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Back to middle ages
Inside Mariupol ruins where bodies are left in bins, residents are forced to drink sewage & bones litter the streets
ONCE a seaside destination, a celebrated place of culture and a beacon of healthcare, the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has now been thrown back into the Middle Ages.
As you walk through the devastated city, bodies and pieces of bodies are still strewn on the ground, amongst the debris and putrid stagnant water pools.
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Queues of Mariupol residents wait in the scorching sun to collect water in plastic buckets, bulldozers try to clear devastated buildings, while the injured and the ill make their way to the hospital, where there is no help to be received.
Some residents are forced to drink sewage as there is little to no clean water, and bodies are now often left to rot in piles of rubbish rather than being buried in graves.
And there is a chronic lack of medicines, with doctors being left with no choice but to amputate limbs to stop disease.
It is estimated at least 90 per cent of the buildings in the city have either been destroyed or damaged - and at least 300,000 civilians have fled or been killed.
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And this is all on the orders of despot Vladimir Putin and his ruthless army as Russia continues to brutalise Ukraine.
Now, the survivors and the sick are under the control of the Russian-backed separatist group, the Donetsk People's Republic.
Survival is an everyday fight for the people of Mariupol.
“People you have known for many years, you can’t recognise them anymore," Mariupol’s health director, Andriy Rempel, told The Sun Online.
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"With so many bodies still lying in the streets, and the threat of cholera, these people can’t cope anymore.”
As so many residents die on a weekly basis, in addition to those who were killed during the shelling and street fighting, the city remains littered with bodies and pieces of human remains.
And every time bulldozers or workmen move to clear damaged buildings to clean up the city, more human remains turn up.
Rempel said: “There are a lot of people who still aren't buried."
He added the main reason Russians are now destroying damaged houses and buildings is because of the large number of bodies inside those buildings - so is easier to just level them than clear them.
“Those bodies are very old and most were eviscerated during the fighting, so it is easier for the authorities to destroy whole buildings rather than dig out and bury them.”
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko estimates there are between 50 and 100 bodies under every ruined house in the city - with some 1,300 buildings already destroyed.
And uncollected human remains continue to poison the city's dwindling water supplies.
Our dead men are left in the rubbish, not in graves.
Petro Andriushchenko
All pumping stations were destroyed and residents are forced to draw water from anywhere - even sewage wells, Petro Andriushchenko, advisor to Mariupol's mayor, told The Sun Online.
And meanwhile, residents continue to discover mass graves - with the largest being discovered just days ago.
"Between June and July, we found one that was three times bigger than any mass grave we found before," Andriushchenko explained, pointing to the site of Livoberezhnyi, where at least 100 civilian casualties were placed in unmarked graves near a churchyard.
"It’s an even worse situation with the dead civilians under destroyed buildings: when the Russians go ahead and destroy damaged buildings, they end up putting bodies in the rubbish.
"Our dead men are left in the rubbish, not in graves."
Rempel explained one of the main problems in the ruined city is the lack of antibiotics - with the sick and wounded now facing being untreated.
It is now often the only option to amputate limbs as they do not have the medicines to save them.
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“If you have some kind of non-serious trauma or wound, you cannot fix it because there are no drugs. Mariupol doctors can’t fix broken bones," said Rempel.
“Sadly, the new logic is: It’s easier to cut your leg or your arm than fix it with drugs because there are none.
"We have no choice but to amputate, or leave people to die.”
Andriushchenko confirmed that every day at least two people have limbs amputated when speaking to The Sun Online.
And lack of medicine extends beyond antibiotics, and poorly civilians go undiagnosed and untreated.
“There are lots of specific illnesses in the city – without any doctor or clinic to diagnose or treat these illnesses. These include diabetes, cancer,” Andriushchenko told The Sun.
“So, we are seeing that the mortality rate of civilian people is four times that of before the war.”
To make matters worse, Andriushchenko claims that Russia has been “stealing” medical equipment from Mariupol medical clinics and hospital – including surgery tools and Covid-19 ventilators.
The pirates have transported the equipment back to Donetsk - the capital of the pro-Russian enclave - and across the border to Russia.
“They said it is help from the Russian Federation but this equipment has turned up in Donetsk and you can see ‘Mariupol Hospital’ on it,” Andriushchenko said.
Rempel explained from 2015 to 2021 there had been £43million investment in Mariupol's hospitals - something which is now being stripped by the Russians.
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“During the same time, there was no new equipment in Donetsk [already under Russian occupation], and that’s why they stole any equipment from Mariupol that was not damaged by the shelling, for Donetsk.”
Meanwhile, the healthcare expert said that the four medical points in the city (run for 150,000 people) were “given” 30 Russian medical professionals “and Russian equipment but it is very old”.
“It is from the past century. Our doctors said, and that is very awful, they can’t understand how to work with this equipment because of how obsolete it is.”
While Mariupol has historically recorded cases of cholera due to its proximity to the Azov Sea, non-functional canalisations, rotting rubbish and flowing sewage are also only amplifying the threat of a deadly cholera outbreak.
“There is always a heightened risk in July, during the hot months. Ten years ago, we had a cholera epidemic inside the city but it was localised, and with our medical system, the City Council took preventative measures so this was not a problem,” Andriushchenko explained.
“But now we have some evidence of cholera but in Mariupol, our medical system has collapsed so we can’t have any diagnostic inside the city.”
The counsellor believes that, even if diagnoses were made, it is not in the Russian occupiers’ interest to publicise an epidemic, no matter the impact on the civilian population.
“Now the risk of cholera is higher than before because it’s a dead man's poison.”
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Rempel, meanwhile, is more pessimistic, saying that he has heard of many cases of residents having “stomach infections” - due to contaminated water.
“Today, we are absolutely sure that there is a cholera epidemic in the city. The people who died from cholera are not in any statistics or official documents, because there is no laboratory inside the city.
“When they die, the reason for their death is not known. Just look at our death rate – four times that of before February.
“That’s why so many are buried without an autopsy or coroner examination. We can't trust Russian information.”
Andriushchenko and Mayor Boichenko both had to flee their beloved city when the Russian soldiers walked on to their town on February 27 – like the majority of Mariupol’s professionals working for the local, regional or national authorities. It had become too dangerous.
Rempel also left Mariupol on February 27. 24 hours later, the city was surrounded. For two weeks after the Russian invasion, Rempel and colleagues tried to get two trucks full of medicine back in Mariupol but Russian checkpoints made it impossible.
Unable to provide direct healthcare support to the city residents, Rempel – who fled to another Ukrainian city – continues to advocate for an end to the Russian occupation.
“People need to know we are going back to the Medieval times.
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"When they finally leave, we will need to rebuild what we had."
He added: “We will need to focus on our healthcare system, on our 80,000 children left in the city – who are today not treated for child infections and not receiving their vaccines -, and on the psychological impact this horror has had on our residents.”
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