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Summary

The story of Russia’s assault on Mariupol is one of horror.

On February 24, 2022, the day Russia began its all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military and Russia-affiliated forces attacked Ukrainian armed forces defending the thriving city in southeastern Ukraine, home to iron and steel plants, a deep-water port, music and art festivals, and an iconic drama theater. Russian forces besieged Mariupol and, for eight weeks, hundreds of thousands of the city’s inhabitants faced devastation and death. Residents cowered in basements, living in fear of airstrikes, incessant shelling, and clashes between the armies. By mid-April, when Russian forces had almost full control of the city, thousands of civilians were dead and thousands of buildings, including high-rise apartments, hospitals, and schools, were damaged or lay in ruins. An estimated 400,000 residents had fled the city by mid-May, but those remaining were left for months without basic services, including electricity, running water, and health care.

This report is based on nearly two years of research conducted by Human Rights Watch and Truth Hounds, a leading Ukrainian human rights organization, as well as 3D reconstructions and visual and spatial analysis by SITU Research. We interviewed 240 people, mostly displaced Mariupol residents, and reviewed and analyzed dozens of satellite images and over 850 photos and videos. The report provides supporting documentation and complements our online feature, “Beneath the Rubble: Documenting Loss in Mariupol, a Ukrainian City Besieged and Devastated.”

The report describes civilians’ lack of access to critical infrastructure and the struggles and risks they faced while sheltering in basements during the Russian assault on the city. It also outlines the repeated, largely unsuccessful attempts by Ukrainian authorities and volunteers, the United Nations (UN), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to organize official evacuations and the delivery of humanitarian aid in the face of Russian intransigence. Our comprehensive building damage assessment found that, by mid-May 2022, 93 percent of the 477 multi-story apartment buildings in the central part of the city had been damaged. All 19 hospital campuses city-wide were damaged, and 86 of the 89 educational facilities that we identified across the city were also damaged.

We documented in detail 14 case studies covering 18 locations, many of which involved apparently unlawful Russian attacks, including attacks on two hospitals, the city’s famous drama theater, a food storage facility, an aid distribution site, a supermarket, and residential buildings serving as shelters. In each of these incidents, we found no evidence of a Ukrainian military presence in or near the building that was struck, which would have made the attack unlawfully indiscriminate. Or we found a limited military presence, which likely made the attack unlawfully disproportionate.

Our research found that thousands of civilians died during Russia’s siege and in the months that followed. Yet the full extent of those who died or were injured during the battle, or who remain missing, may never be known. Our assessment of satellite imagery and analysis of photos and videos of the city’s cemeteries that saw a significant increase in the number of graves shows that more than 10,000 people were buried in Mariupol between March 2022 and February 2023, of whom we estimate at least 8,000 likely died from war-related causes, whether direct attacks or from lack of health care or clean water.

These figures are based on an analysis of the graves in four of the city’s cemeteries and in Manhush town cemetery nearby and is likely a significant underestimation of the total number of dead. Many graves likely contained multiple bodies. The remains of others were likely buried in the rubble and taken away during demolition efforts. Some of those buried in makeshift graves may never have been transferred to the bigger cemeteries, and others either died or were buried outside of Mariupol. We were also not able to determine whether those buried in the city were civilians or military personnel, or how many died as a result of unlawful attacks.

Behind each of the gravesites is a lifetime cut short, a story and, in many cases, a family that was never able to properly mourn or bury their loved one. Relatives of the missing posted information and inquiries on various online platforms; many are still waiting to learn of their fate. Thousands of others were injured during the siege, including those whose wounds were permanent.

Nearly two years since Russian forces captured and occupied Mariupol, the physical landscape of the city has changed profoundly. Damaged multi-story buildings have been demolished, together with countless irreplaceable personal items. Occupying forces have begun the process of building new high-rise apartments, part of Russia’s plans to complete the reconstruction of the city by 2025, and the further development of the city by 2035, if Russia still occupies it. Efforts to clear debris and bring down unsafe structures are consistent with an occupying forces’ obligations to ensure security for the population. However, by not creating the conditions to allow independent human rights investigators, forensic experts, and judicial officials to examine the damaged buildings before demolition, Russia effectively erased the physical evidence at hundreds of potential crime scenes across the city. This makes the digital damage assessment, 3D modeling, and other documentation in this project and others all the more necessary.

To identify the Russian commanders and military units that may have been responsible for laws-of-war violations in Mariupol that could amount to war crimes, we conducted an extensive review and analysis of Russian social media posts, obituaries of Russian personnel, Russian government and military statements, and photos and videos posted by or showing specific units present in Mariupol. We identified a total of 17 units of Russian and Russia-affiliated forces that were operating in the city in March and April 2022. We also concluded that the following 10 individuals may be responsible for war crimes in Mariupol as a matter of command responsibility:

• Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation and commander-in-chief of the military

• Sergei Shoigu, defense minister and military second-in-command

• Valery Gerasimov, first deputy defense minister and chief of the general staff of the armed forces

• Sergei Rudskoy, first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces

• Alexander Dvornikov, then-commander of the Southern Military District

• Viktor Zolotov, commander-in-chief of the Russian National Guard

• Andrei Mordvichev, commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army

• Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic and Chechen national guard forces

• Adam Delimkhanov, commander of Chechen forces in Mariupol during the assault on the city

• Denis Pushilin, head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and commander-in-chief of the armed groups organized under the DNR at the time of the assault on Mariupol

These individuals, and potentially other commanders of the 17 units identified in Mariupol, should be investigated and appropriately prosecuted for their alleged role in serious violations committed during the Russian forces’ assault. Reparations should also be paid to the victims and their families. Concerted international efforts towards justice and accountability are crucial to demonstrate that unlawful attacks carry consequences, to deter future atrocities, and to reinforce the principle that accountability for grave crimes cannot be eluded because of rank or position.

The battle for Mariupol has been among the most destructive of the war in Ukraine thus far. It left behind an unrecognizable wasteland of destroyed apartment buildings, charred streets, shells of cars and buses, and looted shops, with unknown numbers buried beneath the rubble. For months there was no functioning electricity, water, gas, or basic services such as hospitals and schools. By mid-2022, only an estimated fifth of the original population remained, living under Russian occupation.

In the nearly two years since the devastation of Mariupol and loss of civilian life from heavy weapons, other smaller cities and towns in Ukraine have endured similar destruction. To help protect civilians affected by armed conflicts in Ukraine and around the world, all countries should join and abide by the international Political Declaration on the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. They should condemn and seek to end all use of explosive weapons with wide area effects in cities, towns, and villages – no matter where or by whom.

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Methodology

For this report and the accompanying web feature, Human Rights Watch and Truth Hounds—a leading Ukrainian human rights organization—interviewed 240 people. Of these, 26 were Mariupol city officials and volunteers, 11 were healthcare workers in Mariupol, 168 were other Mariupol residents, 7 were national Ukrainian government officials, and 28 were interviewed in other capacities, including volunteers based outside of Mariupol, infrastructure company staff living outside of Mariupol, international and Ukrainian humanitarian staff, Ukrainian and international human rights officials and activists, experts on the Russian military, and Ukrainian and international journalists who reported on Mariupol.

On December 4, 2023, we sent the Russian government a summary of our findings and a list of questions. At time of writing, we had not received a response.

Human Rights Watch and Truth Hounds were unable to visit Mariupol due to the fighting and subsequent occupation of the city, which prevented us from being able to safely conduct interviews in person without undue risk of reprisals against those we spoke to. Instead, we interviewed displaced residents in person or by phone between March 2022 and January 2024.

Nearly all interviews were conducted in Ukrainian, with some conducted in Russian and English. Researchers informed all interviewees about the purpose and voluntary nature of the interviews, and the ways in which we would use the information. We obtained informed consent from all interviewees, who understood they would receive no compensation for their participation. For reasons of personal security, we have withheld the names and identifying information of some of the individuals featured in the report to ensure their anonymity and have given them pseudonyms.

Human Rights Watch analyzed dozens of high and very high-resolution commercial satellite images of the locations where attacks documented in this report occurred and damage done to other parts of the city. Open source research by Human Rights Watch, Truth Hounds, and SITU Research also involved analyzing photographs and videos that were shared directly with researchers or collected from social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), VK, and YouTube. We verified these photographs and videos, geolocated them to Mariupol, and determined the time period in which they were recorded. In total, this report and the accompanying web feature use 850 photographs and videos captured between February 24, 2022, and June 17, 2023.

By matching landmarks in the videos with satellite imagery, street-level photographs, or other visual material, and comparing this with accounts from witnesses, we determined the location and approximate time and date of the specific attacks mentioned in the case study chapter. We also studied the imagery to determine the types of weapons used during some of those attacks and more generally during the assault on the city. Some of these images were used to help us photogrammetrically reconstruct 3D models of seven buildings mentioned in the case studies in the report. The 3D reconstructions demonstrate the state of these buildings before and after the attacks. The 3D reconstructions were also a helpful tool when conducting interviews as they allowed witnesses to describe or point out very specific locations when describing an attack, and to give us more specific details about what they saw.

For the damage assessment and demolitions, we identified a 14-square-kilometer area of focus in the center of the city, where most of the buildings for which we obtained detailed accounts from witnesses of attacks are located. This area does not follow any specific district or city boundaries but is demarcated by major roads to the north and south of Myru Avenue (see image below). To analyze the extent of damage and demolition in at least part of the city in more detail, we restricted our assessment to buildings in this area.

To determine the damage to civilian infrastructure inside Mariupol’s city boundaries, including hospitals, schools, and universities, we analyzed high and very high-resolution commercial satellite images.

To obtain a rough estimate of the minimum number of bodies that were buried in and around Mariupol between March 2022 and February 2023, we used very high-resolution commercial satellite images and drone footage to assess the gravesites at five cemeteries that saw a significant increase in the number of graves and that contain both individual graves and trench-type graves.

To identify the Russian commanders and military units that may bear responsibility for the violations documented in this report, we reviewed social media posts by Russian soldiers present in Mariupol or involved in the assault; obituaries of Russian military personnel killed in Mariupol; awards given to Russian military commanders for their “service” in Mariupol; other public statements by Russian government and military officials; and Russian media reports.

Chapter I Applicable Legal Standards

Russian and Russia-affiliated forces conducting military operations against Ukrainian forces in their assault on Mariupol committed numerous apparent violations of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war. Violations include deliberate or indiscriminate air and ground attacks on civilian objects, including on a hospital, that killed and injured numerous civilians; an apparently unlawful strike hitting part of the electricity infrastructure; the apparent blocking of civilian evacuations and the arbitrary denial of humanitarian aid; and the forced transfers of Ukrainian citizens to Russia and Russian-occupied territory.

War crimes are serious violations of the laws of war committed by individuals with criminal intent.¹ Those who order, carry out or are responsible as a matter of command responsibility may be found liable for war crimes.² States are obligated to investigate alleged war crimes committed by their nationals or armed forces, or on their territory.³

Crimes against humanity are certain crimes committed by members of government armed forces or non-state armed groups that are knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a specific civilian population. Relevant crimes include murder, torture, deportation, or other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.⁴

Many of the unlawful strikes on Mariupol civilian structures may amount to war crimes, including the attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater. The forced deportations of Ukrainians to Russia and forced transfers to other areas occupied by Russia is also a war crime and a potential crime against humanity. War crimes investigations are needed with respect to other attacks on civilian buildings and critical infrastructure, and the blocking of humanitarian aid and evacuations of Ukrainian civilians.

The war between Russia and Ukraine constitutes an international armed conflict, governed by international humanitarian treaty law - primarily the four Geneva Conventions of 1949⁵ and its First Additional Protocol of 1977 (Protocol I),⁶ as well as the rules of customary international humanitarian law.⁷ Both Russia and Ukraine are parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Protocol I.

The laws of war provide protections to civilians and other noncombatants from the hazards of armed conflict. They also address the conduct of hostilities-the means and methods of warfare-by all sides to a conflict. Foremost is the rule that parties to a conflict must distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Civilians may never be the deliberate target of attacks. Parties to the conflict are required to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects and to refrain from attacks that fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or that would cause disproportionate harm to the civilian population.⁸

Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent-that is, deliberately or recklessly-can be held liable for war crimes.⁹ Commanders who knew or should have known about abuses by their forces and failed to stop them or punish those responsible can be prosecuted as a matter of command responsibility.¹⁰

Populations also remain protected by international human rights law, notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights¹¹ and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.¹² The destruction and damage to the civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities, schools, and markets, threatens the enjoyment of basic rights such as the right to health, education, and an adequate standard of living, including food, housing, and water.

Unlawful Attacks on Civilians and Civilian Objects

The two fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law are those of “civilian immunity” and “distinction.”¹³ They impose a duty, at all times during the conflict, to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to target only the former. While the laws of war recognize that some civilian casualties are inevitable, parties to a conflict may not target civilians and civilian objects and may direct their operations against only military objectives.

Military objectives are anything that by their nature, location, purpose, or use provides enemy forces a definite military advantage in the circumstances prevailing at the time.¹⁴ Combatants, weapons, ammunition, and materiel are military objectives. In general the law prohibits direct attacks against what are by their nature civilian objects, such as homes and apartments, shops, places of worship, hospitals, schools, and cultural monuments, unless they are being used for military purposes.¹⁵ Even though a residential home is presumed to be a civilian object, for example, its use by enemy soldiers to deploy or to store weaponry, renders it a military objective and subject to attack for the duration of that use. Hospitals and other medical facilities have special additional protection under the laws of war.

International humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. Indiscriminate attacks are those that strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. Examples of indiscriminate attacks are attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective or that use weapons that cannot be directed at a specific military objective.¹⁶

Prohibited indiscriminate attacks include area bombardment, which are attacks by artillery or other means that treat as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in an area containing a concentration of civilians and civilian objects. Military commanders must choose a means of attack that can be directed at military targets and will minimize incidental harm to civilians. If the weapons used are so inaccurate that they cannot be directed at military targets without imposing a substantial risk of civilian harm, such as Grad rockets, then they should not be deployed. Anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions are prohibited by international treaty and should never be used because they are inherently indiscriminate.¹⁷

Attacks that violate the principle of proportionality are also prohibited. An attack is disproportionate if it may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated at the time of the attack.¹⁸

Armed Conflict in Populated Areas

The laws of war do not prohibit fighting in urban areas, although the presence of many civilians places greater obligations on parties to the conflict to take steps to minimize harm to civilians. Parties to a conflict must take constant care during military operations to spare the civilian population and to “take all feasible precautions” to avoid or minimize the incidental loss of civilian life and damage to civilian objects. These precautions include doing everything feasible to verify that the objects of attack are military objectives and not civilians or civilian objects, and giving “effective advance warning” of attacks when circumstances permit.¹⁹

Warring parties must also take all feasible measures to minimize the risk to civilians under their control. Forces deployed in populated areas must avoid locating military objectives near densely populated areas and endeavor to remove civilians from the vicinity of military activities.²⁰ Belligerents are prohibited from using civilians to shield military objectives or operations from attack.²¹

The attacking party is not relieved of its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians simply because it considers the defending party responsible for locating legitimate military targets within or near populated areas.

Framework Governing Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas

The use of explosive weapons in populated areas poses one of the gravest threats to civilians in contemporary armed conflict.²² While there is no specific prohibition against the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, their use in such areas heightens concerns of unlawfully indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. Explosive weapons include a range of conventional air-dropped and surface-fired weapons, including certain air-delivered bombs, cluster munitions, missiles, unguided rockets, multi-barrel rocket launchers, and large-caliber artillery and mortar projectiles. They can deliver multiple munitions simultaneously that saturate a large area, have a large destructive radius, spread fragments widely, and are inherently inaccurate.

Such weapons kill and injure civilians at the time of attack, either directly, due to the weapons’ blast and fragmentation, or indirectly, as a result of fires, flying debris, or collapsing buildings. They also have long-term ripple, or “reverberating,” effects, including severe psychological harm. They damage civilian buildings, including homes and businesses, and civilian infrastructure such as power plants, healthcare and educational facilities and water and sanitation systems, which in turn interferes with basic services such as health care and education, infringing on human rights. They cause environmental damage and displace communities.

Several types of weapons and weapon delivery systems, both manufactured and improvised, are inherently difficult to use in populated areas without a substantial risk of indiscriminate attack. Weapons such as mortars, artillery, and rockets, such as Grad rockets, when firing unguided munitions, are fundamentally inaccurate systems. In some cases, armed forces can compensate by observing impacts and making adjustments, but the initial impacts and the relatively large area over which these weapons could strike regardless of adjustments make them unsuitable for use in populated areas.

As of December 2023, 83 countries have adopted the “Declaration on the Protection of Civilians from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas,” which seeks to better protect civilians from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.²³ The declaration urges compliance with the laws of war but also commits its signatories to adopt policies and practices to restrict or refrain from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas when harm to civilians or civilian objects is expected, including by taking direct and indirect effects into account when planning and executing attacks, and by assisting victims. While the declaration is not legally binding, countries that endorse it commit to take steps to advance the protection of civilians from explosive weapons that go beyond existing law.

Attacks on Critical Infrastructure

Sieges directed at enemy forces and for the purpose of capturing an enemy-controlled area are permitted under the laws of war as a legitimate military objective. However, siege tactics cannot include destroying, removing, or rendering useless objects indispensable to the civilian population’s survival. Deliberate employment of such tactics, with the intent of starving the civilian population or forcing them to leave the city, violate the laws of war.²⁴ It may also amount to inhumane treatment of the civilian population, a crime against humanity.²⁵ Tactics that arbitrarily deny civilians access to items essential for their well-being such as water, food, and medicine are also prohibited.

Some critical infrastructure, such as electricity generation plants, water infrastructure, and telecommunications facilities, are considered dual-use objects, entities that normally have both civilian and military purposes.²⁶ A dual-use object is a legitimate military target if it is used in a way that makes an “effective contribution to military action” and its partial or total destruction, capture or neutralization in the circumstances ruling at the time offers “a definite military advantage.” An attack on a dual-use object that is a legitimate military objective still must consider the principle of proportionality.²⁷ This means that attacking forces should verify at all times that the risks to the civilian population from any such attack-that is, the extreme importance of those facilities to the civilian population and the anticipated impact of their destruction-do not outweigh the anticipated military benefit.

The attacking force should also assess whether an attack on other military objectives causing less damage to civilian lives and objects would offer the same military advantage.

