Remember Mariupol?
Can we please avoid a repeat?
Have we forgotten Mariupol? Although most people reading this probably haven’t, the urgency, can fade. But with the president of the USA declaring that ‘Ukraine may be Russian some day’, even before his appaling behaviour towards Zelensky in person, we need to remember exactly what it means when we sit back and let Russia take a city.
Yevhen Tuzov is a wrestling coach and an activist who helped people survive the siege of Mariupol. He’s also a very passionate guy, his energy seeming inexhaustible even three years into the full-scale war. Max Maslennikov introduced me to him at NGO Space a few days ago, and I turned on the recorder and listened.
Throughout the catastrophe, Yevhen maintained his Instagram account to support his relief efforts. I’ve used some some screencaps in this post, as they are eloquent.
Yevhen has strong opinions about how the initial crisis in Mariupol was handled.
Yevhen: “To start with, the mayor didn’t do anything. Or rather, he did one very bad thing. On 26 February he and all the top management of our city sat in the basement of a hotel in Zaporizhzhia, put up a Ukrainian flag and made a video as if they were still in Mariupol. People watched it and thought, OK, all the top management are in Mariupol so maybe it’s not critically dangerous, and we don’t need to leave. Then in four days’ time a ring of Russian troops cut us off.
We had two evacuation trains, but they were only half full. You saw what happened in Kharkiv and Kyiv, with people sitting on the roof of the trains. If people from Mariupol had known even ten per cent of what was happening, we would all have run away. Instead, the soldiers used the buses to block the streets and hinder the Russians.
Ordinary people who left Mariupol drove back to get their friends and families. And you know how many people walked from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia? I know one many who walked for six days with his dog, and the pads of the dog’s feet were sliding with blood. On the last day, he walked with the dog in his arms.
People died under rubble because there was no way to move it. We tried for four hours to lift one concrete slab because there was a basement under it, with a woman, a girl and a grandmother. The grandfather and father ran to my shelter, saying, ‘Oh, can you come and help?’ We had 25 people and we couldn’t move the slab. And three days later, those people died in the basement.
I know a lot of examples like that. Some some women lost their milk, and of course the shops weren’t open, and there was no child nutrition. It’s a few days and first the child is screaming, then crying, then it gets quieter, then they die. I saw on 12 or 13 March, one young woman dig a hole barehanded and put her child in there with a blanket.
Can you imagine this, in Europe in the twenty-first century? All my videos start or finish with the words, ‘If someone finds this video, please publish it all over the world. All the world must know what happened to us.’ But now we understand that all the world is not interested.”
But 20 Days in Mariupol is internationally acclaimed…
“When I go to some European countries for screenings of 20 Days in Mariupol, it’s very important for me to speak with people after the screening. In Romania I helped to organise a screening but I couldn’t go. And one Romanian guy stood up after it was finished. “OK,” he said, “very hard film. Where are the actors?” And people from Ukraine told him, no, it’s a documentary. “Oh, impossible!” he said, and walked out.
Human Rights Watch wrote an article saying they’d calculated how many people died at Mariupol: eight thousand! It was way more. Maybe eight thousand people in one week in my district alone. Bob Woodward, associate editor of The Washington Post, wrote a book called War. He said 2,400 people were killed in Mariupol.
In 2020-23 USAID funded a film – not a documentary – about Mariupol, called Yurik. They wanted to show the United Nations saving us. Evacuating us. They were shooting this movie, which is supposed to be set in Mariupol in April 2022, with this white Toyota Landcruiser driving around, shouting in Ukrainian, “Ladies and gentlemen! We are conducting an evacuation!” when the streets are full of Russians! They showed us in basements with light and bread and mobile connections, everything. OK, so why did 100,000 people die, then? There’s a cemetery in every yard.
Some people cannot imagine this level of humanitarian catastrophe. There are borders in the brain and it’s impossible to jump over those borders.”
“I met with some German pacifist in Berlin, and he told me, ‘Oh, you want the Third World War. We are pacifists and we must stop providing you any weapons and support, and the next moment the war will be over.’
People who supported Ukraine told me not to engage with the leader of this group, he was a provocateur, I shouldn’t fight with him, just speak. I gave him a simple example: if you are a pacifist, you don’t want to fight in the street with me here and now. You want to stop conflict by any means. ‘Yes,’ he said. So I told him: ‘If you don’t suck my dick now, I’ll kick your ass. You’re a pacifist. Go on.’ And everyone gasped. It’s a very simple example but it shows how people have no understanding of what’s going on in Ukraine.”
How are the Russians treating people who still live in Mariupol now?
“A lot of people who stayed in Mariupol don’t like what happened but keep their mouths shut, because they know what will happen to them or their families otherwise. Of course, some of them wanted the Russians. They feel they are Russian.
Russian propaganda is working very strongly now. They say that when the Russians came to Mariupol we were living like Russian cities, like Penza, where people have toilets in the street and catch pigeons in the square and roast them over bonfires. No! We had big projects in Mariupol. The best roads and most beautiful squares were in Mariupol.”
Yevhen continues his evacuation work to this day.
“My previous job was as the national team wrestling coach of Thailand. I lived there for just under a year. I worked on cruise ships as chief lifeguard. I saw the world. But now I have to stay here and try to save the people who live behind me. In my opinion, the first resource of every country isn’t their territory, it’s their people. We must save people first of all.
I do evacuations from Toretsk and Niu York. In 2023, it was safer, I took some Ukrainian celebrities with me. When you bring a celebrity to people who don’t want to leave their flats they say, ‘Oh, it’s him! He wants to save us! OK, maybe I will go with him.’ Yeah, really, it works! Imagine, you’re from England and there’s some problem and you don’t want to leave your home, then Sir Elton John comes and says, ‘OK, come on, I want to save you!’ Or Paul McCartney or Prince William.
