"My relatives said that people like you should be cut out". The story of a woman who survived torture and fled occupied Mariupol twice
Source: Ukrainska Pravda
Author: Olena Barsukova
Marina used to love flowers very much. At home and at her dacha, she grew literally everything that could be cultivated in the Azov climate.
Roses, hyacinths, daffodils, dahlias, hibiscus, tulips of all colors and sizes, even blue daisies. There were also coniferous trees that she had planted herself.
Marina thinks of her garden when she talks about Mariupol. Like her hometown, it remains behind the barbed wire of the occupation.
Marina’s mother moved to Mariupol from Zakarpattia, but Marina was born here. Her daughter and son grew up in this city on the Sea of Azov. Her parents are buried here, and she can no longer visit their graves.
Despite her cancer, Marina survived the shelling; she and her daughter ended up in Russian torture chambers, and then she searched for her son, a veteran, from whom she had heard nothing for months.
After several failed attempts, Marina, her daughter, and her son managed to escape. Now they are free, but scattered across different corners of the world. Documents and keys are the only things they have left from their former life.
Marina told us about surviving in Mariupol, returning to the occupied city for her son’s sake, and fleeing the city that was once her home but is now under enemy control.
The heroine’s name has been changed for security reasons.
Marina used to live in the Kalmiuskyi district of Mariupol. She worked as a seamstress at a boarding school, then as a courier at the Illich and Azovstal plants.
She experienced both the drab Mariupol of the 1990s and the city it had become a few years before the war—with new parks, fountains, and bike paths. And then the Russians came—and the cozy city remained only in her memories.
The war found her in a private home near Sartana. Marina’s large family lived under one roof: her elderly father, father-in-law, husband, 19-year-old daughter, and son-in-law, who is in the military. In the yard—two large dogs.
Marina’s family did not leave the city because the older people categorically refused to leave their home. “This is our land; we will die here,” Marina recalls her elderly father’s words.
This wasn’t the first time war had knocked on the doors of Mariupol’s residents: the townspeople remembered the shelling and the relatively quick de-occupation in 2014, so many didn’t take the first explosions seriously.
The woman and her daughter considered evacuating in the early days when the opportunity arose, but they didn’t dare. In Marina’s neighborhood, it was quiet at first. Her daughter and son-in-law were in the middle of renovating an apartment on the left bank, and it seemed a shame to leave everything behind.
When the city lost communication, electricity, water, and gas, it became clear: they had to prepare for a long struggle for survival.
Marina still had a stockpile of food, plus everything they’d managed to buy in the early days while some stores were still open. She was also lucky with water—there was a large five-cubic-meter rainwater cistern in the yard, so she didn’t have to stand in line at the wells under shelling.
“The people on our street agreed: if a shell lands, everyone runs over, digs them out, and rescues them. We didn’t abandon each other.
There were a lot of elderly people—my daughter and I brought them food and medicine; we helped bandage their wounds while we still had bandages,” Marina recalls.
The first “Grad” rockets landed on March 7. One landed right on the edge of their garden. That day, neighbors knocked on Marina’s door—they had come for gasoline to drive to Dnipro.
“What are you doing? There’s no safe passage; no one is leaving,” Marina told them at the time, but they didn’t listen.
The next morning, on March 8, the Russians fired on their car as they attempted to evacuate. The husband, wife, their pregnant daughter, and their Labrador—everyone in the car—were killed. Their bodies lay by the roadside for a long time.
Later, Marina would go to the site where her neighbors died, see the wrecked car, and take a few photos. She would be tortured for those photos on her phone, but that would come later. For now, her daily life is a struggle for survival, but at least she is free.
She walked the broken streets in search of firewood, stoked the stove, baked bread, and fried doughnuts. Back then, there was still enough food to feed the cats and dogs abandoned by the city dwellers who had left.
Marina’s neighbor, who sold meat, began trading his supplies—which were starting to spoil without electricity—and gave away lard for free. Marina mixed the lard with garlic and delivered it to the elderly.
In March, shells were falling every day. The street where Marina lived was littered with craters, and her husband’s relatives had also moved into the house—a total of ten people under one roof.
Food and water supplies were running out. Marina and her daughter went out in search of water—but whenever the shelling started, they ran to the basement, where they had to sit for 3–4 hours.
“The Russians did things that could fill two whole volumes. It was hell. You wouldn’t see anything like that in horror movies,” the woman says.
Some memories from those water-searching trips still haunt Marina. Right before her eyes, the Russians shot a civilian man with a dog—just for his jacket, like they did to the workers at the Illich Plant.
“His head was blown to pieces, and he fell. My daughter and I ran away; someone was screaming,” the woman recalls.
Marina also saw how Russian artillery targeted lines for humanitarian aid where dozens of civilians were standing.
“We’re standing in line for humanitarian aid: they give us three carrots, two potatoes, some kind of coarse grain. People are gathering—and a shell flies right there. On purpose, to destroy them.
It hits—and that’s it, 10 to 15 people are gone. You can’t tell where the legs are, where the arms are. And the dogs were dragging them away. Sometimes you’d look and see one running with someone’s hand in its mouth.”