Attacks on Hospitals

Hospitals, clinics, medical centers, and similar facilities, whether civilian or military, are considered to be medical units that have special protections under the laws of war. While other presumptively civilian structures become military objectives if they are being used for a military purpose, hospitals lose their protection from attack only if they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit “acts harmful to the enemy.”²⁸

Several types of acts do not constitute “acts harmful to the enemy,” such as the presence of armed guards, or when small arms from the wounded are found in the hospital. Even if military forces misuse a hospital to store weapons or shelter able-bodied combatants, the attacking force must issue a warning to cease this misuse, setting a reasonable time limit for it to end, and attacking only after such a warning has gone unheeded.²⁹

Under the laws of war, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel must be permitted to do their work and be protected in all circumstances. They lose their protection only if they commit, outside their humanitarian function, acts harmful to the enemy.³⁰

In May 2016, the UN Security Council unanimously expressed deep concern about the increase in the number of attacks and threats against medical facilities and personnel in resolution 2286 and urged countries around the world to take measures to prevent future attacks. The resolution also strongly condemned what it called the “prevailing impunity for violations and abuses committed against medical personnel and humanitarian personnel exclusively engaged in medical duties, their means of transport and equipment, as well as hospitals and other medical facilities in armed conflict.” It noted that this impunity may in turn contribute to the “recurrence of these acts.”³¹

The resolution strongly urged states to “conduct, in an independent manner, full, prompt, impartial and effective investigations within their jurisdiction of [relevant] violations of international humanitarian law … and, where appropriate, take action against those responsible in accordance with domestic and international law, with a view to reinforcing preventive measures, ensuring accountability and addressing the grievances of victims.”³²

Evacuations and the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid

The laws of war do not prohibit sieges by land of enemy forces so long as they do not cause disproportionate harm to civilians. They require parties to a conflict to facilitate the evacuation of civilians who want to leave conflict areas and not to arbitrarily prevent them from doing so. Whether or not the parties establish humanitarian corridors, they remain responsible for taking all feasible precautions to minimize the harm to civilians from the effects of attacks. Parties should allow access for neutral humanitarian actors to support civilians at risk who may need assistance to leave, including people with injuries, chronic or severe medical conditions, people with disabilities, older people, pregnant people and those who have recently given birth, and children.

International humanitarian law requires warring parties not to withhold consent for relief operations on arbitrary grounds and to allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded impartial aid to civilians in need. They may take steps to control the content and delivery of humanitarian aid, such as to ensure that consignments do not include weapons. However, deliberately impeding relief supplies is prohibited. Lawful military restrictions on aid cannot have a disproportionate effect on the civilian population.³³

Forcible Transfers of Civilians

Parties to an international armed conflict are prohibited under the laws of war from forcibly transferring inside the country or deporting outside the country the civilian population of an occupied territory, in whole or in part. Violation of this prohibition is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and prosecutable as a war crime and a crime against humanity.³⁴ Provisions in the Fourth Geneva Convention and Protocol I, prohibiting individual or mass forcible transfers are clear that the prohibition is regardless of motive.³⁵

To constitute the crime of deportation or transfer, the transfer needs to be “forcible.” Consent to be moved has to be voluntary and genuine, and not given under coercive conditions. As the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) made clear, the absence of genuine choice making displacement unlawful and forcible can include psychological force caused by “fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power,…or by taking advantage of a coercive environment.”³⁶ Therefore, a transfer is not voluntary if civilians agree or seek to be transferred as the only means to escape risk of abuse if they remain. Moreover, transferring or displacing civilians is not justified or lawful as being on humanitarian grounds if the humanitarian crisis triggering the displacement is itself the result of unlawful activity by those in charge of the transfers.³⁷

Warring parties may temporarily displace or evacuate civilians to protect them from the effects of an attack, or if civilian security or imperative military reasons demand such displacement. Protocol I requires that parties to the conflict, “to the maximum extent feasible,” take the necessary precautions to protect civilians and civilian objects under their control from the dangers resulting from military operations, including seeking to remove civilians and civilian objects under their control from the vicinity of military targets.³⁸ Those displaced or evacuated should be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.³⁹

Chapter II The Taking of Mariupol

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainian forces in the city of Mariupol, on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov in southeastern Ukraine, were among the first attacked.

Mariupol is the site of two of Ukraine’s largest iron and steel factories, the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works and the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works (Azovstal steel plant). Capturing Mariupol and areas to the west of the city would allow Russia to control a land corridor between the Crimean Peninsula about 200 kilometers to the west, occupied by Russia since 2014, and the Donbas region about 10 kilometers to the east. The Donbas region includes the self-proclaimed, Russia-backed “DNR” and most parts of “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LNR).⁴⁰

Forces of the so-called DNR and LNR operating in these areas since 2014 were officially integrated into the Russian military in 2022. Capturing Mariupol would also mean control of about 80 percent of Ukraine’s Sea of Azov coastline and related trade: the city’s port was the largest in the Azov Sea region and a key export hub for Ukraine’s steel, coal, and corn.⁴¹

Until February 2022, about 540,000 people inhabited the city.⁴² Former residents and visitors described Mariupol’s distinctly Ukrainian character, its multicultural, multi-religious, and multilingual identity, and its recent development into a modern cultural hub, with a new public transport system, arts events such as Gogol Fest, and its popularity as a summer seaside destination.⁴³

Mariupol is divided into four administrative districts: Tsentralnyi district, the Central District, often called “the City Centre” and home to the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater; Kalmiuskyi District in the northeastern part of the city, often called “the factory area” as it includes the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works; Livoberezhnyi District, or the “Left Bank” in the easternmost part of the city, home to the Azovstal steel plant and separated from the rest of the city by the Kalmius River; and Prymorskyi District, or “the port,” in the southwestern part of the city.⁴⁴

The following timeline of Russian forces’ attack and capture of Mariupol is based on interviews with dozens of witnesses; reports from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based think tank; and reports from the Ukrainian, Russian, and US governments.

Chapter III Civilians Denied Access to Critical Infrastructure

As Russia’s assault on Mariupol intensified, by March 2 the entire city had lost access to power, water, and sanitation services.⁴⁵ While tens of thousands of people fled Mariupol during the first few days of the assault, at least 450,000 remained. With Russian forces now surrounding the city, civilians were trapped for up to seven weeks in appalling conditions: holed up in the basements of apartment buildings and other shelters without access to running water, electricity, gas, heating, telecommunications, or information about what was happening around them in the city or the broader conflict. The estimated 150,000 people remaining in Mariupol by May only gradually regained access to these services in the second half of 2022.

The fighting significantly damaged the city’s electricity infrastructure, which in turn disabled the city’s telecommunications network as well as water pumping stations, without which piped water could not flow. The lack of water knocked out the city’s heating system at a time of sub-freezing temperatures. By the afternoon of March 1, about half of the city’s electricity grid, including some of the Central District and all of the northeastern Kalmiuskyi District, was offline, most likely due to the significant damage done to power lines and electricity pylons. By midday on March 2, the entire city’s water supply was cut off when a key filtration station that pumped water from a reservoir to the city lost power. Later that day, Russian forces may have intentionally targeted part of one electricity transformer station, Azovska-220, that supplied substations in the Central and Kalmiuskyi Districts. This cut power to the few remaining areas there that still had electricity.

To help people cope, volunteers and city council workers brought food and diesel for generators to shelters and hospitals,⁴⁶ and transported water to distribution points throughout the city, braving attacks that damaged some of their trucks. Residents were forced to come out of their shelters to wait in line at wells and water distribution trucks, or to cook meals on makeshift wood fires, exposing themselves to the onslaught of shelling and artillery fire. Others resorted to drinking, bathing, and cleaning with rainwater or melted snow.

People in need of medical care—those injured in the fighting or who fell sick due to the dirty water, the extreme cold, or lack of medicine for preexisting conditions—struggled to make it to hospitals, given the dangerous conditions throughout the city.

By the end of the fighting, all 19 of the city’s hospital campuses were damaged, which further inhibited their ability to provide care and likely contributed to the suffering and deaths not just during, but also after the battle for the city.⁴⁷ At least five of the city’s fire stations were also damaged, likely obstructing the work of emergency responders.

Under international humanitarian law, electricity, water, telecommunications, health care, and emergency response infrastructure are considered “critical infrastructure” and among the “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.”⁴⁸ In at least one case – the attack on an electricity transformer station on March 2 – it appears that Russian forces deliberately targeted electricity infrastructure. In most cases, however, it remains unclear what caused the damage to the infrastructure.

As discussed above, electricity infrastructure is considered a dual-use object, an object that normally has both civilian and military purposes. Such an object is a legitimate military target if it is used in a way that makes an “effective contribution to military action” and its destruction in the circumstances ruling at the time offers “a definite military advantage.” Such attacks, however, must not have a disproportionate impact on the civilian population. Russian officials did not respond to questions about the intended targets of their attacks. Cutting electricity to the population as a whole would be disproportionate and in violation of international humanitarian law.

The following sections analyze the damage to Mariupol’s electricity, water, telecommunications, natural gas, healthcare, and emergency response infrastructure.

Electricity

Mariupol depends on four electricity transformer stations.⁴⁹ The main two, Zoria-330 and Myrna-330, supply two smaller stations, Azovska-220 and Ilyich-110. All four of them transfer electricity to dozens of large substations, which in turn supply medium-size substations that then feed electricity to the thousands of small substations attached to each residential and commercial building. Disabling Zoria-330 or Myrna-330 would have immediately disrupted the whole city’s electricity supply. However, we found no evidence on satellite imagery of damage to either of them, or to Ilyich-110, before March 2, when the entire city was cut off from electricity. Satellite imagery shows the main building at Myrna-330 was damaged between March 14 and 19, but does not show any damage to the electricity infrastructure at the station. Satellite imagery from March 23 shows black marks on the ground near Ilyich-110 that are not present on imagery taken the day before. Imagery from April 4 shows no damage to the transformer stations’ main building, but the next available image, on April 9, shows damage to the rooftop.

Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, DTEK, ran most of the city’s electricity infrastructure.⁵⁰ The company shared with Human Rights Watch a power line register in which its staff recorded when various parts of the network failed between February 24 and March 2, including any known reasons for the failures.

Between February 25 and March 2, DTEK recorded eight incidents in which 23 of the city’s dozens of electricity substations, including the one powering the Azovstal steel plant, went offline in groups of two or more.⁵¹ Simultaneous substation failure suggests that they did not go offline as a result of damage to the substations, but instead because of damage to power lines or electricity pylons, which relay electricity from the transformer stations to groups of substations. During a ninth recorded incident, a single electricity substation in the compound of Starokrymski Filtering Stations #1 and #2, that pumps canal or reservoir water into pipes that run to the city, went down at about midday on March 2, probably due to the downing of the power line that connects it to the Azovska-220 transformer station.⁵²

In two cases, DTEK recorded incidents in which areas dependent on two or more substations lost electricity. The first happened on February 25, when Left Bank residential areas dependent on two substations⁵³ lost electricity at the same time. On February 26, the Mariupol City Council said that 188 “substations”-likely referring to smaller substations at the residential property level-had been damaged,⁵⁴ leaving 41,229 households⁵⁵ without power.

The second happened when residential areas in the Central and Prymorskyi Districts dependent on seven substations⁵⁶ all went offline at the same time for some hours on February 28 and again on March 2. According to DTEK,⁵⁷ this was because damaged nearby powerlines needed to be repaired. They were “reconfigured by cutting off damaged sections and installing additional switchgear” on February 28 or early on March 1, and were damaged again on March 2.⁵⁸ Satellite imagery from March 9 shows two damaged electricity pylons located between the Azovska-220 transformer station and the seven substations.

We also analyzed other satellite images taken between March and April 2022 that show damage to a number of power lines and electricity pylons in various parts of the city and its outskirts. Two residents said that at some point in March, attacks by Russian forces hit electricity pylons near the city’s California market⁵⁹ and about 700 meters south of the western end of Myru Avenue.⁶⁰ Satellite imagery from between March 9 and May 12 shows damage to 11 of the city’s substations, which appears to have occurred after March 2, by which time the entire city was already cut off from electricity. We were unable to determine whether the substations and lines were intentionally damaged by Russian or Ukrainian forces during the fighting.

For the above reasons, and because residents living in many different parts of the city said they continued to receive electricity until March 2, the damage to the city’s substations appears to have occurred after March 2, by which time the entire city was already cut off from electricity.

According to DTEK, at 3:30 p.m. on March 2, one of the transformers at the Azovksa-220 station was damaged by reported shelling. This cut electricity to the last three dependent substations supplying electricity to residential areas in the Central and Kalmiuskyi Districts. The station is located about 8 kilometers north of the center of the city and far from any other buildings. Satellite imagery from March 12 shows damage to one of the station’s transformers, as well as damage to what appears to be a communications tower 90 meters away. There is no other damage to the facility, suggesting a targeted attack on the transformer.

Water

The lack of electricity had a knock-on effect for civilians’ access to water.⁶¹ Damage to the electricity network on February 25 stopped the pumps that sent canal-delivered river water to the city’s pipes, forcing the city to rely instead on reservoir water.⁶² An attack on electricity infrastructure on March 2 downed the pumps that transferred the reservoir water, leaving the entire city’s population without access to running water.⁶³ Volunteers tried to help residents cope with the loss of running water by collecting water from wells and springs and trucking them to distribution points across the city. But this came at great risk, as volunteers and residents had to brave the ongoing shelling while they moved across the city to distribute or collect water and wait in line for hours at distribution points.

How the Taps Went Dry

The Siverskyi Donets River is Mariupol’s main water source. In Mykolaivska, 200 kilometers north of Mariupol, the water flows into a canal that takes the water 50 kilometers, mostly above ground, to the town of Horlivka, 130 kilometers north of Mariupol. There, the Third Lift Pumping Station of the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal pumps water from the canal into at least three sets of pipes.⁶⁴ This pumping station is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the Donbas region and is strategically important to both Ukraine and Russia, supplying water to three million people in the region.⁶⁵

The water pipes that begin in Horlivka run above ground for some kilometers and then underground to reach the First Lift Pumping Station⁶⁶ located six kilometers from Vasiylivka village, about 120 kilometers north of Mariupol. The pipes continue underground from Vasiylivka until they reach Starokrymski Filter Stations #1 and #2, located in a compound about 10 kilometers north of Mariupol city center and just to the south of the Starokrymsky Reservoir.⁶⁷ The filter station pumps and filters water from the underground pipes-and, if needed as a back-up water source, from the Starokrymsky Reservoir-into mostly underground pipes that run to Mariupol, according to the Head of Mariupolvodokanal, one of the two companies supplying the city with water.⁶⁸

On February 19, part of the Vasilyvika pumping station was damaged by an explosion that was captured on camera.⁶⁹ We were unable to determine the cause of the explosion.

The head of the Donetska Regional Civil-Military Administration said that on the same day, Starokrymski Filter Stations #1 and #2, about 100 kilometers to the south, switched from pumping canal water to pumping reservoir water to Mariupol, implying that the February 19 incident stopped canal water from reaching the Filter Station.⁷⁰ A UN committee dealing with water and sanitation issues said that after the incident, 90,000 people in the Volnovakha area had switched to reservoir water and that “cities like Mariupol are similarly shifting to water from reservoirs.”⁷¹ This implies that canal water no longer flowed from Vasilyvika to Mariupol or that it was flowing at a reduced rate. However, the director of Mariupolvodokanal, and the deputy administrator of Mariupol City Council, said water continued to flow from the canal to Starokrymski Filter Stations #1 and #2 until February 26, the day on which the stations had to switch to pumping reservoir water because of the complete loss of canal water the day before.⁷²

The loss of canal water on February 25 can be explained by what the UN committee said involved the “de-energiz[ing]” – a term that refers to a loss of power supply – that day of the strategically crucial Third Lift Pumping Station.⁷³ This meant an end to water pumping from the Siverskyi Donets River into the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal. Three million people, including all residents of the Donbas region-people in areas under the control of DNR forces, as well as Mariupol-lost access to canal water that day.⁷⁴

According to the DTEK register, on March 2, at 12:15 p.m., Starokrymski Filter Stations #1 and #2 stopped functioning because the electricity substation supplying the Filter Stations was “disconnected,” probably because the power line connecting it to the Azovska-220 transformer station was downed. The UN committee said that on March 2, the Voda Dobasa water company informed it that shelling at about 1 p.m. had damaged “a number of power lines” and that this meant that all water pumping stations in Mariupol, including Starokrymski Filter Stations #1 and #2, had stopped functioning.⁷⁵ Satellite imagery of the filtering stations from March 9 shows damage to the station’s roof and some ground nearby, but not to the compound’s electricity substation.

The director of Mariupolvodokanal said his company’s 1,000 or so staff continued to work until March 2, when the loss of electricity citywide cut power to all the water pumps.⁷⁶ He also said that 40 percent of the city’s “small pumping stations that supplied water to the upper floors of buildings” were damaged in the fighting after March 2. In May 2022, Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said that “all 22 [of the city’s] pumping stations had been destroyed or flooded” and that “more than 50 percent of the water supply network was damaged.”⁷⁷

Collecting and Distributing Water at Great Risk to Volunteers and Residents

“On April 2, my husband went to collect water at a well nearby, but he never returned. A neighbor later told me there had been shelling at a crossroads when he would have been passing through. I looked for him for five days. I never saw him again.”

— Woman from Kalmiuskyi District who survived three months in Mariupol before fleeing the city.⁷⁸

After the taps went dry on March 2, about 100 Mariupolvodokanal staff and other volunteers started to collect water at informal water sources such as springs and wells, and truck them to distribution points at hospitals and larger shelters, including schools, kindergartens, and basements, according to the director of Mariupolvodokanal.⁷⁹ After running water stopped, he said, the city’s main source of water became a well about one kilometer to the east of the Drama Theater, where his staff used diesel-powered pumps to extract water. “That well saved many lives,” he said.⁸⁰ Other water sources included the Kalchyk River,⁸¹ a canal close to Mariupolvodokanal’s headquarters, and a fire hydrant near the Drama Theater.⁸²

Mariupolvodokanal staff and volunteers distributed water using eight water tankers, each with a capacity of about 10 cubic meters, as well as two smaller trucks, which allowed them to deliver between 80 and 100 cubic meters of water a day throughout the city in the first few days after March 2.⁸³ Water delivery points included the Drama Theater, the Terra Sport Gym,⁸⁴ the Savona Cinema next door,⁸⁵ a location close to Mariupovodokanal’s headquarters, and the city’s central market, called “Tsentralnyi.”⁸⁶ City officials also tried to inform residents about where to find springs and wells, including in City Garden, the mosque at Nakhimova Avenue 41, the Chaika Café on the Left Bank, and a place near the Open llichyvets Stadium.⁸⁷

These efforts provided desperately needed water to residents across the city. However, the volunteers organizing the distribution, the water tanks themselves, and the residents braving the city streets to reach the wells or distribution points to then queue up for up to six hours, were exposed to barrages of shelling, rockets, and air-dropped munitions.⁸⁸

The intensity of the fighting meant the water trucks could not reach the Left Bank after March 10, although Ukrainian police took one of the tankers after that date to deliver water to Hospital #4. Other areas that were impossible to reach at various points in March included the city’s 17th and 23rd Sub-Districts and the whole of Kalmiuskyi District.

Mariupolvodokanal’s headquarters was attacked the night of March 15-16 and again the night of March 16-17.⁸⁹ Mariupol’s first deputy mayor said that a girl about 10 was injured in a nearby building during one of the attacks.⁹⁰

An attack in early March near the Shans supermarket at Latysheva Street 23, where city council volunteers distributed water and humanitarian aid, killed three or four people, according to a staffer of the Donetsk Regional Bureau of Forensic Medicine, who saw the bodies.⁹¹

By March 18, shelling and other attacks had reportedly damaged or destroyed all but two of the eight water tankers.⁹² One of the tankers was destroyed on Metalurhiv Avenue, another on Bakhchyvandzhi Street that runs south of, and parallel to, Myru Avenue, and a third was destroyed near the Philharmonic Hall next to the Drama Theater.⁹³

One man described an attack on March 15, at around 8 a.m. when he went to collect ground water from a garage compound about 500 meters south of the Azovstal steel plant in the Left Bank. “There were about 30 of us when the attack happened and it killed 20 people and wounded many others, including two people who had come with me from the building where we were sheltering,” he said. “The Ukrainian forces arrived quickly and took the injured to the hospital.”⁹⁴

Later that day or the next, the man said he saw the bodies of about 10 people in civilian clothes near another ground water source, which he said was next to a building belonging to an industrial bread manufacturer called Khlibokombinat and an administrative building belonging to a military recruitment center. The man said he did not know how the people died.

