Beneath the Rubble

Introduction

In the charred remains of Mariupol, a vibrant city once stood.

Before Russian forces attacked, about 540,000 people called the bustling city in southeastern Ukraine home. It was a place as rich in culture as it was in industry, strategically placed on the Sea of Azov.

When the weather was warm, city residents crowded onto Mariupol’s beaches, wading into the shallow waters to a chorus of seagulls. They strolled through the city’s main garden, enjoying its tulips and playgrounds with a view of the sea. “Let’s meet at the water tower,” friends would say to each other, gathering at the century-old red and white brick tower in the city center.

There were popular festivals celebrating the arts – like Gogolfest, in honor of the nineteenth century novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol. Ukrainians from all over came to see plays at the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater, in the heart of the city, and attend performances at Mariupol’s Chamber Philharmonic next door.

Home to two of Ukraine’s largest iron and steel factories, Mariupol invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its roads, public transportation, and parks.¹ The sea was both a part of the city’s identity and part of its promise: one of the largest ports in the region allowed Ukraine to export coal, steel, and grain around the world.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For nearly three months, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation along with affiliated armed groups from the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine engaged in a fierce battle against the Armed Forces of Ukraine to take Mariupol. Russia saw Mariupol as a strategic prize. Dominating areas to the west of the city would allow the Kremlin to control a land corridor between the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region.

By March 2, Russian forces were besieging the city. As Russian and affiliated forces gained ground, attacking with tanks, mortars, heavy artillery and aircraft, families left their homes and followed stairs deep into basements, down into darkness.

In early March, an estimated 450,000 civilians remained stranded in Mariupol, unable or unwilling to leave their homes, loved ones and the lives they had built. The fighting had seriously impaired critical infrastructure, including electricity, running water, heating systems, and telecommunications, bringing the city to its knees.

By April 13, occupying forces had seized control of most of the city, declaring victory on April 21.² On May 17, Ukrainian forces holding out at the Azovstal steel plant began surrendering. The fate of Mariupol rested in Russian hands and remains so.

War transformed the city into something unrecognizable: a tangled mess of crumpled buildings and a place of shallow graves. Thousands of civilians were killed during the fighting or died from other causes. Mariupol has suffered some of the worst destruction in war-scarred Ukraine.

When war came to Mariupol, the identities of those buildings, and the communities they fostered, were stripped away. They became something else: first places of refuge, then, scenes of injury and death.

Two years have passed since Russian forces besieged Mariupol. Much global attention, drawn to other hotspots in the grinding war or to other major conflicts, has moved on. But life has not returned to normal for the city’s residents; the Mariupol they knew is largely gone.

As Russian occupying forces clear away the rubble, building a new city in Russia’s image between mass graves and the Sea of Azov, questions of accountability abound.

Some seek closure and healing. Many are waiting anxiously for the city to be restored to Ukrainian control, for reparations to be paid, and for those responsible for abuses to face justice.

This project aspires to support the push for accountability, through documentation. It also tries to capture some of what was lost so that it is not forgotten.

Survivors emerged from the smoldering basement in a state of shock. With electricity cut and phone lines down, people turned to strangers on the internet in a desperate plea to find their loved ones.

“Are they alive?” read one March 2022 message, asking about Arina and her family. The message was in a neighborhood Telegram group, alongside a series of photographs: Arina smiling in a blue holiday dress, a blue bow in her hair. Her parents embracing in front of a Christmas tree. Ivan’s mother, Svetlana, posing for a photograph.

The Telegram exchange was one of thousands in a flurry of messages from people desperate to find family and friends as news emerged of attack after attack on residential buildings and shelters across the city. Many would be looking for months. Some are still looking.

Nobody seemed to know where the Antipenko family was.

On April 24, 2022, Orthodox Easter Day, a group of men tasked by the Russian occupation administration to remove rubble and bodies from buildings found the body of a child at Mytropolytska Street 98.¹⁴ Pavlo, one of the volunteer workers, had chosen not to work at the site that day. He knew they were going to find the child; survivors had told him that Arina and her family never emerged from the rubble.

The child’s remains, one of 17 bodies and body parts found by Pavlo and his team over several weeks in April, was the smallest they had found. She looked between 3 and 5-years-old, he was told, and was found next to bodies that matched the description of the Antipenko family by people who saw them before the attack: a man in dark clothes, a woman in jeans, an older woman in a pink robe. But was it Arina?

In May, two months after the attack, Dmytro Lastenko, who was in the basement during the attack, returned to the ruins of the building in search of his identity documents. Using a shovel, he dug into the rubble. The smell of death lingered. And with it, lumps of hair, blankets, and a cell phone, its screen cracked. He recognized the phone. It belonged to Arina’s mother, Khrystyna. He brought it to Khrystyna’s mother, Stefaniia, who lived in a different town.

