Resistance fighters, the wounded and families with children have been trapped in a steel works in Mariupol for weeks. Shocking reports from the people trapped inside are now trickling out. Many fear they won’t survive the siege.
https://www.spiegel.de-By Ullrich Fichtner, Katja Lutska, Alexandra Rojkov und Thore Schröder
The book on war crimes is growing longer this spring, page by page, and there will ultimately be an entire chapter called “Mariupol.”
In the steel factory in the city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of people are trapped, under almost constant attack by Russian troops. From the sea. From the ground. And apparently also with bunker-buster bombs from the air.
The steel factory is called Azovstal, an industrial facility spread out across eight square kilometers that is completely inscrutable to the layperson, a sprawling collection of structures beneath whisps of smoke, even in times of peace. Beneath the compound is a maze of shafts, tunnels and bunkers, in which the final remaining defenders of Mariupol are now making their last stand.
Ukrainian soldiers are holding their ground along with fighters from the Azov Battalion, a unit that also includes Ukrainian nationalists. Many of the troops are thought to be injured, some of them seriously. An unknown number of families are also at the site, civilians, children and the elderly. They fled to the steel factory back when they were still able to move about the city, when entering and leaving the steel mill was still possible. They crossed over the Kalmius River to escape the war, but now, their erstwhile shelter has turned into a trap. Nothing is certain: How long they will still have water. Food. Electricity. When the attackers will storm the facility.
All appeals that have been made to the Russian leadership to end the siege – and there have been many – have fallen on deaf ears. The establishment of humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians are agreed to every couple of days, only to then be revoked by the Russians or used for attacks. Another attempt to get the civilians out has been announced for Friday. But for those trapped inside the Azovstal factory, a third world war is no abstract threat. It has, for them, long since begun.
Far away in Moscow, at the long white table in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to tell his guest this week, United Nations Secretary General Antonió Guterres, that the truth is actually quite different and that the world has been misinformed about the situation in Mariupol. The city, Putin said, has been “liberated,” which means that military operations there are no longer necessary. The truth really is the first victim of war, but that maxim can also be misleading.
Because truth does, in fact, continue to exist in times of war. The truth of the victims. It is something that reporters in war zones encounter over and over again: the fact that civilian victims of war hardly ever lie. They may be mistaken about details and confuse places or timelines, they might have hazy recollections of specifics and even mix up things they experienced themselves with things they heard. But as a rule, victims hardly ever intentionally lie. The perpetrators, on the other hand, are almost always lying.
In contrast to the victims, they have much to hide and a lot to lose. They have to justify their actions, even if only to themselves. And they would like to completely cover up the worst atrocities, make all the evidence disappear and ideally delete the memory in their own minds. But this war cannot be erased. People will ultimately be forced to justify what they did, and not only to themselves. They will have to explain the executions, torture, massacres and mass graves in Ukraine. And in Mariupol.
War crimes are being committed there as you read these lines, and very possibly also crimes against humanity – atrocities on which international courts must one day pass judgment. The escape route for civilians and the wounded has been blocked, and the attacking army has intentionally made sure that their suffering is acute. Although they are trapped, hungry and basically defenseless, the bombing and shelling continues. With no mercy.
No evidence for the crimes has yet been gathered that could hold up in court. Furthermore, neither independent media organizations nor international organizations have access to the steel factory. But voices from the inside have gotten out. The truth of the victims.
It has come in the form of short reports, a few videos, text messages and chats from the catacombs beneath the Azovstal factory, isolated by war, a place where mobile phones represent a potential fatal risk due to the possibility that they can be tracked by the enemy. Still, DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to establish contact with people in the steel factory, communicating with those stuck inside – who are fully aware that they might not make it out alive. Contact was also established with others who managed to escape this horrific siege and with former and current company officials, who were able to provide insight into the topography of the facility. The result is a picture of the situation that is far from complete, with gaps in the narrative that cannot currently be filled. But it is, at least, a rough approximation of what is currently taking place in Mariupol.