A military nurse said she had heard from others that there were “many corpses” near a well in Peremohy Park.⁹⁵ She had also heard that some of the injured people she saw in a shelter under Hospital #3 between March 17 and April 25 had been injured while collecting water there.

A man described the scene at the well near the Chaika Café on the Left Bank in mid-March:

I saw three corpses near the well. One of them was a girl wearing high boots with fur on the outside. One was a man with a bullet wound in his neck. All three had also been shot in their chests and were wearing civilian winter clothes. Some other people and I moved them behind a nearby building and the owner gave us blankets to cover them. The owner didn’t know what had happened but as far as I understood, there had been some fighting in the area the evening before.⁹⁶

Another man said that on the morning of March 10, he left his house at Metalurhiv Avenue 117 to collect water from a nearby river, when shelling started:

We didn’t even make it 15 meters from our entrance. I was immediately injured on the right-hand side of my body and my wife’s brother was very badly injured in his back. I took him to Military Hospital #555, and he died during the operation. He was 52.⁹⁷

A deputy head of Mariupol City Council said that a doctor called Andrii Ivanovyh Hnatiuk was shot dead on March 27 by Russian forces as he walked from Hospital #4 to fetch water at a well to the northwest of the hospital near the local cemetery.⁹⁸ A health official said that at some point in March she had heard that a doctor working at the city’s Regional Intensive Care Hospital⁹⁹ was killed while on his way to fetch water for the hospital from a nearby well, though she didn’t know how or by whom.¹⁰⁰

A woman said that she had heard that “a lot of [her] neighbors were killed near a water spring near School #31.”¹⁰¹ A man said he had heard that at some point between March 9 and 11 during the early morning, an attack killed three people near a water source on Persha Slobidka Street.¹⁰²

Another man was killed by a shell fragment as he walked towards a water collection point at the nearby mosque in mid-March.¹⁰³

A doctor said he heard that at some point after March 8, a woman who was sheltering in a building near his, close to the Savona cinema, was killed during an attack while she was fetching water.¹⁰⁴ A man said that on March 12 at about 10 a.m., he saw the body of a man who he had been told had been killed by mortar fire as he walked from 44 Fontanna Street towards the Kalmius River to get water.¹⁰⁵

A woman said one of her neighbors went to collect water and returned with a back injury from an attack.¹⁰⁶ And a man said he knew of a number of people who left his building, at Morskyi Boulevard 54, and the neighboring building, at number 56, to fetch water who never returned, though he did not know why.¹⁰⁷

Natural Gas and Heating

“At nights I cried from the cold.”

— Mariupol resident, who endured three weeks in sub-freezing temperatures.¹⁰⁸

Residents of Mariupol rely on natural gas to cook food and to fuel boilers that heat water, including for heating systems.¹⁰⁹ By March 6, the natural gas supply was cut off throughout the city because of damage to a major pipeline that supplied gas to the city and half of the Donetsk region.¹¹⁰ But heating systems had already stopped working on March 2: with no electricity to pump water, no water reached the natural gas-fueled boilers. Many residents described how they suffered from the cold during those initial weeks of sub-freezing temperatures. And when their stoves no longer worked, they had to go outside to heat water or prepare warm meals on makeshift fires, exposing themselves to both the cold and the shelling.

In addition to the major pipeline damage on March 6, the fighting damaged 32 of the city’s buildings housing natural gas boilers that transferred heated water through pipelines to about 1,900 residential buildings, as well as to public buildings and companies.¹¹¹ He also said that the fighting caused damage to about 360 kilometers of the city’s 600 kilometers of pipelines for heated water, including to some of the 5 percent of the pipes that run overland and much of the remaining underground pipelines that were damaged after water froze inside them, causing them to rupture. He said his department estimated the repair cost would amount to 5 billion hryvnia (UAH), or about US$135 million.

Telecommunications

“I remember how we came to a tower and saw Ukrainian soldiers standing nearby with yellow ribbons on their shoulders. We asked them what was going on because we had no internet access, and we were cut off from the rest of the world. We did not understand whether Mariupol was under Ukrainian control or not. We didn’t even know whether our president was in Ukraine.”

— Mariupol resident who went in early March to an old water tower near the Drama Theater after a week without phone network access¹¹²

During the first few days of Russia’s assault on Mariupol, residents lost nearly all access to mobile phone networks and the internet, shutting them off from the world and preventing them from communicating with loved ones or accessing news about the conflict, possible evacuation routes, or humanitarian aid distribution points. Throughout the siege, this inability to communicate compounded residents’ daily fears and struggles as they worried about the fate of their relatives, friends, and colleagues. They used word of mouth at water and aid distribution points to try to pass messages on to friends and loved ones in other neighborhoods, to let them know they were still alive and where they were sheltering-or in some cases, to indicate who had died and where they had been buried in makeshift graves. Residents also risked walking the city streets, and exposing themselves to artillery fire, as they searched for one of the few locations in the city where they could still occasionally pick up a signal on their phones.

Mariupol’s city council first posted a message relating to the cutting of phone coverage on February 28.¹¹³ Before February 24, Mariupol had three telecommunication providers: Kyivstar, LifeCell, and Vodafone. LifeCell reported that its services in Mariupol were “disconnected” as of February 27 after its “transmission sites” were destroyed and “optical cables in the main and backup routes” were damaged.¹¹⁴

Kyivstar told Human Rights Watch that the lack of electricity citywide by early March made mobile phone coverage impossible, except at two locations: the immediate vicinity of the Drama Theater, from where Vodafone continued to transmit a signal until “its services were destroyed soon after by shelling,” and an area close to Kyivstar’s seven-story headquarters.¹¹⁵

Some residents said they found weak phone signals in certain locations in early and mid-March, including at the Regional Intensive Care Hospital,¹¹⁶ near the Savona cinema,¹¹⁷ and near the Kyivstar building, which allowed them to call or send messages to their relatives.¹¹⁸

Kyivstar’s office contained a core base station, the central hive of mobile telecommunications that was connected to 148 base stations, which in turn transmitted wireless signals throughout the city.¹¹⁹ Kyivstar’s chief technology officer reported that “one by one all these base stations went down [initially in early March] because of the power connection [and] then because of physical damage.”¹²⁰

Kyivstar told Human Rights Watch that residents could continue to connect to Kyivstar’s signal near its office after March 1 because the company’s engineers placed a diesel-powered transmitter and antenna next to a fourth-floor window.¹²¹ A shortage of diesel after March 15 meant they only switched it on for a few hours a day. One of the city’s deputy mayors confirmed that the city council provided the diesel generators.¹²² The company said a March 15 attack damaged the building’s fifth and sixth floors. The building was then significantly damaged by shelling on March 20, and Russian forces were briefly in the building later that day, according to Kyivstar.¹²³ Satellite imagery from March 29, 2022, shows damage to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors on the southern side of the building. Photos taken on March 19 by employees of Kyivstar inside the building show damage to rooms whose windows are on the southern side of the building, while a video posted on February 8, 2023, on social media shows the damaged façade.¹²⁴ On March 21, all staff and their families who had been sheltering in the building left, except for two engineers who left on March 24.¹²⁵

Hospitals

Human Rights Watch identified 19 hospital campuses citywide and found that all of them were damaged during the fighting. The campuses of Hospital #1 and Hospital #4 were among the most heavily damaged, with some buildings destroyed.¹²⁶ To varying degrees, the physical damage and destruction limited the ability of hospitals to provide life-saving care, compounding the challenges hospitals faced due to limited supplies and medicine, the lack of electricity, and limited fuel to power their generators. For additional information on damage to hospitals, see Damage to Healthcare Facilities in Chapter VI.

Fire Stations

At least five fire stations in Mariupol were damaged in March and April-fire stations 22, 23, 24, 25 and 53, likely limiting their ability to respond to major attacks and put out fires throughout the city.¹²⁷ Human Rights Watch analyzed satellite imagery that showed that station 22 was damaged between March 9 and 12, with significant damage on the roof; station 23 was damaged between March 14 and 19; station 24 was completely destroyed between March 14 and 19; station 25 was completely destroyed between March 30 and April 3; and station 53 was damaged between April 11 and 15.¹²⁸

An emergency responder who led the fire response in the city between February 24 and March 14 said he was based at Fire Station #22, which was struck on March 10 at a time when 287 people were sheltering in the basement, including first responders and their families. He said that the attack killed one person and injured nine. He also said that his team prioritized putting out fires in residential buildings, not commercial buildings such as shopping centers and offices, and that his teams got their water from reservoirs around the city where he said there was always enough water.¹²⁹

Truth Hounds spoke with a man who moved with his family to a building that was part of Fire Station #22 and who described the moment the building was struck:

It was between 9 and 10 a.m. on March 10. I was on the third floor with my family when I heard an explosion. It hit the second floor and we ended up on the second floor, under the rubble. My wife and I were rescued after 30 minutes and my son after three hours. Both of them had bad injuries to their arms and legs. Most of the people living there at the time were in the basement and were not hurt. Others who were on the upper floors had minor injuries. A friend and colleague of mine, Pankov Oleksiy Serhiyovych, was killed but they didn’t find his body until months later.¹³⁰

Services in Mariupol Since May 2022

After taking over the city in April 2022, Russian forces took many months to even partially restore the remaining residents’ access to electricity, water, and basic healthcare services.

According to one city official, as of September 2022, city residents still had limited access to food, water, health care, and other social services.¹³¹ In some medical centers, she said, medical care was limited to measuring blood pressure and auscultation, or listening to lungs, the heart, and the abdomen. One of the city’s deputy mayors said that, as of the end of August 2022, attempts to fix part of the electricity grid had resulted in fires and that as of mid-summer, some districts had been sporadically getting electricity, but that none had access to natural gas.¹³²

In early May 2022, the Emergency Situations Ministry of the DPR said that its filtration plant had been relaunched for the first time since a power substation was damaged on March 2 and that, as a result, water supply would be restored in Mariupol on May 12 or 13.¹³³ Yet it was only in early August that some districts started to receive running water for a few hours at a time.¹³⁴ Even with running water partially restored, city officials raised concerns about the continued risk of water-borne infectious diseases, including cholera, since the sewage treatment and drainage systems had not been restored.¹³⁵ Mariupol was also still relying on local informal water sources, such as small rivers and water holes that were known from past testing to contain cholera-causing bacteria, as it was still not receiving water from the Donbas canal, which had been damaged in late February.¹³⁶

On October 9, the DNR’s Ministry of Construction said that water had been restored to all four of the city’s districts.¹³⁷ The director of Mariupolvodokanal, who fled the city but continued to monitor the water situation in Mariupol after it was occupied, told Human Rights Watch in December 2022 that, according to his assessment, 80 percent of the water supply infrastructure and 50 percent of sewage treatment infrastructure had been restored.¹³⁸ In March 2023, he said he thought that almost all damaged water infrastructure had been repaired, but that the assault on the city had completely destroyed four sewage treatment plants, including two on the Left Bank, on Azovstalska Street and in Skhidnyi District, and two on the western side of the city: Pumping Station #6 near Zelinskoho Street and one on Mytropolytska Street.¹³⁹ He said that his company estimated that the cost of repairing damage to the city’s water infrastructure would amount to about US$700 million.¹⁴⁰

By February 2023, the occupying forces had largely repaired the electricity and natural gas grids, in addition to the water infrastructure, but there were still regular cuts.¹⁴¹ These cuts were ongoing in December 2023.¹⁴²

Chapter IV Struggling to Survive in Shelters

Between February 24 and mid-April 2022, tens of thousands of Mariupol residents took shelter for days or weeks wherever they could, to reduce their risk of death or injury from airstrikes, shelling, and other attacks. Some fled to collective shelters in hospitals and in other non-residential buildings, some of which were supported by city officials and volunteers. Others stayed in the basements of their own buildings or fled to other basements.

With no way to bring food into the city or keep shops open, people survived on food they had in their apartments, what volunteers distributed, or food that people risked their lives to find and bring back to the shelters to share with others. Without running water, people tapped radiators, collected rainwater, melted snow, and dodged shelling to fetch water from springs and wells. Without heating and electricity in below freezing temperatures, they huddled together under blankets. With the threat of unpredictable attacks, they risked their lives to cook meals on makeshift wood fires in courtyards and near building entrances, trying to increase their chances of making a swift retreat to basements in case of sudden attack.

The outside world adopted the basements as symbols of Mariupol’s resistance.¹⁴³ Inside them, civilians survived in the harshest of conditions: terrified, cold, wet, thirsty, and hungry in the darkness. Unknown numbers of people died underground, stricken down by the elements and with no access to drugs and medical treatment.

Shelters Across the City

On February 24, the Mariupol City Council published a list of 1,033 addresses entitled “List of basement and other underground premises, in which, if necessary, it would be possible to shelter the population of Mariupol.”¹⁴⁴ Almost all were in residential buildings. Many residents stayed in these designated shelters, while thousands of others sheltered above and below ground in dozens of mostly non-residential buildings.

City officials and volunteers mobilized to support residents during the initial days of the Russian assault, including by providing transport to help people relocate from the Left Bank and villages near the outskirts of the city to shelters and neighborhoods in the city center that were considered relatively safer in the early days of the assault. Volunteers baked thousands of loaves of bread until electricity was cut on March 2, and they collected food from markets to bring to the shelters. They also organized the collection and distribution of water, blankets, clothes, diapers, batteries, and medicine, as well as diesel to power generators at hospitals, coordinating these efforts via radio communication and word of mouth.¹⁴⁵

These efforts provided life-saving assistance to thousands of residents, but delivering aid in many parts of the city became increasingly difficult as the Russian attacks intensified. Officials and volunteers faced mounting challenges to communicate, coordinate, and move around the city. By March 5, such efforts had become very dangerous and shelters across much of the city were soon no longer accessible.¹⁴⁶ In some cases, though, hundreds of people remained in the same shelter for weeks, supported by volunteers.¹⁴⁷

Based on interviews with city officials, volunteers, and residents, as well as posts on the Mariupol City Council’s Telegram channel, we identified 27 locations, including two residential buildings, that functioned as shelters that were supported by city officials and volunteers in late February and March.¹⁴⁸

Hundreds, if not thousands, of other ad hoc shelters existed in mostly residential basements across the city. People in them, too, had to organize food and cooking facilities, find drinking water, and manage sanitation. Some hospitals treating the injured became de facto shelters, some of which came under attack.

The non-residential ad hoc shelters, which did not appear to receive any support from city officials and volunteers, included an industrial sized basement¹⁴⁹ under the Hleb du Soleil restaurant at Myru Avenue 76; a natural gas company’s building at Mykolaivska Street 16 that sheltered about 70 people;¹⁵⁰ School #14 that by March 2 had 300 people sleeping on the concrete floor and where the poor ventilation made it hard to breathe;¹⁵¹ a shelter for about 30 people under the city’s Court of Appeals at Myru Avenue 1;¹⁵² the European Hotel at Prymorskyi Boulevard 9;¹⁵³ the Stymul gym at Sechenova Street 63a;¹⁵⁴ and a former confectionary factory owned by the company Roshen.

Attacks on Shelters

As further described in Chapter VII, many people were killed or injured during attacks that damaged or destroyed the buildings where they were sheltering. We also spoke with six other people who witnessed attacks that hit five additional shelters, including at Metalurhiv Avenue 89 on March 20;¹⁵⁵ two Palaces of Culture that witnesses said were supported shelters, one north of Myru Avenue and the other on the Left Bank, that were struck on March 6 and March 25, respectively;¹⁵⁶ a building housing the Administration of the Livoberezhnyi District at Peremohy Avenue 16 that was struck on March 25;¹⁵⁷ and the City Palace of Culture at Metalurhiv Avenue 150, which was struck between March 23 and 26.¹⁵⁸ According to the witnesses, no one was killed or injured in these buildings during these attacks.

Deaths and Suffering in Shelters

Many residents described the fear and suffering they endured for weeks on end in the city’s basements and other shelters, expecting attacks at any moment and enduring sub-freezing temperatures with little or no light. People with chronic health conditions had no access to much-needed medication, which meant some of them died. The fact that they were cut off entirely from the outside world compounded the stress and trauma they endured day and night.

A video filmed by Russian videographer and uploaded to Telegram on April 21, 2022, captures the dark and cramped conditions in one of the basement shelters of Myru Avenue 5-7.¹⁵⁹

Some shelters were in hospitals, where conditions soon went from difficult to appalling, with medical personnel having to improvise treatment and surgery.

A 57-year-old English teacher told Human Rights Watch how she and her husband sheltered at the city’s Regional Intensive Care Hospital after they were both injured on February 27 during shelling near her home in the Left Bank. Tetiana Burak’s arm was broken, and her husband’s face, jaw, and legs were all injured, leaving him unable to eat or speak. They received some rudimentary treatment at the hospital, but then she said that many of the doctors and nurses started to leave because they were worried about their own families, and they “ran out of medicine, bandages, everything.”

After the hospital was hit during an attack on March 13, she said the patients moved to the basement to shelter. Most were adults who had been wounded from bullets or shelling:

There were hundreds of people in the basement. It’s hard to figure out how many. The basement was packed. There were mattresses and we had some ventilation. But there was only a little light, no water, and no toilets. The hospital had a generator, so we sometimes had electricity.