On it were three undelivered messages from March 6, 2022: “Mommy,” it read. “I’m alive. Everything is fine with me. Love you.”

Following the attack, Stefaniia repeatedly tried to enter Mariupol to find her family, but Russian forces denied her entry, she said. Finally, on April 15, she successfully entered the city and began her months-long search.

She walked up and down streets in her daughter’s neighborhood, showing photographs of her missing relatives.

“I went to different basements and shouted the names of my children,” she said. “People were still huddling in basements. It was dark, and I couldn’t see faces, so I shouted.”

Stefaniia returned to the ruins of Mytropolytska Street 98, where blankets and clothing lay strewn under rocks and jagged wire. She recognized some of the items: Ivan and Khrystyna’s marriage document, Khrystyna’s hat, Arina’s birth certificate.

She visited the city’s central makeshift morgue again and again, for months. There, desperate to find her family, she meticulously combed through decomposing piles of the bodies of men, women, and children. Some bodies were wrapped in large black bags, arranged in the yard of the morgue. Others, dug up from the ground, were strewn on blankets. There were other piles, too: mounds of clothing and footwear taken from victims, and wooden coffins ready for the dead.

Stefaniia returned every other day, like clockwork: unclaimed bodies were buried after two or three days. She didn’t want to miss finding her family’s bodies if they arrived at the morgue.

“On one day we would come, the next day we would try to recover after [seeing] the horror,” she said. “Then, again, I would come [back again].”

Finally, in late September, Stefaniia found a photograph of Arina’s body in a computer database of the city’s dead managed by occupation authorities. “She had an earring in the shape of a crown,” she said. “I recognized her by her teeth, by her clothes. I know these clothes.”

Arina was assigned a number in the database: 1734. So Stefaniia went looking in Mariupol’s biggest cemetery, Starokrymske, where she found a grave marked with the number 1734. But next to the grave’s cross was the picture of another little girl. It wasn’t Arina; it was a girl named Eva, who Stefaniia was told had been shot in a car. Eva’s family had mistaken Arina’s body for their own little girl.

That night, Stefaniia dreamed that she heard Arina whimpering from inside the mislabeled grave.

It wasn’t until October 5 that she was finally able to find her granddaughter’s body, which had been dug up from Starokrymske cemetery by Eva’s relatives a week earlier and reburied in Novotroitske cemetery, about 2.5 kilometers northeast of the city’s Left Bank district. With the permission of occupying authorities, she exhumed Arina, who was buried in a black body bag inside of a small coffin, and reburied her in her hometown elsewhere in Ukraine.

She has not found the bodies of Arina’s parents, Khrystyna and Ivan, or Ivan’s mother Svetlana. She will never stop looking, she says.

For now, they remain “missing,” their remains lost among the remains of thousands of other people. On July 19, 2022, Stefaniia provided her own DNA sample to occupation authorities. They told her to wait for DNA test results from bodies that would be compared to DNA samples of surviving relatives, and that the process could take over a year. At the time of writing, she was still waiting.

“I was a mother and a grandmother, and now I’m nobody,” she says. “My [family was] my wealth, my life was joy and happiness, and now there is nothing. I only ask God to find the bodies of my children to bury, to be next to me.”

The hospital was one of 19 in Mariupol damaged during the fighting. By the end of March 2022, all of the city’s hospitals had “effectively ceased to function,” the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said.¹⁹

Following the attack, patients and medical staff poured out of the facility. Several Ukrainian national police personnel and volunteers trudged through the mud carrying Iryna Kalinina, a wounded pregnant woman on a stretcher who gripped her abdomen in distress, blood soaking her pants. She died later that day, along with her baby, who was reportedly delivered via caesarean section following the attack but showed no signs of life.²⁰ On March 10, Ukrainian officials said the attack killed at least two adults and a child, and injured 17 patients and medical staff.

Medical staff transferred patients to other medical facilities, some of which were also struck during attacks. Some survivors went into the hospital’s underground bunker. At least 57 people sought shelter there, one witness said, including 30 children of medical staff and injured children who were being treated at the hospital at the time of the attack. Some young children arrived alone, without their parents.

“It was dark and cold, and our collective breath created a lot of moisture,” said Diana who sheltered there and tended to wounded civilians. “Everything was soggy. At night, I was covered in several blankets, and they were all disgustingly moist and cold.” ²¹

Doctors performed rudimentary surgery, bandaging wounds, administering injections, removing shrapnel, and amputating one man’s hand with a bayonet knife.²² They deposited trash and other waste, including human waste, outside the bunker on a ramp. It was there, too, where they placed the remains of those who died, according to Diana, including the body of a girl who died in the shelter.