The following is a documentation of the statements from witnesses. The sections combine to form a dramatic narrative about the conditions and occurrences inside the steel factory in Mariupol. And if the deadly siege isn’t immediately lifted, the name Azovstal and Mariupol will be added to the book of war crimes, and they will take their place among those that humanity will never forget.
MIKHAIL VERSHININ
Head of police patrol in the Donetsk Oblast
Vershinin, 48, has been on the Azovstal factory grounds since April 7. He received a list of questions from DER SPIEGEL that he answered via several messages sent through the messaging service Signal between April 24 and April 27.
What is your full name and rank?
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vershinin, captain of the patrol police in the Donetsk Oblast since 2015.
What is your familial situation?
Why do you want to know that? Normal.
What is your role in the defense of Mariupol?
Hopefully an important one. I can’t really say for sure at the moment.
How long have you been on the grounds of Azovstal?
I was brought here on April 7 after I was wounded and had to be operated on here in the hospital.
Where are you sheltering at the facility?
No comment. In a bunker.
VALERIYA
Author
The 32-year-old Azov Battalion fighter sent DER SPIEGEL several voice messages via Telegram.
“The conditions are awful. There is a hospital on the site, but we are constantly being bombed or shelled by artillery. The doctors are operating in the light of a flashlight because there is no electricity. The nurses and medics are working around the clock.
Soldiers are brought to our field hospital who are missing limbs or who have suffered shrapnel wounds. We have no medicines, no anesthetics, no antibiotics. Even if an operation is successful, there is great risk of gangrene or sepsis. Many soldiers will only survive if they are evacuated immediately. Others are dying before our eyes.
There isn’t enough food or water. We don’t know how we are supposed to feed the wounded. The fighters have served their country, and now they are being abandoned. That’s not how it should be. The soldiers have fought for their country. Now, their country should fight for them.”
YURIY RYZHENKOV
CEO
Azovstal belongs Metinvest whose CEO Ryzhenkov is. DER SPIEGEL conducted a video interview with the 45-year-old on Wednesday.
“The entire world warned us that Russia was going to attack Ukraine, but we didn’t believe it. We thought: Maybe there will be attacks in the east, but a real war? Even on the eve of the invasion, we were certain that nothing would happen. We were fools.
Still, Metinvest, the company to which Azovstal belongs, did make some preparations. Eastern Ukraine has been at war since 2014, and there were occasional explosions near Mariupol as well. In Avdiivka, not far from Donetsk, our workers once had to live in bunkers for a time. We also wanted to make preparations in Mariupol for such a situation.
We stockpiled supplies in Azovstal, including water and food. We thought reserves for three weeks would be enough. None of us imagined at the time that the war could last for several months.
The bunkers can provide protection to around 4,000 people. When the invasion began, we saw it as our duty to welcome anybody who wanted to shelter there. Not just our employees fled to the factory, but also people from the surroundings. Civilians, women, children. Many of them are still there, trapped by the Russian troops. But if the Azovstal bunkers hadn’t existed, they may already have been dead.
Before the war, Azovstal had 11,000 employees. We have contact with 4,500 of them, or at least we know where they are. Some are still in areas that have been occupied, but at least they are safe. Others have managed to leave Mariupol. We know nothing about the remaining 6,500. I hope they are alive and well.
In the first weeks of the war, we still had contact with the people in the factory. There was electricity and we had distributed satellite phones to some of the workers. Now, though, the connection has essentially been severed. I don’t even know how many people are still in the factory. But I think it must be quite a few.
In the initial days of the war, I was worried that the factory could be hit by a shell. There are pressurized containers in our plant that contain hazardous materials. Had they exploded, it would have been a catastrophe. When the fighting got closer, our employees stopped the machines and removed everything they could. And they did so under constant bombardment and at risk to their own lives! For me, they are heroes.
The Russians claim that there are vast catacombs beneath the steel factory from which fighters are operating. In truth, that is all a fake. Every factory, of course, has tunnels for cables and pipes. But they certainly aren’t sophisticated facilities where people can freely move about or even live in. Don’t believe what they are saying.