She said that she knew of at least 10 people who died while she was sheltering in the basement; she said she watched as their bodies were taken out.¹⁶⁰

Human Rights Watch also spoke with a military nurse who moved to the bunker under Hospital #3 on March 17 and described the conditions under which she helped provide medical care:

There were about 60 of us there, including a few doctors and nurses, who performed surgery, even amputations, with improvised anesthetics. They saved lives, but one girl died. I helped with dressing and bandaging wounds and with injections. We had some diesel and a power generator.¹⁶¹

A woman who worked as the chief engineer at the Azovstal steel plant said her husband died in the basement of their home at Peremohy Avenue 27 because she could not reach Hospital #4, about 300 meters away at Likuvalnyi Lane 3, to get him medicine for his heart condition:

My husband was 43 years old, and he died in our basement on April 1. He had trouble with his heart before the war and took medicine. It got worse during March, but we couldn’t reach Hospital #4-just a few minutes’ walk away-because of the heavy shelling. I wanted to help him, but I just couldn’t take the risk. I was unable to bury him before I fled the city. I couldn’t even register his death.¹⁶²

Another woman said that in mid-March two older people died in the basement in which she had taken shelter on the Left Bank for three weeks because they had run out of heart medication.¹⁶³

A man who took shelter in the basement of a residential building with at least 10 older people said that some of them who had difficulties walking refused to eat because they could not reach anywhere private to relieve themselves.¹⁶⁴

A woman who moved from her home in the Left Bank to the basement of a friend in the city center said she survived without natural light between February 28 and April 7:

There was no light because we covered the small ventilation holes to protect us from shrapnel and bullets. I was stressed by the constant darkness. I made a candle from a piece of cotton and cooking oil. When I woke at night and there was darkness everywhere, I almost suffocated. I needed light to breathe and reduce my stress, so I lit my candle and looked at the flame.¹⁶⁵

Another woman, who lived in the basement of Enhelsa Street 39 next to the Drama Theater from February 24 until mid-March, also described the challenge of living only by candlelight:

It is hard to understand what it is like to live in darkness, in cold and damp conditions. My husband fell sick after he got hypothermia and then an infection. When we ran out of candles, we poured oil onto plates and made a wick from cotton. That was our only source of light, so there was a lot of soot. All the towels were black. It was only when we left that we all realized we were covered in soot.¹⁶⁶

The military nurse, who sheltered at Hospital #3‘s bunker from March 17 until around April 25, said:

Two of the men regularly left the shelter and brought food back for us. We would have starved without them. We found an old water hole in the shelter and so we each had about 100 milliliters of water three times a day for drinking, brushing our teeth, and washing. We defecated in plastic bags that we took outside when it was safe. We wore the same clothes all the time. It was dark and cold, and our collective breath created a lot of moisture. Everything was soggy. At night, I was covered in several blankets, and they all were disgustingly moist and cold.¹⁶⁷

A 20-year-old described the conditions in a shelter at the Pryazovskyi State Technical University, where he and his brother fled after an attack hit a supermarket near their home on March 4:

There were already some 900 people there in classrooms about two meters below ground level. People slept in corridors. There was no place for us to sleep there so my brother and I slept in a cold room on a narrow metal table feet to head. We broke radiators to get drinking water.”¹⁶⁸

A woman initially sought refuge at the City Palace of Culture at Metalurhiv Avenue 150 and the building of the District of Livoberezhnyi administration at Peremohy Avenue 16, which she said were attacked on March 6 and 25 respectively. She then moved to Hospital #4, where she stayed until April 7:

We didn’t leave the basement as there was constant, really loud fighting. We heard tanks and artillery and planes. There were 15 children and 12 adults, mostly men, in the basement. We made candles out of oil and cloth. We couldn’t charge our phones. We ran out of food after two days. We also ran out of water, so some of the men got water from a sauna nearby. That lasted for about four days. Then we broke the heating pipes of the basement and tried to purify some of the water with cloth. We found a bag of barley, but we didn’t have water to boil it, so we ate it dry and raw. That was our only food for about one week. The children were very hungry. They were crying and their teeth were hurting.¹⁶⁹

Yevhen Sosnovskyi, a theater actor, and photographer, said Russian forces compelled his family and the other residents in their apartment building to leave their homes on March 20. They were not able to take any food or belongings with them. Sosnovskyi’s niece and her two young children-all of whom were badly injured in an earlier attack - were staying with Yevhen and his wife. “We weren’t able to go far,” Sosnovskyi said, “because Olena [his niece] could hardly walk. And all the streets at the time were covered in rubble and stones. So we could only make it to the next door building, Metalurhiv 89.” Soon after they arrived, Sosnovskyi said they “heard the horrific cries of a woman.” Her son and husband had left the basement to check on their apartment, and they were both shot dead.¹⁷⁰

“The first night in the basement was very scary,” said Sosnovskyi. He added:

The building was attacked, and some apartments on the top floors were burning and no one was extinguishing the fires. … The fire started to reach the basement. We had no water to stop the fire. We couldn’t go outside because of the heavy shelling. So all night long we tried to stop the fires however we could, with whatever means we had. I had burns on my face and elsewhere from droplets of burning plastic. But eventually we protected our basement from the fire.

Sosnovskyi ventured outside the next morning to try to find some food for his family. As he tried to check the homes of nearby relatives to see if any food was left behind, the scene he saw “resembled things from apocalyptic films,” with burned corpses and rubble littering the streets. Twice he was detained, threatened, and questioned by Russian soldiers. He only made it back to the basement shelter with half a stick of butter and a handful of walnuts.

On around March 24, Sosnovskyi said he was able to obtain a limited amount of food for his family for about six weeks at what he called a “Russian field kitchen,” which was there primarily to feed soldiers occupying the buildings in the area.

In addition to the stress of trying to feed his family and treat their wounds without any professional medical assistance, Sosnovskyi described the trauma of not knowing what was happening in the rest of Ukraine. He got hold of a radio, which could only access Russian radio stations. “But even news from there allowed us to understand that Russia had failed to seize Kyiv and Kharkiv,” he said. And that gave them some hope and motivation to keep going until they could find a way to flee the city.

Chapter V Fleeing the City

When Russian forces began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, many of Mariupol’s approximately 540,000 residents believed the city would not fall, and so stayed. The eastern edge of the city’s Left Bank had been about 10 kilometers from the front line since 2014, when Ukrainian forces repelled attempts by Russia-affiliated forces to take it. They anticipated this time would be the same.

As the scale and intensity of the invasion became clear and parts of the north, east, and west of Mariupol came under attack, tens of thousands of people fled in the last days of February, including on evacuation trains. These stopped running on February 27, after Russian shelling hit the tracks to the north of the city. Many of those living on the Left Bank or in the outskirts of the city moved to the city center, anticipating that it would be spared. Others stayed where they were because they did not have their own transport or were older, looking after sick relatives, or living with disabilities.

By March 2, those who remained in Mariupol were trapped there, as Russian and Russia-affiliated forces had almost fully encircled it. The city quickly became exceedingly dangerous for civilians as Russian air and ground attacks escalated and residents lost access to electrical power, communications, running water, heating, gas, and medicine. The near-constant shelling and bombing made it impossible for people to move around. To our knowledge, only a few dozen of Mariupol’s residents succeeded in fleeing to Ukrainian-held territory during the first half of March.

Russian forces may have deliberately blocked and certainly did not facilitate either the delivery of humanitarian aid from Ukrainian territory or the departure of civilians during the first half of March and, to a less certain extent, in the second half of March and April.

Throughout this period, senior Ukrainian government officials in Kyiv, Mariupol city officials, UN officials, the ICRC, the Ukrainian Red Cross, and volunteers repeatedly-unsuccessfully-attempted to organize evacuations and deliveries of humanitarian aid into the city. This was despite Ukrainian authorities securing initial approval from senior Russian officials in Moscow on several occasions for plans to bring aid from Ukrainian-held areas to Mariupol on trucks, along with buses to pick up civilians who wanted to leave.

Russia has provided no information to show that there were genuine security grounds that would have temporarily permitted restrictions on the delivery of aid or the evacuation of civilians. These seemingly arbitrary blocks on evacuations and aid prevented Mariupol residents from accessing objects indispensable for the survival of the population, such as adequate food, clean water, sanitation, and health care. Russia’s actions should thus be investigated as violations of the laws of war, and if found to be deliberate, possible war crimes.

The trucks with humanitarian aid and the empty buses never made it past Russian checkpoints on the roads leading to Mariupol from Ukraine-controlled territory. Ukrainian officials prepared around 100 buses at Mariupol’s main bus depot to evacuate civilians, but said that Russian forces’ repeated shelling of the bus depot left most of the buses inoperable by mid-March.

Between March 14 and 31, at least around 60,000 people were able to escape the city and the greater Mariupol area in ad hoc convoys of hundreds, even thousands, of private vehicles. Making it to a car that still functioned and then getting out of Mariupol was an ordeal, as shelling and fighting continued to engulf the city. It then took people up to 72 hours to make the nearly 300-kilometer journey from Mariupol to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia via Berdiansk, as Russian and so-called DNR officials at some 15 checkpoints repeatedly examined and questioned passengers, in particular men, and searched their vehicles. Another nearly 60,000 people made it to Ukrainian-controlled territory in April and around 4,600 people in May.

Some people remained in the city because they did not have their own cars, or their cars had been damaged in the fighting. Others had no information about when, where, and how they might be able to leave, since the fighting was intense and communications were down. It was still harder for the sick or injured, older people, and people with disabilities and their caregivers to make the perilous journey, and so many of them stayed behind. Others were afraid they would not make it past the checkpoints, because they had links to the Ukrainian military or had publicly expressed anti-Russian sentiments. And some, including many older people, chose to stay because Mariupol was their home.

By March 22, it became even more difficult for people to leave Mariupol for Ukrainian-controlled territory as Russian and DNR forces cemented their control over more of the city. They forced or coerced some residents who wanted to go to Ukrainian-controlled territory onto buses that took them to Russian and DNR-held villages and towns, where they underwent an abusive security screening process called “filtration.”¹⁷¹

The ICRC, the UN, and Ukrainian authorities continued their efforts to negotiate an official humanitarian corridor. But it took until early May before they were able to evacuate about 650 civilians from the Azovstal steel plant and other parts of the city, just after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and raised “the imperative” of allowing humanitarian access and evacuations out of Mariupol.

By mid-June, around 150,000 people were estimated to still be in the city.¹⁷² In addition to those who made it out to Ukraine-controlled territory or beyond, others were transferred-in many cases forcibly-to Russia, while others died or were killed during the assault.

Fleeing During the Last Days of February

“No one could imagine the horrors to come.”

— Lifelong resident of Mariupol¹⁷³

Ukrainian officials estimate that between 100,000 and 130,000 people had fled Mariupol by early March.¹⁷⁴ But many residents thought that Russia’s attack on the city would be short-lived, recalling that Russia briefly backed a failed insurgency in Mariupol by DNR forces in April 2014. These forces retreated to territories about 10 kilometers from the eastern edge of the Left Bank, where they had remained until the full-scale invasion.¹⁷⁵ Vaagn Mnatsakanian, a city council staffer who oversaw burials until mid-March, said:

Nobody believed that such a war could happen. At a city council meeting on February 23, everyone said we were safe and that everything would be okay. When it started the next day, a lot of people like me thought it would be like in 2014. But we were wrong. A few people left the city on February 24, but the rest of us didn’t.¹⁷⁶

On February 24, Ukraine’s state-owned train operator Ukrzaliznytsia announced it had started to run free-of-charge evacuation trains on an adjusted timetable.¹⁷⁷ However, many trains left the city half or nearly empty during the initial days of the invasion.¹⁷⁸ A woman said that when the attacks started on February 24, she and many others were not worried: “Everybody thought the attacks would be limited to small-scale shelling of suburbs, so we didn’t think the information about evacuation trains was important. No one could imagine the horrors to come.”¹⁷⁹

Then, at some point between February 25 and 27, Russian shelling damaged railway tracks near the town of Volnovakha, about 65 kilometers north of Mariupol, a public transport official from Mariupol city council told Human Rights Watch.¹⁸⁰ He and other officials had organized five or six city buses to evacuate train passengers from Volnovakha to Zaporizhzhia. After this, he said, no trains left or entered Mariupol. Human Rights Watch reviewed satellite imagery from March 14, 2022, which shows damage to the rail tracks around the train station that would have made it impossible for trains to use the line.

In the last two days of February, many residents moved from the city’s northern outskirts to the city center, calculating that it would be spared. A man from Sartana, Mariupol’s northeastern-most suburb, about 10 kilometers from the center, said he moved to the center on February 26, and organized two buses to bring others from Sartana because “everyone thought that only the outskirts of the city would be attacked.”¹⁸¹

By February 28, Russian forces were already blocking aid from coming into the city; they prevented a truck from Zaporizhzhia loaded with medical equipment and antibiotics and other medicine from reaching Mariupol.¹⁸²

Trapped in the City as Evacuation Efforts, Aid Deliveries Fail

Almost no residents were able to leave Mariupol between March 1 and 13, as Russian and Russia-affiliated forces encircled the city, blocked off all exit routes, and intensified their bombardment. At this time, residents lost access to all basic services and were trapped in their basements and other shelters. Throughout this period, senior Ukrainian officials, led by Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, negotiated with Russian officials, including Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Vasilyevich Fomin, to allow aid trucks and empty buses to drive from Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol and to evacuate civilians from the city in those buses.¹⁸³ But despite these efforts, no aid trucks or buses reached Mariupol until early May.

Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk said that on March 4, both sides exchanged letters that “seemed like Russian officials had given their permission to open [such] a corridor.”¹⁸⁴ Early on March 5, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that, based on an agreement with Ukrainian officials, Russian forces would observe a ceasefire beginning at 9 a.m. to help establish a humanitarian corridor for civilians to leave Mariupol.¹⁸⁵ But the aid and evacuation convoys that subsequently left Zaporizhzhia for Mariupol were repeatedly blocked at Russian checkpoints on the drive to Mariupol.

The head of the Mariupol District Council said that by March 4, when he was in Zaporizhzhia, he and other volunteers had organized 64 evacuation buses and 10 aid trucks loaded with humanitarian cargo and medicine, and that Russian officials had agreed to let them travel from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol through Orikhiv and Polohy.¹⁸⁶ But various attempts to do so between March 3 and 10 failed, due to fighting in Polohy and shelling that hit parts of the agreed route. Russian forces eventually allowed about 10 trucks with aid to reach Berdiansk, but they only allowed Ukrainian volunteers to unload three trucks there and ordered the rest to return to Zaporizhzhia. It is unclear what happened to the aid that was unloaded in Berdiansk.

A priest tasked by Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk to work with 10 priests and other volunteers to get aid trucks and empty buses to Mariupol said they tried to reach Mariupol on March 11, 12, and 13. On March 11, a convoy of 11 trucks with medicine, food, and drinking water as well as about 20 empty buses left Zaporizhzhia but turned back shortly before Vasilievka, about 200 kilometers northwest of Mariupol, due to fighting nearby. The next day, the same convoy reached Vasilievka where Russian forces checked the vehicles and let them pass. Russian authorities directed the convoy by phone to drive via Tokmak to Berdiansk, where at about 9 p.m., DNR forces took some of the pasta, canned food, and cereals from the trucks and then let them enter Berdiansk. The next morning, the convoy tried to leave Berdiansk for Mariupol, but Russian forces said they could not let the convoy proceed due to continued fighting and because “nationalists” [a Russian propaganda term referring to Ukrainian forces] in Mariupol might kill some of the volunteers taking the aid in.¹⁸⁷

Human Rights Watch also spoke with a volunteer based in Zaporizhzhia who participated in attempts between March 5 and 12 to bring aid trucks and empty buses to Mariupol.¹⁸⁸ He said that at some point Russian forces allowed Ukrainian volunteers in Berdiansk to unload aid from six trucks. The aid was kept in a warehouse and never reached Mariupol. During another attempt, on either March 6 or 7, Russian forces stopped the convoy about 50 kilometers southeast of Zaporizhzhia, but then rapidly abandoned their checkpoint due to nearby fighting. The convoy was unable to proceed along an alternative route due to mines. During a second attempt on March 12, he said that Russian forces in Berdiansk said that there was too much fighting in the area and that they feared Ukrainian forces would attack the convoy.

Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk said that on March 13, the buses and trucks had had to turn back at Berdiansk due to continued fighting in Mariupol.¹⁸⁹ The next day, she said Russian shelling had prevented a convoy of buses from reaching the city with humanitarian supplies.¹⁹⁰ That same day, the Mariupol City Council said a convoy of vehicles with humanitarian aid that left Zaporizhzhia for Mariupol was stuck in Berdiansk district “due to Russian forces’ non-compliance with the ceasefire agreement.”¹⁹¹

A senior UN official who was involved in the negotiations said that to the best of her knowledge, some DNR authorities were in favor of allowing aid to reach the city from Ukrainian-held territory but that, despite Russian authorities’ claims to the contrary, officials in Moscow did not want aid to go in from there. She also said that Russian authorities repeatedly claimed it was unsafe for aid convoys to proceed to Mariupol from Ukrainian-held territory.¹⁹²

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly accused Russia of breaking ceasefire agreements.¹⁹³ Russian officials also accused Ukrainian authorities of breaching ceasefire agreements and otherwise preventing Ukrainians civilians from leaving the city.¹⁹⁴ Whether or not a ceasefire agreement is in effect, all parties to a conflict have an obligation to take all feasible steps to minimize harm to civilians and not take actions that would unnecessarily put civilians at risk.

Attacks on Mariupol’s City Bus Depot

Mariupol city officials had hoped to use the 100 or so buses at Mariupol’s main bus depot to help with evacuations, but the depot was repeatedly shelled by Russian forces, starting on March 4. A public transport official said that City Council members prepared 100 buses that together could evacuate over 11,000 civilians in case Russian officials agreed to a ceasefire, and identified police officers who could drive them.¹⁹⁵ In early March, the buses were parked in the open or in hangars at the city’s Bus Depot #4, at the intersection of Bakhyvandzhi Street and Gromovoi Street.

Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk and a deputy administrator of the Mariupol City Council said that the evacuation agreement reached with Russian officials on March 4 mentioned that some buses would be leaving from Mariupol as part of the evacuation efforts, in addition to the empty buses coming from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol. Russian officials had reportedly asked for the locations of pre-boarding gathering points, which included the city’s Drama Theater.¹⁹⁶

The transportation official said that the depot was attacked for the first time on the night of March 4, followed by more attacks in the following week:

More than 10 buses were damaged that [first] night, mostly their tires and windows. We had no staff left to repair them. There were craters in the ground next to the buses, but there was no damage to the roof of the hangar or to surrounding streets and buildings. We removed the diesel and batteries from the destroyed buses to use in other buses. There were more attacks on the depot and every day we lost a dozen buses. By March 13, there were only five or six undamaged buses left. I later saw on Russian Telegram channels that when the Russians took over the city, they used the remaining six and restored another six from scrap.¹⁹⁷

The first available satellite imagery of the depot after March 4, taken on March 12, shows 102 buses parked in the open at the depot, with three or four of them burned. It also shows small holes in the roof of the bus depot and in the roof of an adjacent building. Other damage that may have been done to the buses by March 12, such as damage to their tires, windows, or mechanical parts, is impossible to assess using satellite imagery. Satellite imagery taken on March 29 shows that of the 104 buses parked outside that day, 98 are in the same position that they were in on March 12. Nine of them are burned and there is some debris next to approximately 30 other buses. Photos and footage of the damaged buses at the depot taken by two city officials in early March, including two taken on March 5, show damage to various external parts of some of the buses, including windows and tires.

Damaged buses in Mariupol’s Bus Depot #4, March 5, 2022. © 2022 Private

Satellite imagery taken on March 12 shows at least 29 buses apparently being used as barricades across roads in three locations on the western end of the Central District, including 22 that were burned. Satellite imagery taken on March 13 and 14 also shows 11 buses apparently being used as barricades in three other locations in the same area, of which 14 were burned.¹⁹⁸

Mariupol City Council Evacuation Announcements, March 5 to 8

A series of Telegram posts by the Mariupol City Council starting on March 5 announced plans for convoys of private cars to leave the city, but then said all of them had to be canceled as the proposed evacuation route was still unsafe.

March 5, 10:28 - … from 09:00 to 16:00 there will be a ceasefire. The evacuation of the civilian population begins at 11 a.m. The route Mariupol-Nikolske-Rozivka-Polohy-Orikhiv- Zaporizhzhia was selected as a humanitarian “green” corridor. Evacuation of the population on municipal buses will take place from three locations by municipal buses: Sports Arena (Nakhimova Ave 53); Drama Theater (Teatralna Square 1); Kalmiuskyi district administration [building] (Metalurhiv Ave 193). It will be possible to leave the city by private transport.¹⁹⁹

March 5, 12:18 - As of 10:55, the ceasefire will only take effect on the territory of the Donetsk region. There is fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region. We are negotiating with the Russian side to get confirmation that the ceasefire will include the evacuation route out of Mariupol.²⁰⁰

March 5, 13:42 - Urgent! The evacuation of civilians is postponed as there is no ceasefire.²⁰¹

March 5, 14:20 - Today we received confirmation from the Russian Ministry of Defense that the passage from Mariupol is safe. [But] when we were ready to go, the Russian army began shelling along the corridor we were supposed to use. As a result, now there is no ceasefire. This does not give us a sense of security for movement from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia.²⁰²

Over the next few days, Telegram posts by the Mariupol City Council reflected the failure of ongoing attempts to evacuate residents using safe evacuation routes.

