Vadim Boychenko, mayor of the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, painted a bleak picture of life in the city.
“The situation is very complicated,” Boychenko said in an interview on YouTube on Saturday. The Russian military has already blockaded the humanitarian corridor. We have a lot of social problems, caused by all the Russians. ”
Boychenko said the city, with a population of nearly 400,000, had been without electricity for five days. “All of our thermal substations depend on this energy source, so we don’t have heating,” he said.
There are no mobile networks, Boychenko said, “and we’ve lost our water supply since the Mariupol attack, so now we’re completely out of water.”
†[The Russian army] He said: “They are besieging the city and laying siege to it.” They want to cut off the humanitarian corridor and stop the supply of essential goods, medical supplies and even baby food. Their goal is to stifle the city and put it under unbearable pressure.”
And the number of wounded and dead in the past five days, dozens. On the eighth day there were hundreds. Now we are talking about thousands, Boychenko said.
“These numbers are only going to get worse,” Boychenko said. But this is the sixth day in a row of air strikes and we can’t go out to pick up the dead.
They say they want to prevent Ukrainians from being killed by Ukrainians [state] “But they are the ones who commit the murders,” Boychenko said. Listen, our brave doctors have been saving lives here for 10 days in a row now. They live and sleep in our hospitals with their families.”
Boychenko spoke of canceling the humanitarian corridor on Saturday.
“We had 50 buses full of fuel and we were waiting for a ceasefire and roads to open so we could get people out of here,” he said. “But now we only have 30 buses. We hid those buses somewhere else away from the bombing, and we lost 10 more there, and our number went down to 20.
“So if this humanitarian corridor finally opens for us tomorrow or anytime, we may not have any buses left to evacuate people.”
Boychenko said that there is no doubt about saving the city. “The only task now is to open the humanitarian corridor to Mariupol at any cost.
He said: “All these hadiths are lies.” “All this is happening, I will repeat it for the thousandth time, to destroy us as a nation.”
Boychenko insisted that morale in Mariupol was strong, but they were “close to the call.”
“We cling to the hope that a little dewdrop of love will fall upon the inhabitants of this town, perhaps tomorrow,” he said.
“The city of Mariupol no longer exists, at least the city I saw once,” Boychenko told the YouTube interview.