We request the occupiers to allow the women and children to leave. To give them a possibility to escape. What is happening in Mariupol is a catastrophe.”
MIKHAIL VERSHININ
Head of police patrol in the Donetsk Oblast
Why is it so difficult for your enemies to conquer Azovstal?
Excuse my choice of words: It’s because it is being defended by men with balls. Also, it is a strategically important site that was built during Soviet times, back when a nuclear war was a possibility.
Who is there with you?
They’re not directly with us, but there are hundreds of civilians on site, including children and babies. There are a number of units here that I’m not going to name, but the navy is among them. The Azov Battalion is the largest resistance unit. They are the backbone. There are injured people here, a lot of injured. They urgently need medical help because some of them have serious injuries and the conditions here are not adequate to help them. As far as I know, an injured fighter is no longer a fighter according to the Geneva Conventions, rather a person who needs medical care.
Do you still have hope?
We always have hope. Without hope, there would be no resistance.
For how long can you still hold out?
As long as possible. The people here are fully aware of their prospects. If anyone out there thinks that we are hoping for capitulation, that isn’t true. Of course, nobody wants to die, but if it is necessary, that is what the people here will do. They already are doing so. In every hour, every minute, the people here are fighting against the enemy.
VIKTOR OTSHERETIN
Former head of production
Otsheretin, 62, was a foreman at Azovstal, a steelworker who advanced to ultimately become head of the large rolling mill on site. He oversaw 1,780 people from 43 different countries. DER SPIEGEL reached him by phone in Talne in the Cherkasy Oblast south of Kyiv, where he and his family are staying with relatives.
“Even as a young man, I knew where I wanted to work one day. A third of the residents of Mariupol worked at the steel factories Azov and Illich. I always wanted to work with steel and fire.
Our factory alone was one-and-a-half kilometers long and 500 meters wide, about 10 percent of the total area of the Azovstal factory. Our factory is among the newer parts of the Azovstal facility and was opened in 1973. Under my leadership, it was one of the largest steel factories in Europe, and it was extremely safe. The buildings were erected at a time when the risk of a third world war was significant. For that reason, it was equipped with extremely solid bunkers. The goal was to at least save the experts if the production facilities were destroyed. Their knowledge was crucial.
Our factory had two bunkers, each at least five meters deep – equipped with showers, toilets, changing areas, simple beds, a generator and two different entrances, each for 150 people. A total of 300 people could be protected there. All of the production facilities at Azovstal have their own bunkers, for a total of probably close to 50. People can live there for 50 days or more, as long as they have sufficient supplies.
In the first days of the bombardment of Mariupol, right after Feb. 24, I frequently saw residents from the left bank (of the Kalmius River, which flows into the Sea of Azov west of the factory) moving towards Azovstal. Many of them knew of the bunkers there, as did former workers, of course.
When the bombardment grew more intense after Feb. 28, masses of people began arriving. They walked to the factory or arrived by car, the gates were open. By the time the bridges over the river were bombed on March 17, 4,000 people were already in the Azov bunkers. After that, it was extremely difficult to get out again, particularly for people with young children. There was constant shelling, and it was a long way to the factory gate, up to six kilometers from some bunkers.
I was on the factory grounds everyday until March 11. On March 2, I started bringing in bread and water for those in need in my Renault Logan. I also took photos, but I had to delete most of them for fear of controls by Russian soldiers when we escaped the city.
The bunkers in Azovstal are not connected to each other, but it is still possible at the site to get from one factory to the next underground. There are cable tunnels that are taller than a person, channels for electric cables and heating pipes. Up to four levels of such connections are piled on top of each other beneath the factory grounds. All of it is 20 to 30 meters below ground. My assumption is that there are still around 1,200 civilians in the bunkers. But that is only an estimate on the basis of the number of people who sought shelter there in the beginning and what has happened since.
