People want to leave, but getting out is risky. Talks have failed to produce a recognised humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol, such as now exists in around nine other places
THE DEAD are logged in a handwritten scrawl, each line a tragedy. “21 Park Street, two corpses, man and woman; Central Market, two corpses, one on the road, another in car; 101 Builders Avenue, one corpse, found under a blanket.” There are no names, no next of kin, just lines, and thousands of them. From March 12th the entries become infrequent and chaotic, not because there are fewer new deaths, but because counting them is impossible. The authorities say they have already certified 4,000 dead.
Mariupol, a city of 350,000, was surrounded by Russian forces in late February, and has since been subjected to a savage assault. The Russians targeted the essentials from the start: disabling the power supply, heating, water, communications and, later, the emergency services. From March 10th they began bombing from the air, hitting hospitals and bomb shelters among other civilian infrastructure.
Eyewitnesses say a watershed was reached around March 15th, when Russian airstrikes intensified from a couple of bombs a day to more than 50. Each impact was terrifying, says Irina Perederey, a 30-year old council worker who was lucky to escape the city that day: “The shock waves made you convinced your house is about to collapse.” Oleksandr Horbachenko, an ambulance-service welder, says that things got progressively bleaker as the days wore on.
. Those who are mobile are taking matters into their own hands, leaving any way they can, often under artillery fire. But the fighting is intensifying, and that is making the already dangerous escape routes even more deadly. Part of the city is already in danger of falling.
The government in the capital appears to have ruled out the possibility of breaking the blockade by force. On March 19th Oleksiy Arestovych, a senior adviser to Ukraine's president, said the nearest available forces were more than 70 miles away and would have to traverse open terrain, completely exposed to Russian air attacks, to reach the city. “That leaves politics and diplomacy,” he said.
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