Alina is one of the lucky ones. She’s not dead from starvation or a Russian bullet or missile in Mariupol.
The world is witnessing the horror of Russian war crimes in Ukraine — as revealed in Bucha after Russian troops withdrew from the town near Kyiv. Yet the torture, executions, and casual killing of civilians in Bucha is only a fraction of the ongoing horrors in other besieged towns and cities such as Mariupol. There, in Alina’s home city, more than 100,000 desperate civilians are being prevented from leaving by Russian shelling.
Alina’s story reveals how tens of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians are confronting an occupation unlike anything Europeans have experienced since the Nazi invasions of World War II.
I met Alina Beskrovna on my February trip to Mariupol, when she worked alongside me as a translator and appointment fixer. An IT specialist with an MBA from Lehigh University, she spent a high school exchange year in Williamsport, Pa.
Alina had never imagined what lay ahead for Mariupol.
Just three weeks after we said effusive goodbyes at the Mariupol train station on Feb. 5, her city lay in ruins and she was hiding in a basement.
So I was thrilled to learn last week that she finally made it out of that besieged city on March 23. She traveled first to Poland, then to Denmark, where friends can host her while she seeks a visa to the United States or Canada.
Even though everyone expected fighting farther east in the Donbas region, “we didn’t think it would happen to us,” she told me last week via WhatsApp. Yet what she endured, for almost four weeks in a freezing basement in a once beautiful port city the size of Miami, is what tens of thousands of Ukrainians are enduring daily from Russian sieges.
Soon after the war started, Alina and her mother, along with their three cats, moved from their nine-story apartment building (which had no air-raid shelter) to the basement of a four-story apartment building where a friend lived.
There they joined 31 others, including children, many of them from families of retired Soviet military officers who served before the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Everyone thought there would be a little fighting, but they never expected the total annihilation of the city,” she recalled. “It turned the most pro-Russian people into vicious Russia haters.”
The cellar dwellers all brought food supplies from their homes, especially nonperishables like pasta, buckwheat, canned food — and bottled water. They set up makeshift beds across the cellar, with boards on bricks, or simply cushions.
But a few days in, when temperatures were near freezing, the electricity, water, and gas went out, along with the internet. The group had to learn to live in total darkness day and night after the small basement windows had been blocked with foam to protect against flying glass.
“The lack of light totally changes the atmosphere,” Alina told me. “We used flashlights while the batteries lasted, and whoever had cars could charge their phones [as flashlights] so long as gasoline supplies lasted.” Going outside was always a risk, but when there was no shelling, children would open the cellar door for light and use colored chalk to draw on the cellar walls.
Finding water soon became a serious problem. “It was a couple of miles to some wells,” Alina recalled, and some men risked their lives dragging a shopping cart carrying a 20-liter bucket to bring back well water polluted with sand. (One of the intrepid water carriers was badly injured by a rocket.)
To be safe, drinking water had to be boiled on an outdoor stove that some cellar dwellers assembled in the building’s yard from bricks and a sheet of metal. “It tasted disgusting,” Alina said, and when there was a light snowfall, people ran outside to gather snow for drinking. “There were no showers, no water for bathing or teeth or hair.”
