They don’t let anyone out because they say: ‘We are the last to leave, and you are our protection, you are our shields.’ So they hide in our yards, sit in the yard and shoot.’ This is how the residents of Mariupol describe what the Azov* battalion fighters were doing.
Our camera crew talked to those still in the city. Svetlana came up and asked to record an appeal to the president of Ukraine. She was in the deepest despair: ‘Greetings to Zelensky, personally... What have you done? What have you done, you bastard? How many people, how many orphans, how many... It’s horrible.’.
Another woman led our film crew to the grave of her 27-year-old daughter, who was killed in the shelling. ‘I buried her in front of the window’. Now she is caring for her wounded sister, diagnosed with diabetes. Medicine is scarce, and the days are running out. There are many elderly people left in the city, many of them wounded.
*recognised in Russia as extremist and banned