I worked in the steel factory for 38 years before I was asked in 2016 to become head of administration for the Livoberezhna district, on the left bank. I had lived there for decades. We achieved a lot during my five years of work there, building three parks, paving roads and equipping the streetlights with LED bulbs. There are new city buses with air conditioning, 5,000 trees were planted and a number of structures were renovated, including schools, day care centers, swimming pools and also the cultural center.
Now, everything is destroyed. Everything. I can’t ven talk about it without crying.”
LESYA
Computer programmer
Lesya, 32, doesn’t want to reveal much about herself. She provides neither her full name nor says where she lives. Her mother, Olena, is a medical orderly in the Azov Regiment who has been detached to the Azovstal steel works since the end of February. Mother and daughter have had daily contact at times, but sometimes they hear nothing from each other for days. During an interview via Zoom on Tuesday evening, Lesya seems strong and composed until the end of the conversation, when she says she and her mother know they will probably never see each other again.
“I’ve never been to Mariupol. But I hope to visit the city one day once we have won and it has been rebuilt. My mother was deployed there on Jan. 28. She’s a medical orderly with a unit that guards industrial facilities. I had a bad feeling, but my mom reassured me. She told me that the soldiers she takes care of aren’t in Mariupol to fight. They were only supposed to supervise the operation and even had instructions to withdraw if war broke out. But when it really did happen, they also had to fight.
The war came as a shock to us. On Feb. 24, I woke up because my mother called from Mariupol. ‘It has started,’ she said. ‘They’re already bombing.’ On March 2, I lost contact with my mother for the first time. We didn’t know if she was still alive. At the time, initial reports were coming out that the Russians were entering the city. A little later, the internet apparently got fixed, and we started writing on Telegram. We couldn’t talk on the phone because that would have put my mom and her colleagues in danger.
I didn’t find out that she was at the steel works until the end of March. I don’t know when she got there. I tried to find out exactly where she was in the works, but I was told it might put her in danger if I knew her location. So, I stopped asking.
Until recently, my mom assured me that they had enough food and water. But today she wrote that they are running out of both. That was to be expected, since the channels through which they used to receive supplies no longer exist. Sooner or later, their supplies will run out. The steel works haven’t had water since the beginning. My mom used rainwater to wash her hair. She was also able to wash her body once every two weeks.
She doesn’t say how many people are around her. But from what I’m hearing, I gather that there is a common space for women and men in which they also sleep. The injured are cared for in another room.
If I understand it correctly, no one is leaving the works now because they are being bombed nonstop, from the sea and the air. My understanding is that there is a hospital somewhere in the area around the plant, but there are only a few spots in it. As soon as someone gets better, they take them back to the bunker. My mom changes their bandages there.”
Sergei Poluchin
Former foreman at the rail plant
Poluchin, 60, worked at the steel mill for 27 years. DER SPIEGEL reached him by phone this week near Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine.
“My whole family is very attached to Azovstal. Last year, its parent company, Metinvest, presented us with an award because 16 members of our family have put in a total of 285 years of service at Azovstal. I myself worked at Azovstal for 27 years, from 1984 to 2011. I started right after my military service in Afghanistan.
I’m an electrician and worked as a foreman in the rail plant with responsibility for 20 workers. We made rails and rail ties there around the clock. Azovstal has its own large rail network. There were 50 locomotives. I also trained two of my sons there.
Two thousand workers were employed in our sub-plant. There were 300 people working on each shift. The site had two bunkers, each with two entrances, with toilets, supply rooms and benches. One of my responsibilities was to regularly check on one of these bunkers to make sure it could operate properly – the 40-kilowatt generator, lighting and ventilation. The generator had a filling capacity of 10 to 12 liters.
There was a large diesel tank that was always filled with around 100 liters of fuel. I also remember five or six large, filled water tanks, each with a capacity of one ton.
I remember that next to this bunker, there was also an underground auditorium, a meeting place for those inside the bunker. The bunkers hardly received any maintenance until 2014, but then there was fighting in Mariupol. That’s why the bunkers started being maintained again. My son told me that this is why he continued working at the plant after I left.
