(essay)

As I saw the first shots of the destroyed Mariupol, I thought that it seemed to me that there could not be such a huge scale of destruction. But no, it’s possible. In fact, the media does not write much about what really happened and is happening in this long-suffering city, so I decided to conduct my own small investigation.

At first, I decided to search for videos on YouTube that were definitely uploaded by someone. And yes, I found many channels where locals who have taken root with Russians continue to live in the city. They drive a car and film all the destruction on camera. It’s very painful to see. They do not remove equipment and military personnel for two reasons: first, their channel can be seen and arrested for the footage, and secondly, it becomes clear from their words that they really believe that Ukraine is to blame for everything.

I didn’t just watch these videos, but also opened Google Maps and, thanks to the street view mode, compared how it was before and after. It was scary to look at. Only then did I realize how developed and promising Mariupol really was. Every house had shell holes. And the worst part is that they were made with tanks. The Russians deliberately drove around the city and shot everything as if in a shooting gallery. Some buildings were demolished to zero, and some were divided into two separate ones. The oldest videos were shot in early summer and the Russians have already managed to remove the destroyed equipment and corpses from the streets.

Then I went to the Telegram chat of Mariupol, where in the first days people wrote to each other that they knew about the fate of a particular house and it was unbearably painful to read. All the people tried to find out whether it was safe to go there, whether a shell hit a particular house. Some accounts have been deleted. This means that their owners have not logged in to Telegram for a long time, and therefore, according to the settings, their account is deleted. We can assume that these people are no longer alive.. There were even cases when some of them put themselves on avatars Z, and they themselves, judging by their Instagram pages, moved to live in Russia.

I was so imbued with this pain that I must have been for a while at the moment when this hopelessness reigned throughout the city. It’s not fear, it’s the realization that your life is already over, and death is just a formality.