Ukrainian marines defending the besieged city of Mariupol from Russian forces have issued a desperate video appeal, saying they have run out of supplies and feel “forgotten” as they prepare to fight to the end.
“We have not given up our positions. We have held every bit of this city as much as we could. But the reality is that the city is blockaded and surrounded—and no supply of ammunition or food has come. We have held out until the end,” one of the men in the 36th Marine Brigade says in the video shared on Facebook.
“We are grateful to every Ukrainian who believed and continues to believe in the marines. We’ve held on for so long with this faith. We have not abandoned our positions. We have remained loyal and will remain loyal always,” he said.
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While vowing to continue the fight, he painted a dire picture of the situation on the ground, saying the marines are trapped at an industrial plant in the city.
“For over a month, the marines fought without replenishment of ammunition, without food, without water, drinking from a puddle and dying in batches,” he said.
“No one wants to talk to us anymore, we are forgotten,” he said.
The devastating video comes amid reports that a British volunteer fighting with the Ukrainian marines had surrendered to Russian forces. Aiden Aslin, 28, had been fighting alongside Ukrainian troops since 2018, but reportedly told his family back home they had “no weapons left” after fending off a full Russian takeover for weeks.
Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boichenko, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that more than 10,000 civilians have died in the city since Russian forces moved in.
Dead bodies are literally “carpeted through the streets,” he said, adding that the real death toll may very well exceed 20,000.
He said Russian forces appear to be trying to conceal the civilian deaths, taking some of them to a shopping center that has storage and refrigerators, and incinerating others.
“Mobile crematoriums have arrived in the form of trucks: You open it, and there is a pipe inside and these bodies are burned,” he said.
