A Human Rights Watch researcher said disabled people and seniors are often unable to retreat into safe hiding places in Mariupol, “The people that we spoke to were the lucky ones. They were the ones with the means and the ability to get out of the city.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian forces of reducing the southern city of Mariupol to ashes. Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in the strategic port city with little food or water. There are now no foreign journalists in the city to document the destruction.
“The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died. “By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.
Those are the words of the Associated Press’s Mstyslav Chernov, who spent 20 days in Mariupol documenting the Russian siege. I would say perhaps most difficult stories to hear, though, were from older people and people with disabilities. They, when the electricity was cut, unlike everyone else in the city who went down into these basements to shelter, they couldn’t do that, because no electricity meant they couldn’t take elevators down. And so they sat on their sofas in apartments. You know, I spoke to a man in his eighties.
And that’s when my colleague and I actually headed to the area where we knew people would be arriving once they made it back into Ukrainian-controlled territory in the city of Zaporizhzhia. And then we stayed there for two days interviewing some of the thousands of people that then also got into their own vehicles and took the risk of making it out of the city and arriving to safety.Belkis, you talk about people getting into their own vehicles.
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