Mariupol Shliach: ‘People are Lying Dead on the Street and There is Nowhere to Take Them’
Rabbi Mendy Cohen, the Chabad emissary to Mariupol who is currently on the border between Moldova and Rumania, described on Israeli radio the horrendous situation in the city due to the Russian attacks on it. Rabbi Cohen said that there has been a siege for two weeks and there is currently no electricity or way to charge phones • Full Story
VINNews.com
Rabbi Mendy Cohen, the Chabad emissary to Mariupol who is currently on the border between Moldova and Rumania, described on Israeli radio the horrendous situation in the city due to the Russian attacks on it. Rabbi Cohen said that there has been a siege for two weeks and there is currently no electricity or way to charge phones. People speak on phones for a few minutes and tell relatives and friends about the situation:
“We are deep into the humanitarian crisis, it has reached the stage when people are going in the streets to gather snow and melt it in order to wash their hands, brush teeth or drink something,” he says. “There is nothing to eat. The shops are empty, the pharmacies are empty.”
Cohen sharply criticized the Russians, stating that “they are conducting psychological warfare in the cruelest possible way. They claim that there is a humanitarian corridor and at the crucial time they are shooting. Whoever wants to leave is taking a chance. On Shabbos we wanted to evacuate people under fire. We waited for the green light and then we got an update that 20 of the buses in the parking lot had been destroyed.
“I know from firsthand sources that there are people lying dead in the street and nobody is picking them up because they can’t be taken away.”
Ashdod resident Tatiana Goldin saw her mother on television standing in a street in Mariopol crying for help. Tatiana said that “I want to remind the world, we had one Babi Yar, this is going to be a double Babi Yar. Please enable a humanitarian corridor for people. We’re not asking for more than that.”
An estimated 1300 soldiers and civilians have been killed in Mariupol since the beginning of the war but Mariupol’s deputy mayor Sergei Orlov told CNN that: “Really, we can’t calculate how many deaths we have — I mean three to four times more. We are not even able to count how many people on the streets have been killed by bombing and artillery,” Mariupol’s deputy mayor. We do not know how many, because we cannot collect all the bodies and we cannot count.”
To deal with the sheer number of bodies, city workers dug a deep trench over 75 feet (22 meters) long inside a graveyard and laid to rest the bodies of soldiers and civilians who had been killed during repeated attacks by Russian forces.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitchko said in an interview with Yisrael Hayom newspaper that “we hear ten to twenty sirens a day and we have residents who have spent two weeks in shelters. A large proportion of our population never dreamed they would be carrying weapons: Doctors, musicians, actors. They changed their clothes to uniforms and are preparing to defend the city and the country.”
Klitchko realizes he may be living on borrowed time but maintains optimism: “This is a challenging task but we are not surrendering. The Russians want to steal our future and turn us into slaves. Ukraine was always a country of peace and now we must defend ourselves. The reason for the war is very simple. We had the idea to be part of the European family and build a modern, democratic country but Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Russian empire.
Despite three rounds of negotiations with Russia, Klitchko claims that the ceasefire attempts and humanitarian corridors are “Russian propaganda”, adding that “we’ve tried for 3-4 days to make humanitarian corridors. People have no food or water. The Russians promise a pass but don’t do anything.”
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