In an interview with a YouTube channel on Saturday (5), the mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boichenko, said that the city is without power, water and medical supplies. He further said that local teams are being prevented from rescuing the bodies of people killed after the attacks by Russian forces.
The city of Mariupol is located in eastern Ukraine and a few kilometers from the Russian border.
According to Boichenko, the city, which has a population of nearly 400,000, has been without power for five days. “All of our thermal substations rely on this power supply and therefore we are without heating,” he said.
“Since the attack on Mariupol, we have lost our backup water supply and therefore we are totally without water now,” the mayor said, also adding that the city has no mobile internet network.
“[O exército russo] is working to besiege the city and establish a blockade,” he said. “They want to cut us off the humanitarian corridor, shutting down the delivery of essential goods, medical supplies and even baby food. Their goal is to suffocate the city and put it under unbearable stress,” he says.
The mayor also states that the number of “injured and dead in the last five days is in the dozens. On the eighth day, there were hundreds. Now, we are already talking about thousands”. “These numbers are only going to get worse. This is the sixth consecutive day of airstrikes and we cannot go out to retrieve the dead,” he adds.
“They [governo russo] say they want to save Ukrainians from being killed by the [Estado] Ukrainian, but they are the ones who are killing it,” Boichenko said. “Our brave doctors have been saving lives here for ten days straight. They live and sleep in our hospitals with their families.”
The mayor also commented on the humanitarian corridor, which, according to him, stopped working this Saturday. “We had 50 buses full of fuel and we were just waiting for a ceasefire and for the roads to be opened so we could get people out of here,” he said. “But now we are reduced to just 30 buses. We hid these buses in another location, away from the bombing, and lost ten others there. So, we are reduced to 20”, he complains.
“So when this humanitarian corridor finally opens up to us tomorrow or whenever we want, we may not have buses anymore to evacuate people.”
The local representative considers that saving the city is out of the question. “The only task now is to open the humanitarian corridor to Mariupol at any cost. “All these conversations [humanitárias] are lies,” he said. “All this is being done, I will repeat it for the thousandth time, to destroy us as a nation.”
“The city of Mariupol ceased to exist”, concluded Boichenko to the interviewer.
Source: CNN Brasil
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