March 6, 11:00 - Today at 12:00, the evacuation of the civilian population begins. The humanitarian “green” corridor is Mariupol-Portivske-Manhush-not going to Nikolske-Respublika-Rozivka-Bilmak-Polohy-Orikhiv-Zaporizhzhia.²⁰³

March 6, 16:38 - The evacuation convoy with locals was unable to leave Mariupol today. The Russians began regrouping their forces and shelling the city heavily. It would be extremely dangerous to take people out under such conditions.²⁰⁴

March 6, 17:42 - From 09:00 to 11:00 people were gathered. At 09:20 a Grad attack happened. Eight buses had to take people out of the city. Eight trucks from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol with food and medicine could not come. 30 buses that were supposed to take out women, children, older people didn’t make it.²⁰⁵

March 8, 16:20 - The occupying forces again demonstrated their deception by attempting to break into the city at the moment the green corridor was organized for people. … This video was filmed by a Ukrainian drone on the Melekine highway, which was supposed to become a green corridor.²⁰⁶

Ukrainian officials said that evacuations from Mariupol were suspended on March 6 because Russian forces shelled areas close to the humanitarian corridor that both sides had agreed on.²⁰⁷ On March 7, the director of operations for the ICRC told international media that one of the agreed-upon routes from Mariupol was mined.²⁰⁸

On March 11, Russia proposed evacuation routes for civilians “from Mariupol along two routes to Rostov-on-Don in the Russian Federation via Novoazovsk and Taganrog, then by air, rail, and road to designated destinations or temporary accommodation.”²⁰⁹ As described below, many residents of Mariupol who wanted to flee to Ukrainian-controlled territory were offered no other possibility by Russian forces but to board buses traveling first to Russian-occupied areas and then remain there or travel onward across the border into Russia.

Ad Hoc Car Convoys Leaving the City After March 14

While Ukrainian efforts to organize official humanitarian corridors and evacuation routes failed throughout March and April, tens of thousands of residents were able to escape Mariupol during the second half of March in ad hoc convoys of private cars. It appears that Russian forces largely agreed to allow residents to leave the city and travel to Ukrainian-controlled territory during this period so long as they went through multiple searches at checkpoints of Russian and Russia-aligned forces along the way.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported that a convoy of people in “private vehicles, buses or on foot” left the city on March 14 “towards Zaporizhzhia, after the route and security guarantees for evacuation convoys were agreed upon … by the parties to the conflict.”²¹⁰ Early on March 15, Ukrainian officials were posting messages on Telegram announcing that convoys of cars should leave the city.²¹¹

Between March 14 and 31, the Zaporizhzhia City Council registered 59,067 people who had driven in packed private cars from Mariupol and nearby towns and villages to the Russian-occupied town of Berdiansk and onwards to Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia. Most arrived between March 15 and 22.²¹² Cars continued to arrive after volunteers left the registration center at 5 p.m. each day, and not everyone who made it to Zaporizhzhia during the day came to the center to register.²¹³

On March 31, Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk said that 75,000 people from Mariupol had been evacuated during the month of March.²¹⁴

Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of people at a registration center in Zaporizhzhia on March 17, 2022, about their flight from Mariupol between March 14 and 17.²¹⁵ Many of them said they had left in personally arranged convoys with private cars and that their journeys took between 24 and 72 hours. They described the fear and exhaustion they felt, moving very slowly and passing through 15 to 20 Russian checkpoints where soldiers searched the men and cars, as well as residents’ phones for evidence of connections to Ukrainian forces. Others described seeing Russian personnel detain people at checkpoints, a weapon being fired over a person’s head, and Russian forces firing at a car at a checkpoint near Tokmak on March 16, injuring a girl in the face.²¹⁶

By 1 p.m. on March 14, at least 160 private cars had left Mariupol for Zaporizhzhia, passing through Russian-held Portivske, Melekine, Manhush, and Berdiansk.²¹⁷ The next morning, the Mariupol City Council reported that 300 people from Mariupol had arrived in Zaporizhzhia.²¹⁸

A man said that he left the city on March 14 with his 11-year-old daughter, together with people he had met while sheltering who had two empty spots in their car:

We left the city in a long line of cars and drove to Manhush, where we were stopped at a DNR checkpoint. They inspected all the cars and checked men’s hands for gunpowder traces and let us all pass. In Berdiansk, Russian troops wrote down cars’ number plates and let us pass. We drove to Zaporizhzhia the next day. Just after we passed Kamianske village, there was shelling. We think the Russians were firing at Ukrainian trenches that were not far from the road, so the mortar shells landed all around us. I didn’t see anyone injured. There were more than 200 cars behind us, and I later heard on the news that some people had been killed and injured on the road towards Zaporizhzhia. I did not see them myself. We finally reached the area controlled by Ukrainian troops.²¹⁹

Many more residents made it out on March 15.

At 10 a.m. that day, Ukrainian officials posted messages on Telegram saying a “humanitarian corridor” had been opened between Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia, passing through Manhush, Berdiansk, Tokmak, and Vasylivka.²²⁰ However, the first deputy mayor of Mariupol told Human Rights Watch that “no green corridor” had been agreed upon by Russian and Ukrainian officials for that day.²²¹

By 2 p.m., the city council said 2,000 cars had left Mariupol and that another 2,000 were on the edge of the city, waiting to leave.²²² A team from the Associated Press (AP) was in what one of the journalists described as a “5-kilometer-long traffic jam,” part of an exodus of “around 30,000 people … that day.”²²³ The journalists said the convoy included at least one Red Cross convoy of about 20 cars and that the convoys had to cross 15 Russian checkpoints before reaching safety.

Vaagn Mnatsakanian, the city council staffer who oversaw burials in early March, said:

On March 15, I went to the ICRC office. They said that the road to Melekine was now open though without any guarantees or green corridors. The ICRC had been given the green light from their bosses to try and get out of the city. So I left. Near the edge of the city, there was a horrible traffic jam involving two or three columns of thousands of cars. After about three hours, we got out of Mariupol and then it took nine hours to drive the 90 kilometers to Berdiansk. Between there and Zaporizhzhia, I saw five burned civilian cars by the roadside.²²⁴

Another man who fled in mid-March said he had seen at least 10 burned cars on the side of the road or in fields, and in one case, a dead body lying next to a burned car.²²⁵

A builder who fled his home on the Left Bank with his wife and two young daughters in early March and sheltered in the city center for two weeks described their escape:

On March 15, we couldn’t get even out of the house. Projectiles were landing all over the place in our district. Then the shelling stopped in our area and the battle moved about 500 meters away. My family jumped in our car, and we drove to the port. There was a huge traffic jam there of between 1,000 and 2,000 cars. Ukrainian soldiers organized the cars into a single column and that’s how we moved out of the city. At about 2 p.m. we passed through Melekine, on the coast, and then drove to Manhush and from there through several Russian and DNR checkpoints to Berdiansk, arriving at 10:30 p.m. The Russians questioned everyone at the Berdiansk checkpoint and then let people pass.²²⁶

Another man said he left the city in his car at 9 a.m. on March 15 and drove through 10 Russian checkpoints, including on the outskirts of Berdiansk, and reached Zaporizhzhia by 11 p.m.²²⁷ A woman said she was in the first column of about 300 cars to leave Mariupol on March 15 and that the first Russian checkpoint was in Berdiansk.²²⁸

Hundreds of people who had been sheltering at the Drama Theater left the city in significant numbers early on March 16.²²⁹ Many more left after the theater was bombed later that morning, with “the line of cars leading out of the city and along the coastal road stretch[ing] for miles” on the road to Berdiansk.²³⁰

A man whose son was injured during an attack on Mytropolytska Street 175 on March 10, said that doctors said he had to take his son to Dnipro for medical treatment and that he had therefore made a wooden splint the full length of his son’s body and driven out of the city in a convoy of cars on March 20, with his son “crying the whole way to Dnipro because of the pain.”²³¹

Most said they made it out of Mariupol during this period in private cars, but some said they left on foot. One man described how he and his wife and daughter walked and ran out of the city on March 16:

We don’t have a car, so we had no choice. We ran for seven kilometers through the city and left the city just south of the port. It was mid-morning and there was constant intense shelling all around us. There were a lot of dead bodies in the streets. Then a car took us to Melekine and onward to Berdiansk. We passed through seven Russian checkpoints, and they let us through.²³²

A woman said she and her family fled the city on March 17 on foot and that, although most of the cars that passed them were packed full of people, some drivers took pity on them and gave them lifts for part of the way.²³³ Another woman said she and her daughter left the city on foot on March 17, and were later given a lift by a driver who took them through the many checkpoints.²³⁴

One woman and her daughter said they left by bus. They had survived for eight days in their basement and decided to flee on March 20, just after their apartment was destroyed during an attack on their building. The mother, whose arm had been broken in an earlier attack, said:

Friends told us that there were buses taking people out of the city, leaving Mariupol from somewhere near the district hospital. The registration line was long, so we only managed to register for a bus leaving on March 21. There was heavy shelling that day, but we still decided to make the 15-minute run from our home to the hospital. We were terrified. All we had was a bag with sweaters. Friends of ours with three children also managed to get to the bus. We were overjoyed they’d made it too. As we drove out of the city, we saw it was all burned and black. We cried. Our city was gone. It took us two days to reach safety in Zaporizhzhia.²³⁵

Some people who wanted to leave during this period did not make it out, either because the convoy was shelled as they were trying to leave or because they were unable to find transport. A doctor described her daughter’s failed attempt:

My daughter was the only member of our family who still had her identity papers. On March 21, she tried and failed to leave, and came back and told us what had happened. She said she had gone to the departure point near the Komsomolets cinema in Prymorskyi District, where we knew there was also a shelter. There were 70 people waiting to leave the city in a column of cars. When she reached the front of the line, the cars were shelled, so everyone fled.²³⁶

A 50-year-old man, who tried to flee the city in mid-March but only managed to escape three weeks later, described the scene outside the Drama Theater on March 16: “There were around 50 people on the road there, women, older people, and children. They were throwing themselves in front of passing cars, begging for a lift. But there was no space in the cars.”²³⁷

Satellite imagery taken on March 19 and 21 shows large numbers of cars driving from Mariupol on the road towards Berdiansk.²³⁸ The imagery from March 19, taken shortly after noon, shows about 200 cars at the southern exit of Mariupol on the O0545 road that runs along the coast in the direction of Yalta. The imagery from March 21 at the same time of day shows around 250 cars at that location.

Continued Efforts to Secure Official Evacuation Routes, Aid Delivery

As some people made it out of the city in the ad hoc convoys, and others were transferred by Russian authorities to Russian-controlled territory (see below), Ukrainian officials and others continued their efforts to negotiate an official humanitarian corridor.²³⁹

The Zaporizhzhia-based volunteer told Human Rights Watch that Russian forces in Berdiansk continued to deny buses access to Mariupol. After an attack on a nearby Russian navy vessel on March 24, buses were not allowed to enter Berdiansk at all and were forced to stop at the Lunar Circle roundabout, about eight kilometers to the west of Berdiansk.²⁴⁰

On March 27, French President Emmanuel Macron said that within two days he would be speaking to President Putin to help organize civilian evacuations from Mariupol.²⁴¹ On April 2, Turkish Minister of Defense Hulusi Akar said that his government was working with both Russia and Ukraine to help prepare for the evacuation of civilians and wounded soldiers from the city.²⁴²

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk said on March 31 that the ICRC had confirmed that Russia had agreed to open a humanitarian corridor to Mariupol.²⁴³ She said Russian troops had blocked a convoy of 45 Ukrainian buses on its way to the city at a checkpoint near Vasylivka, about 40 kilometers south of Zaporizhzhia. She also said Russian forces had seized 12 trucks with aid meant for people trapped in the city.²⁴⁴

Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk later said that four evacuation buses had left Mariupol on April 20, stayed in Berdiansk overnight, and reached Zaporizhzhia on April 21.²⁴⁵ But some who heard about the evacuation that day never saw the buses. One Mariupol resident said that on April 20 he heard on the radio that there would be an evacuation convoy leaving within an hour from the Port City shopping mall.²⁴⁶ When he arrived with his family, he saw about 200 other people waiting. No buses arrived, and he remained in Mariupol for another 10 days. He tried again a few days later after hearing on the radio that Russian forces would again arrange for buses to evacuate residents from near the same mall.²⁴⁷ Again, the evacuation never took place.

On April 24, Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk was quoted as saying that hopes of establishing a humanitarian corridor out of the city earlier that day had failed because Russian forces were continuing to fire weapons.²⁴⁸

A successful humanitarian corridor to Ukrainian-controlled territory was finally established on April 30, which facilitated the evacuation of some children and women.²⁴⁹

The same man who tried to leave twice from Port City shopping center and nearby said he tried again to leave from Port City on April 30.²⁵⁰ However, Russian forces were filming everyone waiting at the shopping center to leave the city, including him and his family, while a loudspeaker warned of an imminent missile attack and directed people to a shelter. He said he thought this was a Russian attempt to claim it was Ukrainian forces who were a threat to Ukrainians in Mariupol, not Russian forces. He left the city with his family later that day by car, together with dozens of other cars he saw lined up at a checkpoint on the western outskirts of the city, and reached Zaporizhzhia on May 4.

In early May, UN Secretary-General Guterres met President Putin in Moscow and stressed “the imperative of enabling humanitarian access and evacuations from besieged areas-Mariupol, first and foremost.”²⁵¹ On May 3, the UN and ICRC were allowed to access the Azovstal steel plant, from where they evacuated 101 civilians,²⁵² as well as 58 people from the village of Manhush.²⁵³ On May 4, they evacuated “more than 320 civilians from the city of Mariupol and surrounding areas.”²⁵⁴ They evacuated 170 more people from the Azovstal steel plant and the Mariupol area on May 8.²⁵⁵

No further official efforts were made to facilitate evacuation efforts or humanitarian aid deliveries, as Russian forces soon took over full control of the city.

Forcible Transfers to Russia and Russia-Controlled Territory

As more of the city came under the control of Russian forces between mid-March and early May, many Mariupol residents who wanted to flee to Ukrainian-controlled territory were instead forcibly transferred to Russia or Russian-occupied territories. A September 2022 Human Rights Watch report documented these transfers in detail.²⁵⁶ Some of those forcibly transferred were rounded up by Russian officials in Mariupol on suspicion that they had ties to the Ukrainian military. Others wanted to leave the city for Ukraine-controlled territory but were offered no other possibility by Russian forces but to board buses that took them first to Russian-occupied areas, where they could remain or from where they could travel onward across the border into Russia.²⁵⁷ Forcibly transferring civilians outside their territory is a serious violation of international humanitarian law and may amount to a war crime.

Russian and Russia-linked officials also subjected thousands of these Ukrainian citizens to a highly invasive process referred to by Russia as “filtration,” a form of compulsory security screening. Officials typically collected civilians’ biometric data, including fingerprints and front and side facial images; conducted body searches, and searched personal belongings and phones; and questioned them about their political views.

Thousands of children from Mariupol were among those forcibly transferred to Russia. These transfers later formed the basis of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s arrest warrants for Russian President Putin and the children’s rights commissioner in his office, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. They have both been charged with the war crimes of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfers of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.²⁵⁸

Chapter VI Extent of Damage to the City

During their offensive against Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol, Russian forces attacked much of the city with explosive weapons with wide area effects, including heavy artillery, large mortar projectiles, multi-barrel rocket systems, missiles, and air-dropped munitions. Attacks struck hospitals, schools, other critical infrastructure, cultural centers, and thousands of high-rise residential buildings containing tens of thousands of apartments. In some cases, the attacks started fires that burned parts of, or entire, buildings. As a result, Mariupol suffered some of the most extensive physical damage and destruction of any city in Ukraine during Russia’s full-scale invasion. Mariupol today would be barely recognizable to many of its former residents.

Human Rights Watch conducted a comprehensive building damage assessment of the city center, as well as an assessment of damage to educational, and health facilities citywide. This damage assessment combines an analysis of satellite imagery, which largely shows damage to the roofs of buildings, with drone footage and other photo and video analysis that demonstrates damage to the facades and interiors of buildings, and accounts from witnesses. The analysis of near real-time satellite imagery, photos, and videos is especially pertinent given that many of the damaged buildings have since been demolished by the Russian occupation authorities, and reconstruction efforts are well underway.

This analysis found that by mid-May 2022, 93 percent of the 477 multi-story apartment buildings in the central part of the city’s Central District had been damaged.²⁵⁹ All 19 hospital campuses city-wide were damaged. Of the 89 educational facilities that we identified across the city, 86 were damaged.

The use of explosive weapons with wide area affects in populated areas heightens concerns of unlawfully indiscriminate attacks. These weapons can have a large destructive radius, are inherently inaccurate, or deliver multiple munitions simultaneously. They not only kill and injure civilians at the time of attack, but also have long-term ripple, or “reverberating,” effects. Damage to civilian infrastructure, for instance, interferes with basic services such as health care and education, infringing on human rights. These weapons also inflict psychological harm and can lead to long-term physical impairments such as traumatic brain injuries, the loss of limbs, and hearing loss. They can further cause environmental damage and displace communities.

Damage to Residential Buildings

Human Rights Watch focused its comprehensive damage assessment on 14-square kilometers of the city center: the area surrounding the Drama Theater, all along Myru Avenue, the major transport artery of the city, and two city blocks to the north and south of Myru Avenue. The boundaries include Kuprina Street to the west, Shevchenka Boulevard to the north, Bakhchyvandzy Street to the south, and close to the Kalmius River to the east.

The assessment found that the area contained 9,043 buildings and that 4,884 of them, or 54 percent, were damaged. This included 443 of the area’s 477 high-rise buildings, or 93 percent, and 2,673 of the area’s 5,673 single story structures, or 47 percent.

This damage resulted in tens of thousands of Mariupol residents losing their homes and often all their belongings, contributing to mass displacement and homelessness. Beyond the immense financial loss, every family faced acute psychological suffering, as their homes were turned to rubble or made uninhabitable.

Damage to Schools

We identified 89 educational facilities across the city and found that 86 of them were damaged to some extent.²⁶⁰ This includes 71 out of 74 primary and secondary schools and all 15 university campuses.

Witnesses described Russian attacks on three schools in which Ukrainian forces were deployed. Other witnesses described air-dropped bombs hitting two schools they believed were empty at the time. Mariupol City Council Telegram postings referred to four other schools that were damaged.²⁶¹

Human Rights Watch also spoke with 12 people who said they saw Ukrainian military forces positioned in February and March inside nine educational facilities in Mariupol: school 11 at Arkhip Kuindzhi Street 95; school 25 at Zelinskoho Street 108; school 27 at Troitska Street 56; school 33 at Pishchanyi Lane 18; school 42 at Karpinskoho Street 25; school 62 at Volhohradska Street 1; school 64 at Pylypa Orlyka Street 92; Kindergarten 113 at Yasnopolyanska Street 23; and the Center for Children for Extracurricular Activities at Azovstalska Street 160.

Schools and other educational facilities are normally civilian objects and protected under the laws of war from attack. It is not unlawful, however, for military forces to deploy in schools. When schools are used for military purposes or are occupied by military forces, they become legitimate military targets.