I know that workers at the plant were all evacuated on Feb. 24. Later, when the shelling of the city intensified, the factory gates were opened and people flooded into the site. Perhaps too much attention is being focused on the bunkers – after all, the underground areas of Azovstal are much bigger, with many, many kilometers of cable shafts and water pipes, stacked in layers, each two to three meters high and wide.
Mikhail Vershinin
Head of the patrol police in the Donetsk district
Are you injured?
My left shoulder is. I was operated on and given stitches here in the Azovstal hospital.
How many civilians are there?
We can’t say because we don’t keep tabs on them. They live independently in several communities. It doesn’t make any sense to run around and make lists of civilians during the shelling. There are children and little babies here. And the number of wounded is unclear at the moment.
Specifically, what share does the Azov Regiment have in the overall fighting strength of the defenders?
That information is secret.
What kind of people are hiding in the compound?
Among them are relatives of members of the military, residents of the Left Bank, factory workers. Basically, everyone is here.
Do you have a list of demands for the intentional community?
We are not in a position to make demands. But what is happening here at Azovstal, in the 21st century, in a European country, is blasphemy against all principles of democratic states. It is a violation of all constitutional norms, of all moral principles. We’re not making demands; we’re just asking the community to get people out of here, now.
How are you feeling right now?
Like someone hitting a wall, a very thick wall, and I just can’t break through. I punch and punch and bounce back. We have sent many messages, but so far there has been no response. Nothing. If we could at least start the evacuation of civilians, the evacuation of the wounded. That must happen. Wounded people aren’t considered combatants, and there are so many of them here. When that happens, we will be a big step closer to what we want. That would be great.
Is it possible to speak with civilians at Azovstal?
There is no connection to the internet at all. Only at certain places. Civilians have no connection at all. Taking a civilian to a place where there is mobile phone reception is extremely dangerous because there is shelling and shooting around the clock. Brief moments of silence are interrupted by aerial bombardments. That’s why we can’t arrange that. You’ll be able to talk to these people when they get out of here, God willing.
Lesya
Computer programmer
“Sometimes my mom has internet for a moment, and she writes immediately when she does. The last time, she was totally desperate. She wrote: ‘Everyone here is like a zombie! It’s horrible!’
I asked a psychologist how to calm my mom down, even if we only write to each other. He advised me to give her small tasks to focus on. For example, find three red things in the room or find four square objects. I then gave her the task of photographing her bunker. She willingly did so. I put the photos on Facebook so the world can see how bad things are for the people in the Azovstal plant.
Mom is constantly asking when they will save her or whether there are plans to break the siege of the steel works. She says that right now, the steel plant is being bombarded nonstop – she can hear it clearly. She’s also afraid of chemical weapons. She fears they will evacuate the civilians – and kill the remaining military personnel.
For the Russians, the Azov Regiment in the plant is like a trophy. They view it as the ‘core of the Nazism,’ and they won’t rest until the fighters are dead. My mother knows that. Since Monday or Tuesday, the shelling has once again increased sharply. The Russians began dropping heavy bombs from the air. My mother and her colleagues have been ordered to wear helmets and protective vests around the clock now.
Every message from my mother is important to me. But the best was when she wrote to me in March after a week of silence, saying only: ‘I’m alive.’ She even wished me a happy birthday on April 5. That meant a lot to me.”
OLENA
Military medical orderly
Lesya’s 57-year-old mother, Olena, was detached to the catacombs of the Azovstal steel works on Feb. 26, more than 60 days ago. She communicated with DER SPIEGEL on Wednesday.
“We still have water right now, but very little food. The streets are in ruins, and Russia is bombing everything. There’s no internet because the phone masts have been hit. The mood is at rock bottom. There’s still light in our bunker, but not in others. They are also out of food and medicine. It’s stuffy and humid. I don’t have enough air to breathe.
I’m afraid of the nights because that’s when the shelling is the worst. We can no longer defend ourselves. I feel fear and hopelessness.”
With additional reporting by Nikita Ilchenko
Editor’s note: We have clarified the spelling of Yuriy Ryzhenkov’s name and his position at Metinvest.