Trapped Ukrainian Woman Watched Her Backyard Turn Into a Mass Murder Scene

DNIPRO, Ukraine—Helga Ignatieva, a 23-year-old hotel administrator, will never forget her last weeks in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

“My friend and her sister were standing close to the window when a shell hit their house,” on the ninth day of the war, Helga told The Daily Beast. “A piece of shrapnel hit her 1-year-old son in the head and he started bleeding. They drove to the hospital under the bombing, where the doctors tried to save the child, but he died after 10 minutes.”

As she says this, her voice is calm and methodical, as if the horrors that she witnessed while stuck in her apartment have stripped her of emotion.

“I saw a great number of dead bodies of civilians,” over the past month, said Helga, who kept a diary detailing the horrors she witnessed in Mariupol,. “Two of them were our former neighbors, lying in the courtyard. We wanted to bury them there because no one could come to collect the body, but the ground was frozen, and we couldn’t dig. We had to leave the bodies in a plastic bag, near a kindergarten.”

Helga is just one of the thousands of traumatized civilians who have fled the port city, which has come under the most horrific bombardment of any European city since World War II. Authorities estimate 90 percent of buildings in the city have suffered damage. Worse, they believe that as many as 5,000 people have been killed in the fighting, with tens of thousands more deported to camps in Russia, presumably to be used as hostages in negotiations between the Ukrainian and Russian governments.

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If the Russians do take the city, as they are expected to in the coming weeks, they will be rulers of nothing but rubble and ash. Since the war broke out, every type of civilian building has been targeted, including schools, apartments and churches.

Having lived through the 2014 war in the eastern Donbas region, Ignatieva thought she and her family were prepared for what would come. After all, they were in the Vostochny district when a rocket fired from the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic and killed dozens of civilians in January 2015. But she quickly realized nothing could prepare them for Russia’s latest onslaught.

“We hadn’t imagined the war could be on such a scale… I was not expecting something like that. No one expected it could be this way,” she told The Daily Beast.

Before the Russian invasion started last month, Mariupol was the fastest growing city in eastern Ukraine. Its port is an important export hub on the Sea of Azov. Now, what former residents describe is more like an apocalyptic scene from the Book of Revelations. Above ground, they face relentless Russian bombardments from the sky. And underground—in shelters throughout the city—the situation is almost just as grim, with civilians fighting over the meager amounts of supplies they were given.

“When we started hearing about the bomb shelters [in Mariupol], they were already fully occupied. My fiancé went there to hand out some personal hygiene products we had. He saw a horrifying scene. People slept on the blankets in complete darkness,” Ignatieva said. “Children were crying, pets were sick, people were in a state of panic… when volunteers would bring food and water to them, they would just rip it from each other’s hands. It was simply unsafe to be there”

One of the most notorious attacks in the city was the attack on Mariupol’s drama theater. Despite it being a civilian shelter with the Russian word for ‘children’ written outside, the Russians bombed it two weeks, trapping hundreds of people underground. At least 300 people are believed to have been killed in this barbaric attack.

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Eva, a 34-year-old actress who didn’t want to give her last name, was the stage director at the theater until this January. She had left Mariupol in the early days of the war—and believes many of her colleagues are still buried in the theater.

“When I saw that, it was still a part of me, something inside me had died. It sounds so silly, but the theater itself was a sign of the city’s life. It's a terrible feeling when you can do nothing for the place and people you love,” she told The Daily Beast. “I want to know who is there and who stayed alive. When you search pictures for Mariupol it is the first that comes up. It was the place people would always meet and walk around, the hub of the city. It was the symbol of Mariupol. It felt to me like if there is no more theater, there is no more Mariupol. What is happening here shouldn’t be able to happen anywhere in the world.”

On March 15, three weeks into the war, Helga finally saw her own chance to leave, through one of Ukraine’s dangerous humanitarian corridors.

“Our neighbor ran into our flat and said that the Russians are in the courtyard and that they would be crashing into buses now,” said Helga, explaining that several buses had been piled up as a front line to protect her neighborhood so that the Russian tanks wouldn’t be able to go through. “We lived in a multi-story residential building on the second floor. Our windows had already been blown out and now we thought they’d blow the walls up as well. We quickly grabbed the bags that had been packed ready and just ran outside.”

When Helga made it outside with her neighbor, fiancé, and brother, they were confronted with “lots of Russian tanks, Russian troops, and Russian cars,” she said. “Somehow, we managed to persuade the military men to allow us to get our car—bruised, naturally.” Eventually, they made it out through the Zaporizhzhia highway.

The journey to Dnipro was not easy.

“There were probably around 12 Russian checkpoints. It was the 21st day of the blockade of Mariupol. They made the boys undress three times. They would check their backs, they were very exacting,” Helga told The Daily Beast. “They told one of our guys the scratch on his back was from body armor. They almost took him captive. My fiancé had a ketchup stain on his pants, they said it was blood and he definitely had been somewhere in a field killing Russians. This was even though we had been shelled for three weeks and blood wouldn’t have been a surprise. But we got out of Mariupol in the end.”

The dark irony is that these eastern Russian-speaking regions, like Mariupol, are the ones that Moscow claimed they were “liberating” from Ukrainian “Nazis” as a casus belli for the war. Even in 2014, there were genuine pro-Russian sentiment civil clashes between supporters of Moscow and Kyiv in the city. There is none of that now, says Helga, when asked about how she feels towards Russia.

“All that Russia has brought to my life and my city is death. I don’t have a home anymore, the same as 500,000 Mariupol citizens, I don’t have my city, some people don’t have relatives, friends, memories,” she said. “We will never come back there. We’re on our own now and our life starts anew… There is no city of Mariupol anymore.”

Lelia Katalnikova contributed additional reporting to this story.