In 2019, the Ukrainian government endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, an international political commitment that aims to protect education during times of war by strengthening the prevention of, and response to, attacks on students, teachers, schools, and universities. Russia has not endorsed the declaration. By January 2022, Ukraine had trained about 1,000 military officials on the Declaration and its associated “Guidelines for Protecting Schools and Universities from Military Use During Armed Conflict.” In July 2022, a high-level military order was issued to further restrict military use of educational facilities.²⁶²

The reported military use of schools and attacks on schools have severely disrupted access to education. This is likely to continue long after, as repair and reconstruction of schools can require significant resources and time. Such attacks also have a significant negative impact on the psychosocial well-being of children, parents, and teachers.

Damage to Healthcare Facilities

Our assessment found that all 19 of the city’s hospital campuses were damaged.²⁶³ The campuses of Hospital #1 and Hospital #4 were among the most heavily damaged, with some buildings destroyed.²⁶⁴

The Ukrainian Ministry of Health provided a list of 34 healthcare facilities in Mariupol consisting of 64 buildings, including small clinics, dental centers, and administrative buildings. The list indicated that 26 of these buildings were destroyed and 38 were damaged between February 24 and April 15, 2022.²⁶⁵ An assessment conducted by the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a Kyiv-based think tank, concluded that 82 out of 106 assessed healthcare facilities (including pharmacies) had been destroyed or damaged, and that 33 out of 46 primary care facilities were damaged.²⁶⁶

In addition to the attack on Hospital #3 (described in Chapter VII), witnesses referred to three attacks that damaged the Regional Intensive Care Hospital. A man who lived a few hundred meters away said he moved into his building’s basement on February 27 or 28 after he saw smoke coming from the hospital.²⁶⁷ A woman who was on the eighth floor of the hospital on March 2 said she heard an attack hit close to the hospital at around midday, damaging some of the lower floors.²⁶⁸ Another woman who was inside the hospital on March 13 said an attack damaged a traumatology unit on the second floor and the ceiling of another room, which collapsed, killing one person and injuring another.²⁶⁹

The damage to healthcare facilities across the city significantly inhibited access to lifesaving medical care as thousands of Mariupol residents desperately needed treatment for injuries, illnesses caused by the deplorable conditions in shelters, and preexisting conditions. In June 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that by the end of March, “all hospitals [in Mariupol] able to receive injured civilians were damaged or destroyed [and] … the damage and destruction coupled with the lack of electricity and medical supplies meant that hospitals had effectively ceased to function.”²⁷⁰

Hospitals, including military hospitals, have special protections under the laws of war, and deliberate attacks against hospitals and other medical facilities that are not being used to carry out attacks are prohibited. Under the Geneva Conventions, while the protection of hospitals ceases if they are being used outside their humanitarian function to commit “acts harmful to the enemy,” adequate warning must first be provided before the hospital can be attacked if the warning goes unheeded. Any attack on a hospital that is being used outside of its humanitarian function must be proportionate in relation to the anticipated military advantage.

As described below, Russian forces occupied the Regional Intensive Care Hospital and Hospital #3, and at the Regional Intensive Care Hospital appear to have committed abuses inside the hospital by firing at civilians passing by in cars. They also launched rockets from the hospital grounds, subjecting the hospital to possible attack.

Chapter VII Case Studies: Attacks Harming Civilians

The laws of war prohibit attacks against civilians and civilian objects that are deliberate, do not discriminate between civilians and combatants, or cause harm to civilians disproportionate to any expected military gain. Also prohibited as indiscriminate are attacks that are not directed at a specific military objective. Parties to the conflict have an obligation to do everything feasible to verify that targets of attack are military objectives. They must do everything possible to cancel or suspend an attack should they determine the target is not a military objective or would cause disproportionate loss of civilian life.

The following 14 case studies involving 18 locations describe Russian airstrikes and artillery attacks that struck presumptively civilian structures-residential buildings, hospitals, the city’s drama theater, a food storage facility, an aid distribution site, and a supermarket. The basements of many of the residential buildings served as shelters. In these incidents, we found no evidence of a Ukrainian military presence in or near the building that was struck, except in a few cases where there was a very limited military presence and where the attacks caused disproportionate civilian harm.

Several of the attacks were carried out with guided weapons, including air-dropped bombs, indicating that the buildings hit were deliberately targeted. Deliberate, indiscriminate, or disproportionate attacks that are carried out with criminal intent-that is intentionally or recklessly by those ordering them or carrying them out-are war crimes.

Several of the cases were apparent Russian laws-of-war violations that may amount to war crimes.

Human Rights Watch asked the Russian Defense Ministry about its basis for each of the attacks in the case studies below, but had not received a reply at time of writing.

The warring parties should impartially investigate the following cases consistent with their obligations under the Geneva Conventions to investigate apparent laws-of-war violations committed on their territory or by their forces.

Food Storage Site North of the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, March 1

On March 1, 2022, an attack hit a food storage facility, destroying half of the space used to store food, killing one man, and injuring two other people.²⁸⁰ The city’s first deputy mayor said that grocery stores had agreed to give city officials and other volunteers food to store for distribution to those in need around the city. On February 25 and 26, they had stored considerable food in this facility, which belonged to a municipal garbage disposal company called Komunalnyk, about 200 meters to the north of the northeastern-most part of the Azovstal steel plant’s perimeter.²⁸¹

The company’s director said that on February 24 and 25, six 12-meter-long open trailer trucks brought about 20 pallets with bottled water and food-including pasta, flour, cereals, vegetable oil, sugar, and salt-from the Metro shopping mall to the facility, where his staff unloaded them with forklift trucks and stored them inside the facility.²⁸²

A city council member said he and a team of volunteers had gone to organize the storing of food at the facility on March 1, and that they also made bread there to distribute to those most in need.²⁸³ Just after they finished organizing the food, the attack struck the building. A second city council member said that she was later told that the attack happened about 20 minutes after she had left the site.²⁸⁴

Komunalnyk’s director said the attack had seriously injured one of the company’s security staff, Dmytro Horbachov, 53, who later died.²⁸⁵ He also said that he later saw the remnant of a Grad rocket protruding from the ground near the building and that the angle suggested it had come from the east.

Satellite imagery taken on March 10, 2022, the first image available after March 1, shows impact craters 100 meters west of the facility, on the other side of Kalmius River, but no damage to the roof of the facility. Satellite imagery taken on March 13 shows damage to the roofs of four buildings next to the facility, including one completely collapsed roof.

Torhova Street 20, March 8

An attack hit a residential building at Torhova Street 20 on March 8, killing three women and two children. A man who was visiting a friend who lived next door, said:

That day, I went to bring food to a friend with a disability who lived just to the east of the theater. It wasn’t that safe to move around, and I was scared, but I went anyway to help him.

At about 5 p.m., we were smoking a cigarette just outside his building. There were explosions, but they were quite far away. I didn’t see any soldiers or military vehicles in the street at any point that day. I was watching three women, one boy about 10, and a girl, about 12, who were in front of a shop that is on the ground floor of the three-story building that was hit.

Suddenly I heard the slow and heavy sound of something falling from the sky. Then I saw a flash and smoke and saw that part of the building above the store had collapsed. It was all like in slow motion. We were scared, so we ran away, though not very far. We were in shock and waited for about 10 minutes and then went back to where we had been standing to see whether there were any survivors. I saw five bodies lying on the ground: the two children and three women I had seen before. The girl had lost a leg. They were not under the rubble but lying next to it in the street. I didn’t see any blood on their bodies.

About a 30-second walk away, just across the road from where they were killed, there was a playground with a covered sandpit. My friend and I moved the children’s bodies into the sandpit. Then I went home and never returned.²⁸⁶

Satellite imagery from March 10, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows damage to the middle section of the roof, as well as debris next to the eastern side of the building. Analysis of additional satellite imagery shows the building was subsequently damaged four times.²⁸⁷

Hospital #3 and Pryazovskyi Technical University, March 9

Airstrikes hit Mariupol’s Hospital #3 and the neighboring Pryazovskyi Technical University one after the other on March 9, killing at least five people and wounding 18 others.

Hospital #3

On March 9, images were beamed around the world showing a pregnant woman being carried on a stretcher through a heavily-damaged hospital courtyard in Mariupol.²⁸⁸ She was one of two people known to have died after an air-dropped bomb landed at about 2:50 p.m. that day in one of the courtyards of Mariupol’s Hospital #3, damaging two buildings belonging to the city’s Territorial Medical Association for Children’s and Women’s Health (maternity and pediatric units).²⁸⁹ The woman, Iryna Kalinina, died later that day of her injuries.²⁹⁰ Her baby, delivered by caesarean section, was stillborn.²⁹¹ Ukrainian officials reported that the attack had killed two adults and a child, and wounded 17 medical staff and patients.²⁹² Among the wounded was Marianna Vyshemirska, whose image was also seen around the globe after she was photographed walking down a flight of stairs and through the bombed courtyard while nine months pregnant.²⁹³ On March 10, she gave birth to a girl.²⁹⁴

Russian officials made several claims relating to the presence of Ukrainian military forces at the hospital at the time of the attack.²⁹⁵ Just a couple of hours before the attack, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that Hospital #3 was empty of staff and patients and was being used by Ukrainian forces as a firing position.²⁹⁶ On March 10, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russian forces had targeted the hospital because it was being used as a base by the Azov battalion.²⁹⁷ The Russian ambassador to the Netherlands accused Ukraine of hiring actors to feign injuries after the attack.²⁹⁸ No evidence was put forward substantiating these claims.

The husband of a nurse said he saw about 15 members of the Ukrainian territorial forces positioned as guards in the hospital in the days before the attack, but the presence of military personnel providing hospital security does not make the hospital a valid military target.²⁹⁹

Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Ukrainian forces were using the hospital as a base or to deploy their forces.

A doctor who was operating on a patient in the hospital’s Oncology Unit, about 60 meters to the east of where the munition struck, said that the blast wave threw him and other medical staff into a corridor next to the operating room and that sandbags that had been covering the building toppled onto the floor.³⁰⁰

A member of the Mariupol city council was making tea with a friend just outside the building where they were sheltering about 500 meters from the hospital grounds.³⁰¹ He described hearing the roar of an approaching plane, a bomb falling, and then two explosions whose shockwaves pushed him and his friend into the building. They went out and saw smoke coming from the hospital grounds but rushed back in when they heard a plane approach again. The council member said he heard another bomb fall and then two more explosions. The shockwave this time blew out the doors and windows of his building. He later found out that the second attack had hit nearby university buildings. Another man in a separate building also recalled two explosions, the first of which had him running out of bed and into the street, and a second one so strong that the shockwave flung him back inside his building.³⁰²

Those who survived the attack inside the hospital or rushed there to help encountered horrific scenes. A volunteer at the hospital, who ran from the Oncology Unit to the maternity unit to help injured people get out, said:

There was a crater in the courtyard, about 15 meters wide and about 5 meters deep. A few of us helped the wounded and pregnant from the first floor come down to the courtyard and took them to ambulances. I saw between 12 and 15 wounded people with different wounds, including some badly torn flesh. We took one of the injured men, about 50 years old and wearing military clothes, into one of the hospital’s buildings. His face was burned, and he smelled badly burned. I watched him die.³⁰³

The head of Mariupol city council’s Department of Social Protection also came to the scene shortly after the attack. She had been working out of the Territorial Center of Social Services close to the maternity hospital since February 25.³⁰⁴ The woman, a colleague, and two policemen named Serhii and Oleksandr were all thrown to the ground in their office, she said, and the blast wave shook the doors and shattered windows. Then, it was quiet, and across the courtyard they saw the maternity and pediatric units on fire. She said:

Serhii and Oleksandr radioed for help and then they and a few of us, including a man called Andrii in a cap and red and grey coat, ran to the buildings. Andrii and Serhii appear in this photo of four men evacuating a pregnant woman on a stretcher [Iryna Kalinina, referred to above].³⁰⁵ The woman’s thigh was badly injured, and a doctor said there was no way to save her. While on the stretcher, she shouted, “Don’t touch me! Let it be as it is.” I heard she later died.

We took some of the children to the nearby children’s surgical ward. Newborn children were taken to the Regional Intensive Care Hospital. Soldiers and policemen took pregnant women and women who had recently given birth to a hospital in District #17. We transported people in cars, [they were] on each other’s laps. A lot of people were panicked and bleeding, but none of us knew how many people were injured.³⁰⁶

One man who had brought his injured mother to the hospital was impressed by the doctors’ work, so he decided to stay and help find food for people sheltering in the basement. He said:

Until March 16, seven or eight members of the [Ukrainian] Territorial Defense forces with Kalashnikovs [military assault rifles] guarded the hospital. Two were positioned near the entrance of the Oncology Unit on the first floor and some were near the power generator. Sometimes I saw some of them patrolling inside the children’s section. After March 9, they slept for several days in the maternity unit to protect it from looters. The only vehicles I ever saw on the hospital grounds were two red and white ambulances and a blue truck.³⁰⁷

A doctor said he started treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers at the hospital on March 4.³⁰⁸ A military nurse also said that the hospital was treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers at the time of the attack.³⁰⁹ She said that when Military Hospital #555 at Amosova Street 54 ran out of space, she and other military medics moved wounded soldiers from there to Hospital #3 on March 6 or 7. They received medical care in at least one part of the hospital, the Oncology Unit.

A video recorded by an AP journalist on March 9, 2022, captures the sound of the explosion, shows from a distance smoke rising from the hospital campus, and then shows the damaged facades and interiors of the maternity and children’s units, and some of the wounded.³¹⁰ Another video, recorded by the Ukrainian military and distributed to the media, shows the damaged upper levels of the maternity unit.³¹¹ A surgeon working in Hospital #3 said that the damage was so extensive that the units could no longer be used.³¹²

Satellite imagery from March 12, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows a crater with an estimated diameter of 10 meters in the courtyard of the hospital and damage to the facades of the maternity and pediatric units. An analysis of the crater and the damage to nearby buildings indicates that the explosion was caused by a 500-kilogram aircraft bomb that uses an impact fuze.³¹³

Pryazovskyi State Technical University

Moments after the attack on Hospital #3 on March 9 at about 2:50 p.m., Russian aircraft also attacked buildings belonging to the Pryazovskyi State Technical University, killing at least two people and injuring at least one. None of the seven witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they saw any Ukrainian military forces in the area at the time of the attack.³¹⁴

The university is near the easternmost buildings of Hospital #3, and about 400 meters to the west of the Drama Theater. Almost all of the university’s buildings are arranged in a closed square campus. By early March, some of these buildings were sheltering hundreds of people who had fled to the city center to escape attacks in the Left Bank.

Mykhailo Puryshev owned a restaurant called Evo in a building at Myru Avenue 68, which has an entrance on Universytets’ka Street and faces the university campus. He said he saw no Ukrainian military at any of the university buildings, including the inner courtyards, on March 8 or 9.³¹⁵

Puryshev said that he was standing just inside the entrance of the building with his restaurant and recorded videos with his phone at the moment of the March 9 attack on the university, as well as the aftermath in one of the nearby streets.³¹⁶ He said:

I heard planes and an explosion from the direction of Hospital #3. I went outside with a few others and then I heard another plane coming closer. I warned the others, and we all ran inside. I was the last to enter and was pushed inside by the shock wave of an explosion. I had trouble breathing. I heard children in the basement crying in the darkness. From what I know, nobody died or was injured inside our building.

Shortly after, I went outside with my phone still filming and saw the horror. I started to cry, for the first time since the start of the attack on the city. About 100 meters to the west, I saw the body of a man lying in the street. I also saw a damaged car right opposite my entrance, about 30 meters away. Next to it, I saw the body of an older woman. Then I saw a seriously wounded man crawl out from the car. Later, Ukrainian soldiers who came to our building took him away. I helped the grandson of the dead woman drag her body to the corner of my building.

A university building opposite my building, at Universytets’ka Street 7, was damaged. Some people who were sheltering in my building later told me they had gone into that building a while after the attack and seen one body inside.³¹⁷

The footage recorded by Puryshev shows the moment of the attack and Puryshev leaving the building shortly thereafter and walking along part of Universytets’ka Street. The footage shows a body lying next to a car close to the entrance of his building.

Another man said he had been staying with a friend in the basement of a university building nearby and that they had been thrown to the floor by the shockwaves of the attacks on Hospital #3 and the university. He said:

We saw two bodies lying in the road on the side of the Evo restaurant. We saw damaged buildings and walked past a car that was burned and saw the remains of a person behind the wheel. We took a photo of the car, and we took photos of the buildings on both sides of the road.³¹⁸

Another man said he was jolted awake from a nap by an explosion and ran out of his building. He ran swiftly back in, as another attack hit nearby. He said:

As soon as the explosion woke me up, I ran outside to the courtyard. Less than a minute later, I heard an airplane above, loud, like a rocket. I heard a whoosh that started high pitched and then got lower in pitch. I heard an explosion from the direction of the university. I turned and ran back towards the building entrance and a shock wave lifted me off the ground. I picked myself up and ran back into the building.

After dark, I left the basement and went to the university. I saw that part of one of the university buildings had been destroyed and saw debris falling off another university building down the road, so I didn’t go any further. I didn’t see any bodies nearby. A little further down the road there were burning cars. I stayed for a minute and then went back. People in my building told me that the maternity hospital was hit first and then the university. About three or four days later I went to the university to meet someone. I saw a lot of burned cars. I saw a body lying in the street and then four bodies covered in metal sheeting.³¹⁹

Images taken on March 10 show damage to the southern facade and to part of the inside of the building.³²⁰ Further images taken on March 9 show the damage done to the northwest corner of the building, facing Universytets’ka Street 7.³²¹

Satellite imagery from March 12, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows significant damage to the entire northwest corner of the building of Universytets’ka Street 7, the collapsed roof of Universytets’ka Street 9 just to the south, and damage to the roof of at least one other building, at Kazantseva Street 7, that forms part of the enclosed campus.³²²

Based on witness testimony and images of the damage done to the buildings, we concluded that aircraft-delivered weapons were used in the attack.

Zelinskoho Street 98A, March 9

An apparent air-dropped bomb damaged a nine-story building at Zelinskoho Street 98A on March 9, 2022, killing at least two people. A woman and her husband, who lived in the building with the woman’s mother, said that the building was first hit on March 5 or 6, causing damage to one apartment.³²³ The woman described the second attack:

Early in the morning of March 9, the worst thing happened. Our neighbor, Vladimir Chupryna, who was about 55 years old, went outside to make coffee. A man called Ivan, who had left his home and was sheltering in our building, went with Vladimir to prepare some baby formula for his child. But then an airplane dropped a bomb. It landed right in front of the entrance and hit one of the cooking stoves. Fragments hit them [Vladimir and Ivan] and they died on the staircase just inside the entrance. Their intestines fell out, so the whole first floor was covered with blood. We wrapped their bodies and some of the men carried the bodies to the other side of the building.³²⁴

A series of images taken after the attack show broken windows and smaller damage done to several facades of the buildings.³²⁵ Satellite imagery taken on March 14-the first available after the building was hit-shows a small impact on the southern side of the roof.

Marinska Balka Street 67 and Vidkryta Street 23, around midnight March 10-11

At least three people were killed during attacks that damaged the nearby single-story homes at Marinska Balka Street 67 and Vidkryta Street 23 at around midnight on March 10-11, 2022.

