Dazed, haunted and traumatized, survivors struggled to explain the brutality: 'I don’t have words...Nothing is real anymore.'
Evacuees from the Russian-controlled city of Mariupol, including those from the besieged Azovstal steel factory, arrive at a reception center for internally displaced people in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Tuesday. ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — From their cold and fetid bunker, deep underground, the survivors of Mariupol’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works had feared the wreckage that would greet them if they made it out alive.
“On the one hand seeing the sky for the first time, but on the other seeing the destroyed city,” said Osnat Lubrani, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine. The drive normally takes less than four hours, but because of active shelling, shooting and numerous Russian checkpoints along the way, it turned into a grinding 36-hour ordeal. When the buses arrived in Zaporizhzhia, the passengers looked shattered.
Oksana, a mother of two, was one of them. Trapped inside with her husband and boys ages 10 and 14, she watched as her sons somehow adjusted to a life in which bombs shook the foundations as they ate less and less each week. Their only food was packages of humanitarian aid that the Russians allowed in.“During the first month, they cried and shuddered,” she said. But later, they grew quiet, and retreated into themselves.
In a message to The Post, the head of the regional police force said Russian fighters had repeatedly shelled the facility and were attempting to storm the plant’s perimeter. The latest attacks had killed at least two civilians, he said, and as many as 200 others were still hiding out in bunkers below the plant, desperate for evacuation.
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