And we make videos for old people who stay when their families leave, and the child is crying, ‘Oh, Granny, please come, we’re waiting for you.’ It works. We have a lot of strategies!”
“Though sometimes nothing works. We have a lot of problems with people who are afraid of life here [in free Ukraine] more than life under shelling.
In 2023 my friends from the White Angels evacuation team came to a woman who had a six-month-old child, and was living with her husband and mother in Mariinka. They were saying, ‘The shelling is getting very close.’ The last time a shell hit about ten metres behind the house. ‘Come with us, we’re trying to help you. We’ll provide some money, some shelter in a safer city.’
She said, ‘Get out, motherfuckers, I don’t want to listen to you. I built this house and I’m not leaving.’
They came back in the morning, and overnight a few shells had hit the yard, destroyed part of the house and killed her mother and her six-month-old child. She and her husband were injured. When the police evacuated her, she didn’t speak for a month.
Some people are stupid. Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, you need to be kind, to ask them, but no. Evacuation needs to be compulsory. If you refuse to come, OK, sign this paper, and now this is not your child. OK, stay and die, it doesn’t matter what happens to you, stupid person.’ Because the child cannot choose for themselves. They don’t understand all the risks around them.”
Yevhen has experienced many close calls himself.
“I have multiple concussions from explosions. In Mariupol I took some boxes of pelmeni from one of our basement shelters to another – we had four – and when I came back I heard the whistle of a shell. I was standing near a tree, and the shell hit the first-floor wall, and some shrapnel embedded itself in the tree trunk about 15 cm from my nose. I remember seeing it flying in slow motion, with the smoke. Ting! I remember it very well. And after that, I couldn’t hear, and my nose and ears were bleeding.
The next morning, hearing came back in one of my ears about fifty or sixty per cent, and only ten per cent in the other. It came back completely maybe six days later. After that I had a lighter concussion.
Above: Yevhen came across this man weeping beside a ruined house in March, 2022.
Then the last time was last year, on the third of August when I evacuated people from Toretsk. We were in my car – a Mercedes Vito, a small bus, with only two seats in the front and cargo space in the back. There were two old women and one old man aboard. They were sitting on bags in the wells. I was in the driver’s seat. A drone flew towards us and tried to blow up the bus. I swerved left into the trees at the side of the road. The drone flew under the trees and hit an old Soviet electricity pylon, that hadn’t been working for years, and was overgrown. The pilot controlling the drone didn’t see it, because of the leaves. One propeller caught the cable and the pylon blew up. It was very close to us, and all my windows were open. The windscreen cracked.
That time I couldn’t hear with my left ear for two months. I came back to Dnipro and didn’t go anywhere for a month. Only in the last days of August I went back to my evacuation company for three trips or something like that.”
There’s a lot of talk of Trump and Putin signing a ceasefire at the moment.
“Ukraine doesn’t matter to Trump and Vance. They want our minerals. It’s the US and China racing to Mars, and Elon Musk needs these resources because in Dnipropetrovsk oblast we have 9% of the titanium in the world.
I did interviews with The New York Times, Bild, ABC, CNN, BBC and all those. At every interview I talk about the obligations of the five countries who signed the Budapest Memorandum. They don’t print that. Thanks to the Netherlands and Japan for not signing it. But Germany, France, Britain, USA – come on, motherfuckers! We were the third biggest nuclear power in the world and we gave away all our weapons. Give them back and the war will finish the next day.”
Max: “They just want us to stop fighting. And one day we will have to stop. But we have to show that, OK, guys, we know you’ll come back in time. But we have to show them that they’ll need to think twice. Show them power, make it a horror for them, so they understand that they can touch any other country but not Ukraine. It may be selfish, but what else can we do?
I think for now the Russians are are scared enough, because they’ve lost too much because of this war. The longer the ceasefire, the more they will think there’s no sense in getting back to Ukraine. But they will get back somewhere. They will get back to Georgia, to the post-Soviet countries. Maybe they will get back to the Baltic countries. But there’s less chance of that, because the Baltic countries are NATO countries.”
Yevhen: “But NATO is only a word. NATO is an impotent old man. I’m sorry, but it’s true” [Yevhen adopts a sarcastic tone.] Oh, we have weapons, we have everything, but we can’t… Where are these brave Frenchmen who were fighting for Napoleon. Where are the brave British with Churchill?
We’re going back to the Middle Ages, it’s the law of the strong. Ukraine is losing everything; we stay at the edge. But the people who have nothing to lose are the most dangerous. A ceasefire? It’s like, a big tough guy comes and rapes your wife, injures your children. You’re fighting him and some other guy comes and tells you to stop! Can you imagine?”
You can support Yevhen’s current evacuation work by donating to his PayPal on this address: Blagrod86@gmail.com
I’m typing this post in a nice coffee shop in Dnipro, over 100km from the front line. Here’s a screengrab of me collecting images from Yevhen’s instagram. Flashing up on my screen in the top right-hand corner is an (entirely routine) notification from the Dnipro Alerts Telegram channel about ballistic missiles heading towards Dnipro region from the north.
Mariupol used to have nice coffee shops too.
A lot of people are tired, and USians are in shock over their domestic crisis, but Yevhen is still fuelled by rage and determination to protect and restore his homeland. What else can we do to help?
Yes, I do remember. I will remember forever. I dream about it, and they are nightmares.
Thanks for this Anna, you're shining light into dark and neglected corners and we appreciate it very much.
Don't forget to try and find me a historic buildings nerd at some point!