A man who lived at Marinska Balka Street 67 said that he, his family, and some of their neighbors had taken to sleeping in his basement after February 28. Every day, he saw Ukrainian armored vehicles passing by his and his neighbors’ homes to distribute aid, but he said they moved on after doing this and were never stationed near his home.³²⁶ He described the night of the attack:

At midnight on March 10, I was sleeping in the basement with my wife and two daughters, and a neighbor and their two children. Suddenly I heard something hit the ground above us and part of the basement ceiling collapsed. No one was hurt. I went to the top of the stairs and saw that my house was damaged, but still standing. The garden shed had been blown into the living room. The windows and doors were gone.

Outside, I saw that the building just opposite my house had been hit and was on fire. I didn’t know the people who lived there. I helped a young man and his mother-in-law escape from the house, but his wife and her sister were screaming as they were trapped under the collapsed roof. They burned to death.

I found out that 14 other houses nearby were also damaged in that attack, but I don’t know whether anyone else was killed or injured. That night, many families from the area, including us, fled to shelter in the basement of a clothes shop about 100 meters to the south. Two days later we went back and found a man stuck under the rubble of his house. Somehow, he’d survived, and we managed to free him.³²⁷

A doctor who was staying with relatives just 75 meters away described how, in the aftermath of the same attack, she saved the life of a neighbor who was severely injured after an attack hit his house at Vidkryta Street 23 a little after 11:30 p.m. on March 10:

It was around midnight and silent in our area, and we were about to go to bed. I heard an airplane and bombs in the distance. Then bombs exploded close by and suddenly there was a loud explosion. I lost my hearing for some time. I saw a bright light outside and a shock wave hit the house and shattered the windows. My husband was thrown to the ground, and I covered my brother with my body. Part of a wall and a window fell onto my grandmother. Her arm was sticking out from the rubble, but we removed the rubble, and she was okay.

Then I heard someone outside screaming for help. I grabbed a cloth in case I needed a tourniquet and rushed outside. The house opposite ours, number 21, was gone. I saw a man about 20 and a girl about 12 lying where the entrance had been. There were fires all around, so it was very bright. The man said he had lost his legs and that I couldn’t save him and that I should save the girl instead. It looked like the man’s legs had been severed from his body, but I put the tourniquet on the leg that seemed more damaged than the other. The girl seemed ok, but one of her legs had been crushed by the wall.

I worked with other people to free them from under the rubble. It took a long time. One of our neighbors then took them by car to the hospital. I heard they were moved to another hospital which I heard was also hit two days later. I heard afterwards that the girl died of her injuries. In late April [2022], I saw an Instagram story about the injured man I’d helped. I visited him in Mechnikova hospital in Dnipro. He had lost both his legs but was doing okay.³²⁸

A video posted online on June 8 of Marinska Balka Street 67 shows DNR officials retrieving a body from under the rubble before moving the body into a marked van.³²⁹ The video also includes drone footage of the area, which shows the extent of damage done to Marinska Balka Street 67 and nearby houses. A large crater is visible directly behind the building. Satellite imagery from March 12, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows damage to the southwest corner of Marinska Balka Street 67 and severe damage to the adjacent houses, some of which are completely destroyed.

Mytropolytska Street 98, March 11

Between 3 and 6 p.m. on March 11, an air-dropped bomb hit a five-story apartment building at Mytropolytska Street 98, killing at least 17 people and causing significant property damage.³³⁰

A man who was in his apartment in a neighboring building just to the east of Mytropolytska Street 98 said he heard the attack and shortly after saw that the central part of the building had collapsed.³³¹ He said:

At about 3 or 4 p.m., I was taping the windows in my apartment. Just as I had finished, I heard a plane and went to the corridor to be safer in case of an attack. Then an explosion blew my windows out. Shortly after, I went to the entrance of my building and saw a fire at number 98. I walked over and saw that the part of the building above the middle entrance had collapsed. In the days before, I had seen many people cook just outside that entrance. Later that day, people who had been sheltering in number 98 came to shelter in our building. They said that people were in the building’s basement at the time of the attack and that some of the wounded had been taken elsewhere.³³²

Truth Hounds spoke with a woman who lived at Mytropolytska Street 94, about 100 meters to the south of number 98, who said she heard that there were people calling for help from inside the building just after the attack:

The superintendent of our building ran outside to see what happened. When she came back, she said that it was a ‘bloody mess’ and that we should go and rescue people, because she could hear people moaning and calling for help. I refused to go outside. Later, I heard from others that the fire department came to put out the fire but had to go away as the shelling continued.³³³

Dmytro Lastenko lived at Mytropolytska Street 94, and he moved in late February to the basement at Mytropolytska Street 98, which was listed as an official shelter for civilians in times of need. He told Human Rights Watch about the set-up of the basement:

The basement had six main rooms. There were a few smaller rooms for storing food as well as a toilet. The toilet had a small emergency tunnel leading out of it. There was one staircase to get to the ground floor. There were 18 other people in the room I stayed in. I think there were about 30 people in all parts of the basement at the time of the attack.

The day before the attack, on March 10, Lastenko said that two Ukrainian soldiers entered the basement. “I didn’t speak to them,” he said, “but a man from our basement who was sort of in charge, did. He told me later that they had wanted to take up position inside someone’s apartment above us, but that he had said no, because there were a lot of people in the basement. He said the soldiers then left.” Lastenko didn’t see any other soldiers in or near the building for the rest of that day or the next day.

He described the moment of the attack:

I didn’t hear anything before the explosion. The attack destroyed the room in the basement where I normally stayed. At the moment of the attack, I was in a room right next door. One part of the basement caught fire, although it didn’t spread. There was a lot of dust and pungent smoke. It was so dense that our torches could only light up the space right in front of our eyes. I found air on another side of the basement so I could breathe better.

I walked up the stairs. The exit to the ground floor was not blocked by rubble, although there was a lot of destruction a few meters away. Right after the attack, people crowded the exit to the building trying to leave.

Outside, the trees were littered with belongings from apartments, and cars parked in the courtyard were destroyed. I ran to Mytropolytska Street 100 right next door where I knew there was a shelter in the basement.

Lastenko said he went back to Mytropolytska Street 98 the next day to try to find his backpack, which had his personal documents in it:

I was down there for about 10 minutes but didn’t find it. The only room that was destroyed was the one I had been staying in. There was a lot of rubble. I saw one burned adult body at the entrance of the room. I also saw other body parts: two heads, one arm, and one leg. Everything was charred, clothes and skin. Some relatives of people staying in that room couldn’t find their relatives afterwards, so I fear that more people were killed than the ones I saw.

I shut myself away for two days in building 100 and didn’t speak to anyone. I still have problems sleeping after seeing the scorched bodies, knowing this might have been someone I knew.

Lastenko left Mariupol on March 18. He later returned with his parents in mid-May 2022 and again he went back to the building, where he finally found his identify documents. He said:

There were no bodies in the basement then but there were still remnants of the rubble. Everything was partially burned. Nothing was intact. It was very damp and there was still a bad smell. My stepfather and I used a shovel to dig out my documents. I found two lumps of hair and a cellphone with a case that stank of decaying flesh.

Lastenko recognized a phone that belonged to a young woman he had spoken with while sheltering in the basement, Khyrstyna Antipenko. He tracked down the woman’s mother, Stefaniia, in mid-May and gave her the phone.³³⁴

Stefaniia told us in April 2023 that five of her relatives appear to have died in the basement of Mytropolytska Street 98: her 24-year-old daughter, Khrystyna; her 27-year-old son-in-law, Ivan Antipenko; her 3-year-old granddaughter, Aryna Ivanivna Antipenko; her son-in-law’s 47-year-old mother, Svitlana Volodymyrivna Paraschchevina; and her son-in-law’s aunt, Svitlana’s sister, 44-year-old Natalia Volodymyrivna Antipenko.³³⁵

She said that they had all moved to the basement of Mytropolytska Street 98 on March 6 and that she had spoken to her son-in-law on March 8, the last time she spoke with any of her relatives. When she received her daughter’s phone in mid-May from Lastenko, she saw that her daughter had written her a text message on March 6 that had never been never sent due to the lack of phone coverage in the city. The message said, “Mommy, I am alive. Everything is fine with me. Love you.”

She said that Lastenko had told her how Khrystyna had prepared food, and that 10 minutes before the attack, she had taken it to the room that was shortly to be destroyed, called on her daughter to come to eat, and then served food to all the people who were in the basement. Lastenko told her that while he was able to escape, he thought everyone who had been in the room where Khrystyna had served the food had died.

Stefaniia later discovered a Telegram group set up by people looking for relatives who they thought might have died in Mytropolytska Street 98.³³⁶ A woman she met online through that group told her that five of her relatives, including two teenage girls, had also died in the basement.

On April 15, Stefaniia finally made it to Mariupol to try and find her relatives’ bodies. She said she regularly went to Mytropolytska Street 98 in the second half of April but that she never found their bodies, or saw anyone there removing rubble or bodies. She and her husband did find some of Ivan and Khrystyna’s belongings amidst the rubble, including their marriage certificate, educational certificates, medical records, Aryna’s birth certificate, and photos, including of the day Khrystnyna left the maternity hospital. She also found a bag with Khrystyna’s hat and Aryna’s overalls. She said she recognized Khrystyna’s smell on the hat. She also found a telephone and told members of the Telegram group. The husband of the phone’s owner met Stefaniia and, after charging the phone, showed her a video filmed in the basement on March 6 or 9 which showed Stefaniia's granddaughter playing in the basement. Svitlana, her son-in-law’s mother, and one of the teenage girls were also in the video.

Then in late April, she got news that their bodies may have been recovered. She saw a message posted on the Telegram group for people looking for missing relatives at Mytropolytska Street 98, saying that a recovery team retrieved the last five bodies from the building, including “a girl aged between 3 and 5, a man in dark clothes, a woman in a black jacket and blue jeans, and a woman in a pink robe whose body was decomposed.”

She described how she felt when she saw the post:

I realized that those were my [relatives’] bodies. That’s because they were talking about a small girl and about clothes I recognized. On March 9, Ivan had sent me a video that he had filmed while he was cooking outdoors. He was wearing a dark sleeveless jacket, a hoodie, and sport trousers. Khrystyna was wearing a black jacket and weathered-looking jeans. A woman in the Telegram group who had survived the attack said she knew that Khrystyna was wearing jeans with torn knees and a black coat, that Ivan wore dark clothes, and that Svitlana was wearing a warm pink robe.

I now feel so guilty that I didn’t stay there day and night because at some point while I wasn’t there, workers took their bodies away and now I can’t find them.

It took her until October 5 to find her granddaughter’s body (see Chapter VIII), and as of December 2023 she was still looking for the bodies of her other four relatives.

Pavlo, who was involved in recovering bodies from the building, said he was part of one of many recovery teams made up mostly of staff from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service and volunteers.³³⁷ He said that every morning they met at the Metro shopping mall, and that a man he was told was called Sergey Mishenko and some senior officials apparently reporting to him gave the teams instructions about which buildings they should go to that day to recover bodies that might be in the rubble.³³⁸

During his first day, on April 21, 2022, he was sent to Mytropolytska Street 98. People living in the area told him that an airplane had bombed the building, collapsing the central part of the five-story apartment complex into the basement. He said that the rubble, about two stories high, was made up mostly of concrete slabs that could only be moved with a crane and excavator.

Pavlo’s team was made up of a truck driver, an excavator driver, a crane worker, Pavlo, and three others who cleared the rubble. The other members of the team had already worked at the building for some days before Pavlo joined them. By April 23, the team had found five bodies and a leg. Two bodies and the leg were in the same destroyed room of the basement under the building’s “section 3,” and three were under rubble from upper levels of the building’s section 3 that had collapsed on top of rubble from the basement. Pavlo said his team was the second of three recovery teams that worked at the building in April. The first team worked at the building for some days during the second week of April and also found five bodies, including two or three in one of the basement’s corridors and the rest higher up in the rubble. The third team worked at the building on April 24 and 25 and found five bodies and two legs, belonging to the same person, all in the same destroyed basement room where Pavlo’s team also found bodies. The three teams found a total of 15 intact bodies and three legs belonging to two people, indicating that at least 17 people died in the attack.

Pavlo described the bodies that he personally uncovered:

We found the first body on April 21. We were removing large slabs with the crane and then there was a bad smell, so we continued with shovels. We found the body of a woman who I guessed was about 60 years old next to a large cooking cauldron near some tea and coffee boxes and canned food.

We also found the body of a young man in the center of the destroyed room. He had been decapitated by the falling concrete and his head was close to his torso. A woman who I think was staying in another section of the basement, said she had the dead man’s passport, and she gave me it. The passport belonged to a man called Dmytro, whose surname I can’t remember, born in 1988. I compared the passport photo to the man’s head and saw it was the same person. We put the passport in his pocket or taped it to his body and then put the body in a black body bag.

We also found a burned leg in a black boot in the destroyed room. I remember we were confused about how it had gotten there. Maybe the explosion had projected it there from some other part of the building where people died.³³⁹

Pavlo also said that each time his team found a body, they put it in a black body bag and left it by the roadside to be picked up by a truck, which he said took the bodies to a makeshift morgue near the Metro shopping mall. He said his team did not write anything on, or attach anything to, the outside of the black body bags because no one gave them any materials for that purpose, and that he was frustrated about this as he knew it would make it harder for relatives to later identify the bodies.

One image taken by an AP journalist on March 11 shows the building at Mytropolytska Street 98 on fire and a large section in the middle of the building destroyed.³⁴⁰ In two videos posted online, a woman films just outside the building as part of it is engulfed in flames. Two videos filmed in the days before the strike show residents cooking just outside the part of the building that was destroyed in the attack.³⁴¹ A video uploaded by Russian media in April 2022 shows DNR officials removing a body from the rubble.³⁴²

Satellite imagery from March 12, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows the collapsed central part of Mytropolytska Street 98.

Witnesses said they did not see Ukrainian military forces in the area at the time of the attack.

Human Rights Watch spoke with a man who was in the Regional Intensive Care Hospital, about 400 meters to the north of Mytropolytska Street 98, on March 11.³⁴³ He said he saw many Russian ground forces to the south, west, and north of the hospital and that by the end of the day they had surrounded the hospital. He said that for most of the day, he was inside the hospital and didn’t see what was happening nearby. At some point in the mid to late afternoon, he moved to the southern side from where he could see the high-rise buildings of Mytropolytska Street, including 98, which had already been hit earlier in the afternoon and was on fire.

Later he saw a few Russian tanks moving up and down Matrosova Street, some firing at the high-rise buildings on Mytropolytska Street. He said one of the tanks struck Mytropolytska Street 110.

On May 5, 2023, occupation forces added Mytropolyska 98 to their list of buildings slated for demolition.³⁴⁴ Satellite imagery taken on June 2 shows part of the eastern part of the building demolished. A video taken the same day shows the demolition in progress.³⁴⁵ Satellite imagery taken on June 13 shows the demolition had been completed.

The heavy fighting taking place in the area at the time suggests that there may have been Ukrainian forces near the building. The Russian Defense Ministry has not replied to our request for information concerning possible Ukrainian forces in the vicinity at the time of the fighting.

Dzerkalnyi Supermarket, Budivel’nykiv Avenue 86А, between March 4 and 13

The brief re-opening of the Dzerkalnyi Supermarket helped people find food. Six people described to us at least one attack that hit the supermarket. One person said they saw a person killed and another said they saw body parts of what they thought were about five people, while a third person said two people were injured. Witnesses mentioned different dates and it is possible that the supermarket, or areas close by, were hit more than once.³⁴⁶ The first available satellite imagery in March, from March 12, 2022, shows no damage to the building, while satellite imagery from March 14, 2022, shows a hole in the building’s roof.

One man was inside the supermarket with about 50 other people at the time of an attack, which he said was around March 10. He described the devastation:

I was a few meters from the bread section when something exploded near me. It pierced the metal roof and destroyed all the cables hanging from the ceiling.³⁴⁷ I was not injured, but I saw that one woman had been cut into pieces.

I ran out of the shop and about 50 meters south along Budivelnykiv Avenue, hid near the entrance to an office together with a Ukrainian soldier. As soon as I had taken cover, there was a mortar attack. When it stopped, I left. I saw body parts on the pedestrian and parking areas in front of the supermarket, as well as on Budivelnykiv Avenue. One of my friends who had been at the shop told me later that he had dragged what he thought was an injured woman to safety before he realized she was dead. On the day of the attack, the only military I saw was the soldier I hid with.³⁴⁸

Another man who was waiting to enter the supermarket at the time of an attack, which he said was on March 12 or 13, described trying to help seriously injured people:

I was in line with about 200 people waiting to get inside. Then something hit the supermarket and the blast knocked me to the ground. Two men near me, both about 40 years old, were injured. I tried to help them. One had something stuck in his leg and probably survived, but the other one was badly wounded in his stomach and left leg. I don’t know what happened to him.³⁴⁹

Witnesses described seeing blood and body parts at the damaged supermarket after it was attacked. A man who had waited seven hours in line to get into the supermarket on what he said was March 9 or 10 heard an explosion behind him as he was walking away with supplies:

I didn’t look back. I ran straight to my building. Two days later, I went back to the supermarket and saw body parts of what I think were about five people near the northern part of the supermarket. I also saw blood stains on the ground of the supermarket’s parking area, which faces Budivelnykiv Avenue.³⁵⁰

A woman who was inside a nearby apartment heard an explosion on March 4 and said that when she went to the supermarket later that day, she saw body parts on Budivelnykiv Avenue, a half-meter-wide crater outside the supermarket, damage to the roof, and shattered windows in surrounding buildings. She said that while there were often police and Territorial Defense Forces in the area in early March, she saw none that day.³⁵¹

Another woman said she had heard that one or two days before she visited the supermarket on March 8, something had exploded right next to a line of people waiting to enter and that several people had been killed:

I saw blood on the ground outside the supermarket. I waited in line a long time, but couldn’t get inside, so I went back the next day. On both days, the shop was guarded by [Ukrainian] soldiers. People told me the soldiers brought food from warehouses to the supermarket. I saw some arrive in an armored van filled with groceries. Some cashiers told me that soldiers drove them to work in the morning and took them back at the end of the day.³⁵²

The woman explained what happened on March 14 when her husband went to the supermarket to buy groceries: “When he came back, he said people told him a shell had hit the supermarket the day before and that it was badly damaged. He went inside with a flashlight, like other people, to see whether there was any food left and then came home.”

Another man also said that some Ukrainian soldiers were sometimes at the supermarket to keep order among people waiting to get in.³⁵³

A video uploaded to YouTube on April 5, 2022, shows the damage to the interior of the building.³⁵⁴ The building appears undamaged in satellite imagery taken on March 12, 2022, the first available date after the building was first hit. The next available imagery, taken on March 14, shows a large hole in the roof.

Myru Avenue 127, around March 13

Human Rights Watch spoke with two people about an attack that struck a nine-story building at Myru Avenue 127 on around March 13.³⁵⁵ It remains unclear how many people were killed or injured in this attack.

A man who had moved from his home to the building’s basement on February 24 said it was sheltering hundreds of people in 11 rooms on either side of a long corridor. He said:

Every evening at about 6 p.m., two of us counted how many people were staying in the basement and we informed the man overseeing the basement. The evening of March 12, we counted about 350 people, including 38 children. Forty-eight of the people on that list were staying in the only room that was damaged by the attack the next morning.

