This Wednesday was the first occasion in which Julia Karaulon could talk to her husband since last day 2. The same person who had advised him not to give up his trip to Italy Since he did not “believed” the Russian invasion, he asked him
Let him do the impossible to get the daughter of both, 10 years old, and her stepdaughter, from 15.
“He says that the food is running out and that has nothing for children. There is no electricity, no water, or heating and the temperature right now is 5 below zero,” explains the 45-year-old female in the former headquarters of the
Circus of Zaporiyia who is now receiving host center for displaced persons.
Interpreter of the well-known Illich metallurgical factory – the second largest in the country – located in Mariupol, Julia shared her husband’s opinion and that is why she moved to the European nation on a work trip.
She there surprised him the beginning of the war.
His family – Marido, daughter and stepdaughter, and his mother – were trapped in Mariupol.
“They are refugees in a gym, he says everything is a disaster, I could also talk to a neighbor three days ago and he told me he was picking up snow and water from the rain to drink, the only food he had were a lot of liver
rotten, since the refrigerator does not work. He took a lot of salt and cold ones, “says Karaulon with his eyes almost flooded by tears.
The relatives of Karaulon counted between the hundreds of thousands of Mariupol people who expected to be evacuated from that coastal village at an export attempt after the failed efforts during the last three days.
The operation again frustrated at the recruceration of Russian bombings, which came to seriously damage the main maternal and child hospital in the city, leaving at least 17 injured, and three dead, including a girl.
Hours after the first conversation, Julia showed the images that came from Mariupol with her face.
Photos that showed the building devastated by the expansive wave of the impact of what should have been a great-caliber bomb released by an airplane, which left a huge slope of several meters deep.
The images taken by the photographers of the AP agency allowed to understand the scope of the event: pregnant women running away from the building, another that had to be transferred on a stretcher.
The Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelenski launched an emotional call via Twitter, qualifying from “atrocity” that occurred.
“There are people, children under the rubble. How much longer will the world be compliant ignoring this terror? Close airspace already!”, Wrote the president.
The brutal attack on the health center only confirms the critical situation faced by Mariupol, described as “apocalyptic” by the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.
In the strategic villa located on the coast of the Sea of Azov, more than 400,000 people resided before the start of the Russian offensive.
Now there are abandoned corpses on the streets and a wide lack of supplies that has led to looting some shops.
“The whole area of the east (the city is divided by a river) is razed. My daughter’s school has also been destroyed, and two nearby hospital floors, including operating rooms,” says Karaulon.
Sergiy Orlov, the number two of the municipality, added that almost 1,300 dead have already been accounted for and that only on Wednesday have had to bury 47 in a common grave since the cemetery can not be accessed before the repeated bombings suffered by the Villa.
Oleksandr Starukh, Governor of Zaporiyia – The city to which the inhabitants of Mariupol – said at nightfall that “Russians have prevented any movement from civilians” should have been evacuated.
“They have not been able to leave the Greeks (there is a large Greek community in Mariupol), they do not stop bombing and there is a continuous movement of troops from Crimea to the locality, I think they have decided to annihilate Mariupol,” he added.
Kiev and Moscow claimed to have agreed a ceasefire to move the civilians who would like to run away from localities subjected to harassment of Russian troops as Enerhodar, Sumy, Izyum, Volnovakha, Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel or Mariupol itself.
Tuesday more than 5,000 people -including 1,700 foreign students – managed to leave Sumy.
This Wednesday could do it some small groups of civilians from populations of the Kiev environment and almost a thousand residents of Enerhodar, a few kilometers from Zaporiyia.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense had already accused Moscow to take advantage of on Tuesday that his troops had reopened the road that joins Mariupol with Zaporiyia -banding the obstacles and mines- to try to advance through that same route, which reactivated the armed confrontation.
“The enemy launched an attack by exactly going to the humanitarian corridor. They have not let children, women and elders leave the city,” was read in the statement released through social networks.
According to United Nations, since the beginning of the war, more than 474 civilians have died and almost a thousand have been injured, although the organization itself admits that these figures are calculated very down and that the actual losses can be much higher.
The main staff of the Ukrainian army estimated on Tuesday that Russian offensive had slowed down by admitting the failure of its initial attack, which begins to be confirmed as a military desatinum.
The erroneous analyzes that denied the possibility of a Russian invasion were based on an evaluation of the logic that should govern a military assault, which did not meet with the forces that Russia had accumulated next to the border of Ukraine.
Before the invasion, NATO estimated that Moscow required some 600,000 soldiers to occupy and control all Ukraine.
However, the School of the US Army War recalled in a study that the same Russian army dedicated 150 uniformed by every 1,000 residents during its successful 2003 campaign in Chechny, which would imply – thinking about the population of this country – that
It would have required up to 6 million military.
Putin seemed to ignore all these reasoning and attacked less than 200,000.
Hence the successive burns that are suffering from the military of him.