I’ve read about punishments for fascists. I want something even worse

Yesterday I found out that three of my friends are gone. My neighbor went out to walk his dog — a shell hit, he died. Other friends were driving, five of them in a car. A shell hit. They burned alive in the car. A third girl — she lived where I did. A shell hit. Three floors of their building are destroyed. They wrote to tell me they’re gone.

They cut the heating. Outside it was minus 9, inside the apartment it was 3 degrees above zero. Then the frost got so bad the radiators burst. The worst part was when they cut the gas. We chopped down trees in the courtyard and burned them on a barbecue grill. It took 20 minutes to boil a glass of water. I discovered that you can actually prepare buckwheat differently: pour water over it, leave it for 24 hours, and it’s ready.

Every day we thought it couldn’t get worse. But the worst began on March 8th, when they started using aviation. Nothing survives aviation strikes. A bomb hits a building — the entire facade collapses. At first, we figured out they were bombing every 3 hours. We knew when we could go out, bring medicine to our parents. Then they started bombing every hour, and then every minute.

There aren’t enough shelters for everyone. There was no room in the bomb shelter — you stepped over people just to get to the toilet. We had a family in the shelter, several generations. They hid food from each other. A neighbor strangled his cat because there was nothing to feed it. And if you stepped outside the shelter, you had no protection at all. A bomb flies, lands a hundred meters away, and the blast wave throws you aside. My wife and I would run to the next street over, to her parents. We’d be running and bombs would start falling. You drop into a ditch and lie there. Safety protocol says if you’re lower than the curb, you’ll survive. It’s terrifying when you have no control over anything.

An acquaintance of mine got out to Russia a few days ago. She’d survived in Mariupol, on the left bank, where the fiercest fighting was. They were about to leave, their car came under fire. One of the guys was wounded — they stitched him up with regular thread in a basement. They hid in a basement bomb shelter. Yesterday they tried to get out, and when they emerged, a building slab fell on one of the guys — right before her eyes, it crushed him. They surrendered and were taken to a filtration center. Now word came that she’s been taken to Donetsk. Nobody wanted to go to Russia. The people who went did it only to save their lives.

My friend, my child’s godfather, went to his hospital shift and didn’t come home for three days, because nobody could relieve him that entire time — getting to the hospital through the shelling was impossible.

Russian soldiers won’t let Ukrainian buses through. Officially, it’s stated: evacuation from Mariupol takes place in the city of Berdiansk. Berdiansk is 90 kilometers away. People who don’t have transportation have no way to get there. There’s been no gasoline for three weeks. Some people scrounge fuel from relatives, some had no gas reserves, some drained their gas into a generator to charge a phone. You can’t slip through. My friend and his pregnant wife walked out of Mariupol toward Berdiansk on foot. They were lucky — someone picked them up in a car. Russia does nothing to help people leave toward Ukraine.

Your media says we bombed our own maternity hospital — that it was the Azov Regiment and so on. So you understand: at that address, the maternity hospital, in one of the hospital buildings, there was a humanitarian aid distribution point. Diapers for children, baby food. Everyone knew aid was distributed there. How could we have aimed a bomb at ourselves? Where the Azov Regiment would want to position itself, they wouldn’t set up any humanitarian aid point nearby. There should have been military vehicles or soldiers there. There was nobody. We went there all the time.

The bombing of the Drama Theater was the last straw. We used to go there to gather information, because that’s where the most people always were. Military personnel would occasionally come there with news from the front, from the mainland. We went there feeling safe. Nobody thought anyone would think of bombing people. There was already no gas — people gathered there, cooked something on grills. Outside the theater, there were crowds of people. Inside was a large bomb shelter. Russian media wrote that the Azov Regiment was there, but I went there constantly. There was no Azov there.

I was luckier than the rest, because I didn’t have to bury anyone in my courtyard, unlike my friends. I was luckier because I didn’t see many severed limbs, or my neighbor burying his wife in the kindergarten across the street.

I’ve read about the punishments given to some of the fascists, the Germans. They had to rebury with their bare hands the people they’d killed. I want even worse punishments. Because they’re simply killing us here, gunning us down. We have no military targets in Mariupol, and they’re just annihilating us, in case anyone doesn’t understand.