Alyona Chausova started her day on the morning of Feb. 24 like it was any other day, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, it changed her life irrevocably.
“I didn’t believe it,” she told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “Out of habit, I turned on my laptop, made tea, [and] according to the plan, there was an internship day in the restaurant where I was invited to work.” But the event never happened, and the last she heard from them was the announced cancellation.
Chausova, who lived in the key port city of Mariupol, was there for Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and was prepared for another round of such fighting, but this has been different, she said.
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“In 2014, I was in Mariupol, but if you compare the scale of the tragedy, no one was ready for it. No one expected the war to gain such momentum so quickly,” Chausova explained. “We saw a tank in the city center live, we were shocked, but everything stopped very quickly. Therefore, we did not have time to analyze what was happening.”
In a matter of days, they lost power, shops and pharmacies closed, and the water and gas were turned off, as was access to the internet. In this time, the residents of Mariupol were forced to cook over self-made fires outside.
“Every day, the blows to our city were tougher and more active. It came to the power that we didn’t have much time to make a fire and heat water” because Russian forces shelled neighborhoods, she said, adding that her apartment complex was hit three times. “In addition, every day, we tried to find water, food, [and] medicines. It wasn’t just dangerous, it was a crazy risk. I can’t count how many times a day I said goodbye to life, opened my eyes, touched my face, legs, hands and realized that I was still alive.”
Russia has sought since the beginning of the invasion to capture enough land between Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and the eastern part of Ukraine, which has a pro-Russian separatist faction. This would allow Russia to move supplies and troops more easily from one area to the other. As such, the Russians have put a significant emphasis on overtaking Mariupol. Russian forces have been accused of targeting civilians in the city and engaging in war crimes.
Russian forces, over the five-plus weeks since the invasion commenced, have shelled a local maternity hospital, bombed a Mariupol theater that had been serving as a shelter, even though civilians had spelled out the word “children” in Russian in the front and back of the facility, and bombed a school that was housing hundreds of people.
“When the kindergarten near our building got bombed, we went there to take a few chairs for our basement shelter. I came in and noticed a row of kids’ slippers,” Chausova wrote in a Medium piece detailing her experiences. “It struck me: I’m stealing from children. This war forced us to do unthinkable things.”
“When the scale of destruction in my hometown reached a critical point and I saw it with my own eyes, I can’t describe the horror. I closed my mouth with my hands and couldn’t believe it was really happening,” Chausova told the Washington Examiner. “When I saw how easily such seemingly cumbersome buildings disintegrate, I realized how fragile human life is. I saw people’s bodies on the street, their faces were covered with a blanket, and their hands and legs were tied — there was no one to clean them. I saw these people’s clothes, I was afraid to see acquaintances there. They were ordinary civilians, someone’s parents, someone’s neighbor.”
Chausova’s neighbors approached her about leaving the city on March 13, and she accepted the offer, but she “left everything at home” because she “didn’t believe it would work out.” As they and others drove toward Zaporizhzhia, they realized a key bridge they needed to cross had been destroyed. Instead, they went down “a narrow detour road nearby,” and “the route is mined,” she wrote.
She is now living in Dnipro, and on Monday, she told the Washington Examiner, “I watched a video today where I saw that my house was gone. Just ashes. So I’m speechless for now. My hope died today. That’s the last information about my house. My whole life was in it.”
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Late last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross was unable to reach Mariupol, where they sought to facilitate the safe passage of civilians to Zaporizhzhia, the organization said in a press release.
As of Sunday, more than 1,400 civilians had been killed in Ukraine, whereas more than 2,000 had been wounded, according to the United Nations, warning that the death toll is likely “considerably higher,” considering the difficulty of wartime casualty-tallying. It’s unclear how much higher the toll could be, but a spokesperson for Mayor Vadym Boichenko said late last month that nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, had been killed in Mariupol alone since Russia’s invasion.
