With everyone who manages to escape from Mariupol, the testimonies of the horror in the city, which has been under siege for more than three weeks and cut off from the mobile network, multiply.

"Hundreds of thousands of people are still in hell," Nadezhda Sukhorukova wrote on Sunday in her war diary, which she publishes on Facebook.

She herself managed to leave the city a few days ago.

On February 26, two days after the start of the war, she wrote: "We are strong.

We'll endure it."

Sofia Dreisbach

Editor in Politics.

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Then on Sunday: "Every day it becomes more difficult for them [the people of Mariupol] to survive." The lethargy that overcame her after days and nights in the dark basement, life without electricity, water, heating and mobile phone reception, walking the dog between attacks and curfew.

"In the basement someone screamed in fear"

On March 19, she reported on the last attack she experienced in Mariupol: “The ground sagged, the house shook, someone in the basement cried out in fear.

[.

.

.] When I saw what was left of our garden in the morning, I was numb.

I just stood there and looked.

It wasn't my town.” After visiting a maternity hospital with a friend last Friday, Sukhorukova noted: “And women gave birth.

Without light and water, in the cold delivery room and while the bombs were falling.

When the ward ran out of food, the doctors started giving their supplies to the women in labor.” Bread is nowhere to be bought.

"Nothing could be bought at all.

First the shops were closed, then they were robbed.”

In the Telegram channel "Mariupol now" photos of destroyed houses are lined up, usually including a comment on which street the house is located.

There are many expressions of solidarity and sympathy for Mariupol in the West: Italy wants to rebuild the city theater that was destroyed in a bomb attack last week, under which civilians are said to be still trapped, Greece wants to rebuild a maternity hospital that had previously been attacked.

On Sunday, Russia is said to have shelled an art school where 400 people were sheltering;

the number of victims is not yet known.

The evening after, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke of the siege of Mariupol as "terror that will be remembered for centuries to come".

More than 39,000 people were evacuated from the city in private vehicles last week, the Mariupol City Council wrote on Telegram on Monday.

"Thank you to everyone who helped organize the corridor that saved tens of thousands of residents." But many of the 400,000 residents are still holding out in Mariupol.

Repeated attempts to supply the city with food and relief supplies fail due to constant shelling by Russian troops.

Ihor Shovkwa, Selenskyj's security advisor, spoke on Monday on ZDF of a "genocide".

The city is encircled, every 15 minutes Russian rockets hit.

Ukraine had rejected an ultimatum from Moscow to hand over the besieged city before the deadline on Monday.

"There can be no talk of capitulation and laying down of arms," ​​Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told Ukrainska Pravda.

Russia had spoken of letting those who laid down their arms go unmolested.

On Monday in Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell spoke again of "massive war crimes" that Russia was committing in Mariupol.

The video journalist of the AP news agency, Mstyslav Chernov, played a key role in the fact that the extent of the Russian siege became known.

Along with his colleague, AP photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, was one of the last foreign media journalists to document the humanitarian disaster in Mariupol.

Then they brought Ukrainian soldiers out of town - to prevent Russian soldiers from arresting them and forcing them to make false statements that ruined all their work.

This is how Chernov describes it in a transcript released by the AP on Monday.