At about 6:30 a.m., an attack hit the building. The basement room that was affected was underneath the part of the building that collapsed. I later saw that this was the part under the two easternmost of the building’s four entrances. At the time, I was in another basement room, about 10 meters from the damaged room. I saw a family of five escape the room and I saw people help a man with broken legs get out. Apart from that, I didn’t see anyone else escape.³⁵⁶

A woman who lived nearby said she had heard about an attack that hit Myru Avenue 127 a few days before, on March 10:

There was lots of artillery landing in our area starting March 2 and on March 9 there was a big fire in our building. Some of the people living in our basement moved to the basement of Myru Avenue 127 and the next day, on March 10, that building was bombed.³⁵⁷

Satellite imagery collected on March 12, 2022, shows parts of the north and south facades collapsed. Imagery collected on March 13 shows additional damage to the southwest corner of the building, with the northeastern side and the roof completely collapsed. Satellite imagery from January 25, 2023, shows demolition of the building underway. Seven images of Myru Avenue 127 posted online show significant damage to the building.³⁵⁸ A video published in February 2023 shows the building almost completely demolished, with three vehicles on top of the rubble.³⁵⁹

Shevchenka Lane 29a, March 13

On March 13, 2022, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., an attack hit a single-story residential building at Shevchenkа Lane 29a, about 800 meters west of the Azovstal steel plant, killing seven people and injuring three.

Human Rights Watch spoke with a survivor of the attack, Tetiana Raizova, who was in the building at the time it was struck.³⁶⁰ She said that in the days before, she heard aircraft overhead, and what she called a “cannon” firing from inside her neighborhood, which she thought was Ukrainian. But the morning of the attack, she said, her neighborhood was quiet.

Raizova said the 12 people with whom she was living in the house were her son, Kyrylo Raizov (2 years old); her husband, Denys Raizov (29), and his paternal uncle, Hryhorii Raizov; her mother, Natalia Susuhorova (47); her father, Viacheslav Senior Susushurov (57); her father-in-law, Valerii Raizov (about 48); her maternal aunt’s husband, Oleksandr (about 48); her brother, Viacheslav Junior Susuhurov (23); her brother’s girlfriend, Veronika Tarasova (23); her mother-in-law, Svitlana Kolomeiko (about 46); and two other relatives whose names she confidentially shared with Human Rights Watch.

She later heard from relatives about six people who had been killed in the attack, including her son, her parents, her father-in-law, her maternal aunt’s husband, and her brother’s girlfriend. She said that three others were injured: her brother, her mother-in-law and another woman. All these casualties were also mentioned by a second witness, who in addition saw the body of a dead man in the street nearby (see below).

Raizova said that all 13 of them stayed in the basement overnight on March 12 and spent the next morning on the ground floor, cooking on a wood- and coal-fired oven in the living room. Her husband, Denys, and his uncle, Hryhorii, left the house sometime between 11 a.m. and midday, and within two minutes, a strike hit a 9 story-building about 50 meters away, she said. Raizova grabbed her son Kyrylo, and ran towards the basement stairs when she was suddenly lifted off the ground: “Without hearing any explosions, I heard ringing in my ears, felt weightless, and then everything went dark, and I heard and smelt how my skin was burning. I thought I had died.”

Human Rights Watch also spoke with a man, Pavlo, who lived about 120 meters northeast of the building and saw the aftermath of the attack. He said he did not see any soldiers or military vehicles in the area the morning of the attack.³⁶¹ He said he was outside when he heard the humming of a plane above and an explosion nearby, and took shelter in the underground section of an outhouse. About half an hour later, a neighbor told him that a plane had dropped a bomb on a nearby building. Raizova also said that one of the survivors of the attack told her later she had heard a plane overhead just before their building was hit. Pavlo went with the man to help bring the wounded to the hospital.

Pavlo said the walls of the building had collapsed inwards and the roof had fallen onto the collapsed walls: “The building was simply pulverized. There was almost nothing left, just part of a bathroom and part of a corridor.”

Over the next few hours, Pavlo saw six bodies and four injured people, one of whom later died. He said that many of the victims were from the Susuhurov and Raizov families, whom Pavlo recognized since they were neighbors. Those who died, he said, included Natalia Susuhurova and Viacheslav Susuhurov Senior; Kyrylo Raizov; Valerii Raizov; a man called Oleksandr; and Veronika Tarasova who he said died in the hospital after being injured during the attack. Pavlo said he also saw the body of a man who did not live in the building, next to his severed leg, lying in a pool of blood a few meters from the destroyed house.

Pavlo described seeing Viacheslav Susuhurov Jr. near the body of his mother, Natalia: “He seemed like he was in shock and maybe even deafened. He was covered in blood, had blood coming out of his ears, nose, and eyes, and he was crying.” Then he saw Denys Raizov, Kyrylo’s father, who he said was in shock: “He was holding his lifeless child and was talking to him, repeatedly saying, ‘The child is not crying.’”³⁶² He said that Tetiana Raizova was also injured in the attack.³⁶³

Pavlo’s wife’s uncle took the injured people first to the Emergency Medical Care Hospital, and then to Hospital #3, where Veronika died the next day.

Pavlo and others used chainsaws to cut parts of the collapsed roof, periodically stopping to listen for voices under the rubble and to look at planes they saw overhead in case it was too dangerous to continue.

Raizova described what she heard once the ringing in her ears had subsided:

Suddenly, I heard my husband’s voice, asking ‘my love, is that you?’ I started to shout. I also heard a woman asking me where the children were, but I didn’t know. I reached out with my right hand to see if I could touch Kyrylo, but I only felt gravel.

Then I heard other voices and chainsaws. I was terrified of being cut. I also heard a woman asking me where the children were. Then they pulled me out from the rubble. It felt like I was under there for an eternity, but someone later told me they freed me quite quickly. They lay me down on a wooden door, maybe from the house, and I lay there while they freed others under the rubble.

I was covered in blood and in a lot of pain. I later found out that one of my shoulders and two ribs were broken. Both my hands were burned. My left hand was charred so badly that the nurses later couldn’t find any veins. Flesh was missing from other parts of my body, and I had shrapnel injuries. Some shrapnel is still in my body, and I will have to live with it inside me.

They put me in a car with my brother and his injured girlfriend, Veronika. I remember wondering how Veronika was able to sit upright, as she was badly burned. Her face and body looked like modeling clay. My brother’s hand was injured, and I later found out he had a concussion. I ended up in Hospital #3, where they treated me.

Pavlo also described finding victims and survivors:

We found the first body by pure chance, touching it accidentally with our feet. It was Oleksandr, who Denys Raizov immediately recognized, saying: ‘This is Uncle Sasha.’ His limbs were torn off and his skull was cracked open. Then we found the body of Denys’ father, Valerii Raizov.³⁶⁴

Soon after, I saw a little finger sticking out from under the rubble. We removed the rubble and found a light-haired woman, about 50, still alive. We cleared dust off her face to help her breathe. She started screaming in pain, I think because her neck was under pressure. I remember saying, ‘Stay with us.’

My wife’s uncle then took the injured woman to the nearby hospital where she got help. We heard a few days later that she was recovering well.

Finally, we found the body of Viacheslav Susuhurov Sr.. His body was still sitting in an armchair in a corner of a room. It was difficult to remove the body because his legs were slightly bent under the armchair, which was underneath a wall that had collapsed.

Denys Raizov eventually told everyone who was helping to find bodies that all 13 people who had been sheltering in the building were accounted for, so they stopped looking for bodies. Pavlo and others then put the seven bodies in a trailer that they attached to his wife’s uncle’s car and took them to the Old City cemetery, 600 meters to the west, where they put them in an open trench, near another trench which he said was already full.

Later that day, Pavlo said he saw the remains of a munition next to his home at Shevchenka Lane 19. He took a video of the conical shaped munition, a screenshot of which he shared with Human Rights Watch.³⁶⁵ He said it was about 500 mm long, that the narrow part was several centimeters, and that the wide part was about 20 centimeters. We identified this as a nose cone from an Uragan rocket. Pavlo’s wife’s uncle told him that at the moment the explosion hit Shevchenka Lane 29a, he had been in his car and had seen the munition falling from the sky and striking outside Shevchenka Lane 19.

Satellite imagery of Shevchenka Lane 29a taken on March 12, 2022, shows the building intact, while satellite imagery taken on March 14, 2022, shows it as being completely destroyed.

Shelter at Kazantseva Street 20, March 15

An attack on March 15 hit a building at Kazantesva Street 20 that served as a shelter for at least 150 people. The attack killed at least two people and wounded at least three others.³⁶⁶ There was no evidence of Ukrainian forces being in or near the building at the time of the attack.

A member of the Mariupol city council, Halyna Morokhovska, was responsible for the shelter.³⁶⁷ She said the building had previously served as a dormitory for war veterans, but none had lived there for some time before the assault on Mariupol began in February 2022. At the time of the attack, 172 people displaced by the fighting were sheltering there. Most were from Sartana village, about 10 kilometers to the northeast of the city center, which had been attacked in late February. Those seeking safety included about 50 children, 20 older people who had difficulty walking or who had very limited mobility, and one pregnant woman.

Morokhovska said she chose not to leave the city because she felt responsible for the displaced and tried to make sure everyone in the shelter had food and water and was warm. When the attack happened, at around 3 p.m., she was on the second floor of the building with four others, including her 37-year-old daughter, Natalia, and son-in-law, Andrii, discussing how to leave the city. She said:

March 15 was a dark day. There was a lot of shelling, lots of loud explosions … Suddenly I heard a long hum, like a “uuuuuuuuuuuuu” sound, and then my ears were ringing. I was later told that there was a large crater in front of the building. I saw a lot of planes in the sky in the days before, so I think a plane dropped a bomb next to our building. Then I saw Natalia buried under bricks, with parts of her body sticking out. The right-hand side of my body, especially my leg, had been badly injured by shrapnel. My thigh and my face were bleeding, and blood was flowing into my eyes and mouth.³⁶⁸

Andrii, whose back had been to the window, was hit in the head by a “huge stone,” he said. Then, he saw, “There was a man lying on the floor right next to me, covered in blood and screaming in pain. I accidentally stepped on Natalia’s foot, which is how I discovered that she was under the rubble, covered in glass shards.”³⁶⁹

Natalia said she thought she was going to die:

Suddenly, I realized only one of my eyes was open and I saw dust and smoke. My left hand was all broken and bloody. I said to my husband, Andrii, ‘Love, it is over.’ And then I fainted. I regained consciousness briefly while my husband was digging me out from under the rubble, and then blacked out again.³⁷⁰

Andrii said a man helped him carry Natalia down the stairs so he could rush her to the hospital.

Halyna, who was later brought to Hospital #3 separately by ambulance, said: “The [hospital] was in a horrible state, with puddles of blood on the ground. The walls shook under the shelling. Three others who were injured in the attack that hit our building were also brought there.“³⁷¹

Natalia saw two of these people, a man and a woman, die, as doctors tried to operate on them. “I saw people put their bodies on a pile of bodies behind the hospital,” she said. A surgeon at the hospital said that after the hospital’s morgue was full, medical staff put bodies out in the open, including next to a building where they were later hit during an attack, scattering body parts.³⁷²

Natalia and her mother survived, but still suffer the effects of the attack. Halyna said:

A doctor stitched up my face which was very painful, even though he injected what I think was lidocaine into my face. There were no beds, so I lay down in the hallway on a bench. When we got to Zaporizhzhia two or three days later, Natalia spent four days in the intensive care unit. She only started eating and holding a spoon on April 21. She lost her right eye and had a broken jaw, skull fracture, and broken bones in her arm and her hand. I’ve been in a lot of pain, especially my face and my leg. But I just worry about my daughter. I feel guilty that this happened to her.³⁷³

The director of the city’s water company, Mariupolvodokanal, said that he and his colleagues had delivered food and water to people sheltering at Kazantseva Street 20. They were at the company headquarters when they heard about the attack on the building:

A woman arrived pleading for help, so we all ran to the building while informing the police on our walkie-talkies. There was a fire, which I helped extinguish. I saw two injured people on a staircase, including a 30-year-old woman and a man from Sartana village near Mariupol, called Oleksandr, about 45. I carried him to Hospital #3, but he died.³⁷⁴

A video uploaded on April 9, 2022, shows the damage done to the eastern side of the building and debris in the street near the building.³⁷⁵

Satellite imagery from March 19, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows debris all around the building. Imagery from two days later taken from a different angle reveals damage to the eastern façade of the building. A video uploaded on April 9, 2022, shows the damage done to the eastern side of the building and debris in the street near the building.³⁷⁶

Neptune Pool, Military Hospital #555 and Metalurhiv Avenue 213, March 16

Russian attacks in the Kalmiuskyi district minutes apart on March 16 hit a military hospital, a nearby residential building, and the Neptune swimming pool facility, which was serving as an aid distribution point and makeshift health clinic, killing two civilians near the residential building and 10 people in the hospital.

Witnesses said that at the time of the attacks, military medical personnel were treating wounded soldiers and civilians in the hospital and that soldiers ran back and forth between the pool and the hospital shortly after the attack on the pool.³⁷⁷ Besides this, we found no indications of a Ukrainian military presence in the area at the time of the attack. Military hospitals, like civilian hospitals, are protected from attack under the laws of war.

The Neptune pool, at Akademika Amosova Street 2a, was being renovated to become a training center for Ukraine’s Paralympians.³⁷⁸ At around 11 a.m. on March 16, Russian forces bombed the building. Volunteers had turned the pool into a makeshift aid hub to collect and distribute food.³⁷⁹ Witnesses said that at the time of the attack the Ukrainian Red Cross and military medics from the nearby Military Hospital #555 were using the pool building to treat wounded civilians and soldiers and to provide medical care to pregnant women.³⁸⁰

The military hospital itself was attacked minutes before the pool and between 4 and 10 people were killed, two witnesses said.³⁸¹ Another witness said that a building between the pool and the hospital, at Metalurhiv Avenue 213, was also hit by an attack just after the strike on the pool and at least two people were killed.³⁸² A military nurse said that some of her colleagues from the nearby military hospital were in the Neptune pool building at the time of the attack, providing care to civilians with minor injuries. They told her that no one was killed in the attack, though some people were injured by falling debris.³⁸³

One witness said he saw airplanes overhead at the time; other witnesses said they heard them.³⁸⁴

For the three days prior to the attack, a woman who lived nearby had stood in line in the open square in front of the pool to get basic provisions. She said she saw the moment the pool was hit from her apartment window and saw smoke rising from it. Half an hour later, she and her sister went to see what had happened: “[Ukrainian] soldiers from the nearby hospital were running back and forth between the pool and the hospital, though they were not carrying anyone or anything. There was a hole in the roof and one side of the pool was damaged. The windows and doors at the front were shattered.”³⁸⁵

A man said he narrowly escaped what he thought was an artillery attack near the pool a few minutes after the attack on Neptune:

My wife and I heard a plane. It sounded quite high up and far away. Then I heard two explosions, and a wave of warm air went through our apartment, pushing open our windows. Two minutes later, I ran outside to see what had happened. I ran north along Metalurhiv Avenue. People were running towards and past me. A woman shouted that the pool had been attacked. I reached the corner of the big square in front of the pool and saw that there was a hole in the roof. The front was also damaged, and windows and the door were missing. There were no people on the square in front of the pool. I didn’t see any Ukrainian forces there.

About a minute after I reached the square, I heard a “zzzz” sound and realized there was an artillery attack. I heard it land, at most 200 meters from me, I don’t know where. I threw myself to the ground and crawled back towards our apartment, running the last bit. Later that day, a neighbor told us the military hospital next to the pool had also been attacked.³⁸⁶

One video shows the damage done to the entrance of the building. Another shows the damage done to one of the rooms. An image shows the damage done to the main swimming hall, including a large hole in the ceiling.³⁸⁷

Satellite imagery from March 19, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows two large holes in the building’s roof.

A woman said that as she was walking to her home near the pool after collecting aid there, the pool was hit and then another attack hit a second building, at Metalurhiv Avenue 213. She said she did not see any Ukrainian forces near her building or in the vicinity. She described the moments before and after the attack:

I stood for about 30 minutes with 300 other people in a line that ran from Metalurhiv Avenue through the center of the square to the front door of the pool. There were no Ukrainian forces next to the building or inside it. Then I saw two airplanes circling. I couldn’t tell whether they were right above us because they were so high. Everyone stayed in line. I remember thinking they were going to bomb the nearby [Ilyich Iron and Steel Works] steel factory like they had done before.

I got to the front of the line, went inside to get the aid, and then walked back towards my home through the square.³⁸⁸ Suddenly, when I was about 100 meters from the pool, I heard something falling and the sound of an explosion right behind me. I didn’t turn around and ran to the closest entrance of my apartment building. I saw a woman and a boy of about 12 cooking on a small fire just outside a residential building right next to mine.

A minute or so later, something else exploded on or next to that very building. I ran along the front of my building to reach another entrance that led to my apartment. I looked back and saw the boy and woman lying on the ground… Soon after the attacks, I saw [from my apartment] that medics were walking with stretchers and carrying injured people from the direction of the pool to the military hospital next to my building.³⁸⁹

One video posted on June 18, 2022, shows a section of the roof in the middle of the building missing.³⁹⁰ Satellite imagery from March 19, 2022-the first available after the attack-also shows the central part of the rooftop of Metalurhiv Avenue 213 collapsed.

A nurse who had started working in Military Hospital #555 next to the Neptune pool on February 21 said the hospital was treating soldiers and civilians, that about 200 people were living and working there, and that the March 16 attack killed 10 people. She also said that a few days before, another attack on the hospital had killed four people who were undergoing surgery at the time.³⁹¹ She said that at no point had military forces been based at the hospital:

Several dozen [Ukrainian] Territorial Defense Forces patrolled the hospital grounds. They wore camouflage uniforms similar to [those worn by] regular army soldiers. Some wore bulletproof vests, some had Kalashnikovs. I only ever saw red and white or olive-colored ambulances in the hospital compound, not military vehicles. There were never any military forces stationed at the hospital, not even for a short time. By early March, we were helping civilians and not only injured fighters.

The first attack on our hospital was maybe two days before the one on the Neptune pool. One bomb hit an operating room and killed four people undergoing surgery. They included a 40-year-old woman who came to the hospital with an abdominal injury caused by shrapnel. She had been in severe pain and had waited for 40 minutes before we took her to the operating theater. Another bomb hit the courtyard to the west of the building and blew out the hospital’s windows.

After that, it took us a day or two to organize the evacuation of patients to the Azovstal and Illich Steel and Iron Works plants. The evacuation was underway when the second attack happened on March 16. It hit an area between the intensive care unit and surgical ward, killing about 10 patients, whose bodies I saw. We left the next day, and I went to the shelter at Hospital #3.³⁹²

Another nurse who had also been at the military hospital on March 16, said that civilians with minor injuries who had received care at the hospital in the previous days were not there at the time of the attack because they had been sent to the Neptune pool for further treatment. She said that four soldiers died in the attack on March 16, because the power cut out as they were undergoing surgery. She said the hospital was running at full capacity at the time.³⁹³

One woman said that she and many other civilians, including children of medical staff, had been sheltering in one of the hospital’s three basement rooms for several weeks and receiving food and water from volunteers. None of the civilians sheltering in the basement were injured or died from the attack, she said.³⁹⁴

Satellite imagery from March 19, 2022-the first available after the attack-shows damage to the rooftop of one wing of the hospital and to the rooftop of another building in the hospital compound.

The Neptune pool was evidently being used by civilians to collect aid after March 12, with people regularly lining up outside. Even if small numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been present at or near the building at the time, the attacking forces should have known that their attack had a high risk of harming numerous civilians.

Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater, March 16