Life and death in shattered Mariupol

MARIUPOL, Russian-controlled Ukraine (Reuters) – Shells were exploding nearby but Tatiana Bushlanova didn’t flinch when she spoke to Reuters in front of the shattered remains of her home in Mariupol last May. Fighting in the port city has long since ended but the pensioner is still struggling to take in the enormity of what has happened.

Mariupol’s strategic location on the Sea of Azov made it a prime target in what Moscow calls the “special military operation” that it launched in Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year.

Russian forces captured the city in May when, after a siege lasting nearly three months, the last Ukrainian defenders emerged from the underground tunnels of its vast Azovstal steelworks and surrendered.

By then, much of Mariupol lay in ruins, and tens of thousands of people had been killed in a city where more than half the pre-war population of some 450,000 have fled.

Tatiana, who is still in Mariupol, said the death and destruction visited on the city had hardened people’s hearts.

“People lost everything. Everyone’s kind of strange now, angry. I don’t see a lot of kindness out there,” the 65-year-old said in interviews conducted near her old home, now rubble, and where she now lives, ahead of the first anniversary of the war.

One of her old neighbours was killed when debris crushed him after an explosion, a neighbour’s son was killed by a shell as he went about his business, and another neighbour had her hand torn off in an explosion, she recalled.

Back then, sitting alone on a bench in the courtyard of her ruined apartment block surrounded by blackened walls and collapsed balconies, she lamented that she and her husband Nikolai, 63, had nowhere to go.

They clung on for two more months, reluctant to abandon their home of 20 years even though there was no electricity, gas or running water. Their son Yevgeny and his family fled to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

“We didn’t want to leave, but we did want to eat. We went out, things were flying around all over the place; it was terrifying to go outside and cook something,” she said.

They were among the last 10 families to leave the building.

“People have gone wherever they could get to,” she said.

She and her husband now live in an apartment about a kilometre (half a mile) away that belonged to a couple called Andrei and Marina who were killed by shelling as the Russian military fought the Ukrainian army to take control of Mariupol.

For weeks after their deaths, the young couple lay in makeshift graves outside the building. “Until they were reburied in August, they were buried in the courtyard here the whole time. It was kind of creepy for me,” she said.

Their cat Alisa continues to live in the apartment.

WAITING FOR PEACE

Still traumatised by what she and her husband have lived through, Bushlanova said life in Mariupol was starting to look up a bit with the city’s Russian-installed authorities building some new apartment blocks.

“Some kind of hope has emerged,” said Tatiana, reflecting on the cataclysmic changes she has seen in the city whose name became known around the world as a byword for death and destruction.

Russian officials have announced a major long-term reconstruction plan for the city, where they have introduced the rouble currency and switched schools to the standard Russian curriculum, taught in Russian.

After moving in July, Tatiana and Nikolai tried to make themselves comfortable in their temporary accommodation, re-arranging salvaged furniture and putting up their family photographs which they had managed to save.

Their old apartment block was demolished – “the excavator stood there and took the building down bit by bit” – but getting compensation is a drawn-out process.

The couple applied for a statutory payment of 100,000 roubles ($1,350). “They said we’d find out in 70 days’ time (if they get the handout) and if not, they’ll probably put us in the queue for an apartment,” Tatiana said.

In the meantime, they live on her modest salary as a cleaner and on their two pensions of 10,000 roubles a month each which Tatiana said was tough given how expensive food had become.

With Mariupol still under Russian control, and no sign of an end to the conflict, Tatiana says they will stay in the city that has been their home for decades.

“Forgive me, but where (else) will we live out our final years? No, we’ll live them out here,” she said.

“We’re waiting for peace and our own apartment. That’s all we need in this life for now.”