Meanwhile, throughout March, attacks continued to hit the medical complex. As blast waves rocked the heavy doors of the bunker, those sheltering inside came up with activities to distract the children.²³

“To help their mood, we gave them simple tasks like sorting pills, which they did with great eagerness and meticulousness,” said Rustam, whose wife worked in the hospital.

With no way to bring food into the city and few shops sporadically open, people across Mariupol survived on food from their apartments or shared by people in shelters who risked their lives scavenging for it in nearby buildings. Food was scarce: two oranges divided among 20 people; boiled potatoes and a can of meat stew was dinner for dozens.²⁴ Volunteers who left the hospital complex bunker in search of food and water, or to restart the generators, sought cover from aircraft and drones overhead. ²⁵

Across the city, thousands of people endured similar conditions, doing what they could to survive.

“Without [the volunteers’] help, we would have likely starved to death,” said Diana.²⁶ Children cried from hunger, she said, their bellies mostly empty.

Without running water, people tapped fire hydrants, collected rainwater in buckets, melted snow, and dodged shelling to fetch water from springs and wells. Venturing outside to get water was risky; some people never returned.

Those sheltering in the hospital’s bunker were comparatively lucky. There was an old water reservoir inside, though nobody knew how old the water was, and a well close by in a park. But it didn’t come without risk.

“The way to the well was covered with corpses,” Diana said. “Those people who were brave enough to go there were likely to become our patients with pieces of [their bodies] torn off.”²⁷

Stanislav didn’t want to leave the bodies where they had fallen. He and a friend dragged the children across the street, to the playground, which had a sandbox pit and a cover, and left them there. It was a crude makeshift grave, the best they could provide. It wasn’t safe to be outside.

Just weeks before, children had flocked here to play. Now, it was an unmarked grave holding children’s maimed bodies.

Faced with an onslaught of fighting, many people were unable to bury loved ones or other victims. For some, a makeshift grave was a shallow pit dug next to a residential building with a cross fashioned out of wood, or a children’s football field. For others, it was a trench for 200 bodies dug in haste as the war’s front line crept closer.³⁵

A man ran out of the building saying it had been hit. There were people who needed help.

Rostyslav ran inside with two other men, to an apartment now in ruins on the third floor. There he found Denis and Asya, a couple in their thirties with whom he had been sheltering in the basement. Denis and Asya had gone up to their apartment just before the attack to collect some belongings, leaving their two children, whom Rostyslav estimated to be 6 and 14, with their grandparents in the shelter below.

When Rostyslav entered the destroyed apartment, he found Denis and Asya in their bathroom under a collapsed wall.

Asya “died in my arms,” said Rostyslav. Denis was buried deeper under the rubble. “He was screaming from the pain, and he was in shock.” Rostyslav dug him out. A nurse administered intravenous (IV) fluids, hoping to save Denis, but he died an hour later.

Rostyslav placed their bodies together on the sofa, in the destroyed remains of the apartment. It was too dangerous to bury them; the shelling was constant.

“We realized we had to escape as soon as possible,” he said. Rostyslav and the other men wept for the people they could not save.

The next day, Rostyslav left Mariupol, risking the 30-kilometer walk, away from the bombs and the destruction, and far from his city.

He was one of the fortunate ones: during the first half of March 2022, it was nearly impossible for civilians to leave the besieged city, with evacuation attempts repeatedly called off at the last minute, in the face of Russian obstruction. Ukrainian authorities also accused Russian forces of blocking humanitarian aid from reaching the city.

Despite continued fighting, a reported ceasefire agreement on March 14 allowed tens of thousands of people to escape Mariupol in cars for Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia in the second half of March and April. Some, like Rostyslav, fled on foot.

Those fortunate enough to have working vehicles met at places like Myru Avenue 42 to join hundreds of cars that wove through the countryside as they tried to make it to relative safety. The journey of less than 300 kilometers often took two or three days as they passed dozens of checkpoints manned by Russian and Russia-aligned officials who often searched, interrogated, and occasionally detained those fleeing. It was especially difficult for older people, caregivers, people with disabilities, and those with serious injuries to make the journey. It was only on April 30 that the first official evacuations of civilians from Mariupol to Ukrainian-held territory took place, with further evacuations the following week involving the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Many left behind loved ones. Bodies were rolled in carpets, left on benches, lying near walls, piled up behind garages. Spring brought new horrors, as bodies began to decompose and the smell overpowered parts of the city.

“Seeing dead bodies became the new normal in Mariupol,” said Olena, who survived multiple attacks on her building before making it into an evacuation convoy.

