Ukraine displaced: 'There is no Mariupol anymore'
STORY: Carrying what they could, people spoke emotionally about what they had witnessed and how they managed to escape from the city under siege.
Olga Hadzhynova, a 32 year-old wife and mother, began to cry when she talked about her missing husband.
“Now I’m in Zaporizhzhia, alone with four children, no money. I don’t know what to do next. I hope we will find him, my husband. Maybe he’ll get a mobile connection…I don’t know how to exist without my husband,” she said
Dmytro Kartavov, a 32 year-old builder, his wife Olga and children spent days sheltering in the basement of their home on Shevchenko Boulevard in the central Kirovsky district of Mariupol without power, heating, food or water. The were trapped, caught in the crossfire between Russian tanks and Ukrainian snipers, some as close as five metres away from where they were hiding, they couldn't obtain food or water.
77-year-old Kateryna Semenuk summed up how drastically their lives had been changed over the past few weeks with the words: "There is no Mariupol anymore. They bombed it completely."
Mariupol has become the focus of the war that erupted when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops over the border on what he calls a "special military operation" to demilitarize Ukraine and replace its pro-Western leadership.
The port city lies on the strategically important Sea of Azov as its capture would allow Russia to link areas in the east held by pro-Russian separatists with the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
