we should go, and we left. Almost the entire male half of our bomb shelter gathered. A Roma family was hiding with us, so even a little boy got behind us. He was not allowed in, but will you keep them?

What we saw while going to the bakery was a real horror. Before that we were sitting in our shelter. First in one, then in another. And we didn't see anything around us. And here they saw.

You know, we walked on corpses. Literally. We walked in a pool of blood, because blood was everywhere and it was impossible to get around it. Everything around was destroyed. I couldn't believe it was Mariupol.

We still brought water. It was water from a fire tank. It used to be plumbing, but now, of course, it has become technical. However, we did not have another.

Then we went there a few more times for water. Arthur, a gypsy, was with us. We helped his children, fed them, and he treated us very well. He used to work in the morgue at the fourth hospital. Then, when the war broke out, he helped as a paramedic and ran a diesel generator. One day he brought me news from my uncle,  who also volunteered at the hospital with his son. So I learned that you can move to a hospital and live there. Arthur said an evacuation would be arranged. So we didn't think long and went there.

We were housed in the basement. The basement was dirty, the district administration is much better. However, unlike the district administration, the hospital had real beds and even bed linen. We slept normally there for the first time. In the evening we had a real time. We thought we would be evacuated the next day, so we ate all our supplies. How shocked we were to learn that no evacuation was planned.

In fact, we had no choice - we had to leave the city ourselves.

We were told that you can walk to Lyapino, and from there to Novozovsk. Not the best option, but it was necessary to choose somehow. Arthur offered to take us to Lyapino in a hospital car. We agreed. But when we got to Veselka Park (it's just a horror of what happened to the park!), We saw that the road was blocked and mined.

Then we decided to return to the city center. Arthur did not want to take us to the center. So we set off on foot. But when we reached the beginning of Naberezhna Street, we saw that everything there was also blocked and planted with mines. And a warning was written: mines.

We were just shocked. You know, we're in a real mousetrap. There are mines in the back, mines in the front, and air bombs in the middle.

So I stood there, thought, and decided to go through the mines. I thought: now is the day, sunny. If there are stretch marks - I'll see them. It was agreed that we would walk a distance of 100 meters. If I pass, everyone else follows.

And we passed! It was awful, but we did it. We got to the train station closer to the evening. There is an administrative building on the left. People were hiding in it. We asked them because it was scary to go on and we needed a rest. We were received very warmly. They fed and drank tea. The next morning we left.

We suddenly heard a whistle in the area of the European Hotel. We didn't even have time to fall to the ground. The wife only managed to close her daughter's ears.

The bomb exploded nearby.

Veronica was not injured. I had a backpack on my back. There were things, documents, my old laptop. One fragment pierced my passport, laptop wires and got stuck in my laptop. I was on the verge of death. The trouble happened to his wife. She was seriously injured.

Shards tore her stomach.


It's just awful. I grabbed her in my arms and carried her to the Garden Cafe, the only survivor there. The former administrator of the institution, and now the security guard Sasha, opened the door for us. He met with a gun because he thought we were looters. But when he saw us, he understood everything. I let him in. I put my wife on the floor. And we didn't know what to do. She could not even be bandaged. Intestines, skin, blood… I understood that I had to take my wife to the hospital. But at that moment I was told that there was no hospital left in Mariupol at that time! I did not even imagine the scale of the tragedy that happened to our city. We were in a complete information vacuum.

But fate is. Do you know what it is? I think that fate is when a man, a masseur of the Mariupol football club Leonid Kutsevalov, who is a paramedic by profession, is sitting in a cafe at the bar. (Now I saw that he disappeared, he is wanted).

Another puzzle in this picture is a pregnant woman who walked with her mother from the train station. She had hemostatic drugs with her. She gave an ampoule, and Leonid gave his wife an injection that stopped the bleeding.

These two circumstances saved his wife's life.

I started looking for a car. The old Zhiguli stopped. The man behind the wheel promised to pick us up in half an hour and pick up the wounded wife. In fact, he arrived only 2 hours later. I have a bad memory all this time. My wife was cold all the time, she was conscious, she complained of pain and cold. We picked her up, put her in the back seat of the car and left. I had to leave my 5-year-old daughter with people who became our friends after three weeks together in the basement.

We drove to the Melekin checkpoint, and I saw Russians there for the first time. I was shocked! I had no idea how far Russia had come. But we had no way out, we had to save my wife. And I sought medical help. We were offered only a drug injection so that my wife could die without suffering. I refused, of course, and began to look for someone who could take us to Nikolsky. The Russians had a military hospital there, and this is the closest place where their wives could be treated.

I will not tell for a long time how I looked for a car, how I persuaded to take away. We made it. Doctors examined his wife. She needed a serous operation. Doctors said she was saved by being overweight. And the fat somehow made the plugs that she didn't lose much blood.

She was left in Nikolsky. And I began to look for ways to return to Mariupol to pick up my daughter. I was just lucky enough to meet a volunteer who brought food to Mariupol (my sister, whom I called by phone, helped me find him). He took me with him.

Fortunately, my daughter and friends did not have time to walk to the city, and I found them where I left.

We helped the volunteer to distribute food. According to the plan, he was to go to the DOSSAF and distribute food there, but due to the shelling it was impossible to get there. And then I offered to go to the station, to help those people who saved us. That's what we did.

Honestly, when you have hardly eaten for three weeks, it is very difficult to part with food, even if you realize that your own salvation is soon.

We distributed food, took as many people as we could, and moved to Zaporizhia.

Two dozen Russian checkpoints. I couldn't believe my eyes. I hated them. It was hard for me to realize what had happened. However, I want to say two things that surprised me.

A Chechen met us at the first checkpoint. I asked for documents. I said that my documents were damaged. He first demanded some normal documents, then when I started looking, and children's things began to fall out of the filled trunk, he agreed to look at my damaged passport. He asked, "What's wrong with him?" I replied that it was a fragment of an enemy missile. What was my surprise when he started swearing at the man who sent him here to Ukraine. “What am I doing here! Here is the devil, the jackal! ” - so he swore.

Another episode happened a little later, when another Chechen hugged our volunteer driver and practically accompanied us, so the cars passed without checks.

I don't know how to explain it. But I see that they are not all beasts. But still they carry out criminal orders. "

Meanwhile, Nikita is treating his daughter. In the basements of Mariupol, she contracted pneumonia. And this week a psychologist starts working with the girl.
with the girl.

The war inflicts wounds that heal very poorly.