“As we drove out of the city, we saw it was all burned and black,” said Olena of the apocalyptic scene out the bus window on the drive out of Mariupol in late March. “We cried. Our city was gone.”³⁹

Remains were being pulled from the rubble as late as February 2023, said Oleg Morgun, Mariupol’s mayor installed by Russian occupation forces.⁴⁰ Thousands of people died during the assault on and siege of Mariupol and in the months that followed, including those killed during attacks and many who died because they did not have access to clean water or adequate health care.

Based on our analysis of five mass burial sites in and around Mariupol, at least 10,284 people -an unknown number of soldiers among them-were buried in these graves between March 2022 and February 2023. This is the minimum number of people buried during this period and is most likely a significant underestimate of the total number of people who died during this period, given that the remains of some victims may have disappeared in the rubble of destroyed buildings, some graves may contain multiple bodies, and some of the injured or sick may have died or been buried outside of the city. It will probably take many more years to get a full accounting of all those from Mariupol who were killed or died during this period.

Human Rights Watch, SITU Research and Truth Hounds identified four cemeteries in the city that saw a significant increase in the number of graves and where thousands were buried in individual and trench-like graves: Starokrymske, Novotroitske, Vynohradne and Pavlov Street cemetery. We also identified hundreds of burials in a cemetery just outside of the city, in the town of Manhush.

The cemeteries hold thousands of bodies, many still unidentified.

Stefaniia, who has only found one of her loved ones – little Arina – out of four relatives killed in Mytropolytska Street 98, assumes the rest of her family is buried in one of these cemeteries.

“I feel their presence,” she says. “I have to find them.”

Across the city, occupying forces marked 459 buildings for demolition, 148 of which are in central Mariupol, according to a May 2023 list published on the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (“DNR”) website.⁴³

Our analysis shows that at least 66 high-rise apartment buildings damaged during the siege had been demolished in central Mariupol as of February 9, 2023.

In June 2023, two Russian companies, MCT and Geostroy, began tearing down Mytropolytska Street 98, where Arina and her family died in the basement.⁴⁴

On Telegram, former Mytropolytska Street residents reacted to the news alongside a photo and drive-by footage showing a low rubble pile where Mytropolytska Street 98 once stood. “Теперь только воспоминания,” wrote one individual: “Now, only memories.”

Human Rights Watch reviewed satellite imagery of the site. As of late June 2023, nothing remained.

Occupying forces — and workers who are sometimes hired to do the difficult work – have cleared millions of tons of rubble from Mariupol, transporting it to dump sites around the city. That debris, once people’s homes and belongings, will be used by Russian authorities to rebuild the occupied city.

“At the landfill, it is planned to process 1.5 million tons of construction waste annually, which were formed as a result of repair and restoration work, including the dismantling of buildings and structures,” said Natalia Mnatsakanyan, a news anchor for the Russia-occupation controlled Mariupol 24, in a report posted to their Telegram account in February.⁴⁵ The material “obtained from recycling will be used in construction,” she added.

In August 2022, Russia’s Construction Ministry announced plans to “restore” Mariupol within three years.⁴⁶ The plan, promoted by Denis Pushilin, the head of the “DNR,” appears to have been commissioned by the Russian Construction Ministry and prepared by a Russian federal organization called the Unified Institute of Spatial Planning.⁴⁷

According to the plan, Russian authorities expect some 350,000 people – up from the current estimate of about 150,000 – to live in Mariupol by 2025, 450,000 by 2030, and 500,000 by 2035.

Hundreds of thousands of Mariupol residents now live outside their city, some displaced to other parts of Ukraine, some abroad as refugees.

Meanwhile, unknown numbers of Mariupol’s original inhabitants remain missing, some of them presumed dead, others transferred to Russia, willingly or forcibly.

On February 25, 2023, the Kremlin put on a lavish event at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium, to mark one year since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Onstage, in front of thousands of cheering onlookers, Russian leaders paraded children from Mariupol, recognized by Mariupol survivors who watched the footage from afar, the Guardian reported.

Several weeks later, on March 19, just over a year after Russian forces besieged Mariupol, and two days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin for war crimes involving the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children, the Russian president paid an unexpected visit to Mariupol.

Landing by helicopter at night, he drove down Myru Avenue and toured the surrounding area, visiting key landmarks and inspecting what the Russian occupation forces called “construction and restoration” plans.⁴⁸

He walked through Mariupol’s elegant Philharmonic Hall, just next to the destroyed Drama Theater. Gone was the orchestra’s lead conductor, Vasyl Kriachok, who fled in April 2022, setting up a new orchestra in Kyiv. Also gone were most of the orchestra’s musicians, scattered around the world.