When the Russians seized the territory of the Ilyich Plant, they began conscripting people to clear the rubble in exchange for a meal. Marina’s daughter joined in to distract herself from the horror of daily life. But during this “work,” she had to endure the most terrifying experience of her life.
“I told her, ‘Don’t do it.’ She said, ‘Mom, the girls are going, so I’ll go too.’ The Russians picked her along with two other girls to ‘clean their office.’
The first few days
seemed fine. But on the fifth day, a Kadyrovite who was in charge there raped her. My daughter came home in a terrible state. I thought I’d never bring her back to reality,” the woman says.
The consequences were irreversible. The girl began having epileptic seizures, hallucinations, and insomnia. But the suffering in the nearly captured city did not end there.
In order for residents to move around Mariupol, they had to undergo filtration—a humiliating procedure from which many never returned.
Marina knew she wouldn’t pass it, so she bought a fake slip of paper—supposedly from the screening, but without the signature of the occupying “commandant.” This document allowed her to move around the city, but not to leave its borders.
As it turned out, Marina had been on the occupation authorities’ radar from the very beginning. The database contained information about her son, a veteran, and on top of that, Marina had been “turned in” by her ex-husband, the father of her daughter.
When the invasion began, her husband hid in the basement for three days. Marina and her daughter brought him food. Then he disappeared somewhere, and Marina found out—his “love” for the occupiers outweighed his paternal feelings.
“My ex-husband was always pro-Russia and would shout, ‘Here come our guys, you’re done for, run!’ When the screening took place, he brought them a phone with a photo of my daughter and my son-in-law in uniform. He told the Russians that my daughter and I had traveled to Kyiv for protests, that we were pro-Ukrainian, supported Azov, and supported our army,” Marina recalls.
Soon, the first inspections began. Books, insignia, flags—all gifts from Azov fighters—the woman buried them in her garden. The first visit by Russian security services passed without incident, but Marina realized she had to flee. They decided to contact volunteers. But the convoy that was supposed to go to Ukraine, for some reason, went to Russia.
In July 2022, Marina and her daughter were arrested at a checkpoint between Novoazovsk and Taganrog. They were immediately taken to separate rooms. Among the 40 detainees, they were the first to be called in for questioning.
“My daughter went in first, and then they called me. My daughter was no longer in the room; they had taken her out through another exit. I walked into the room—two large lamps, a table, a chair. I sat down; the lamps were shining in my face, and two men were sitting across from me.
One of them came over and kept pressing on a specific spot on my left shoulder. It still hurts—it’s hard for me to lift my arm,” the woman says.
They asked Marina about her son—where he was, where he went, what his views were. She said she didn’t know. For that, the Russians pulled her by the hair.
Then they forced her to write a statement promising she would never cross the border of the Russian Federation again, and sent her to the room where her daughter was being interrogated.
“Everything in the corner was covered in blood, but there was no blood on my daughter. She had bruises, her long hair was disheveled, as if they’d twisted it. Her face was black, and she was shaking all over. I realized they’d really tormented her,” the mother recalls.
After the interrogation, the women were taken down to the basement, where they were held for three days. They were forced to clean the rooms after the interrogations. The women didn’t see anyone, but there were teeth and hair in the bloodstained cells.
One evening, a Chechen soldier approached the exhausted Marina and asked, “Why are they treating you like this? Did they see some kind of murderers in you?”
Marina told him her story. The man asked again, “Do you have cancer?” Apparently, the Russians had rummaged through everything in Marina’s bag, including her medical records.
The Chechen must have taken pity on the women. During his shift, they were given their belongings back. He gave them some pieces of paper—something like passes to get through three checkpoints on the way to Novoazovsk—and told them to run.
“The Chechen said: ‘Go back to Mariupol and try to get out any way you can. I can hold things off for a day so you can leave. But right now, you need to be out of a 5-kilometer radius,” Marina recalls.
It was 11 p.m. Thunderstorm, downpour, lightning—such a gloomy scene would be perfect for a movie about the apocalypse.
Marina had a broken leg, but she and her daughter set off on the road. Then they were picked up by a couple who hadn’t managed to leave Mariupol after visiting relatives. Ironically, the couple was from Moscow.
The women spent the night at a hotel in Novoazovsk, returned to Mariupol, and turned to the volunteers again.
The car picked them up at 6 a.m. They drove through the fields to avoid the checkpoints. There was a checkpoint only at the entrance to Berdyansk—the women then spent a week in a hotel, waiting for permission from the occupation command.
And then the Russians gave the “go-ahead.” Marina and her daughter finally got into the car, which was moving in a convoy through Vasylivka to Zaporizhzhia—to the “mainland.”
“When we saw our Ukrainian flag, we cried with joy and fell to the ground. I couldn’t believe we’d finally escaped from hell…” the woman recalls.
Soon after, she returned to the occupied territory in search of her son. His arrests and imprisonment are a separate, long story.
Marina’s son had served in the Azov Regiment back in 2014, but was discharged a few years later due to a civilian injury. At the start of the full-scale war, he was in a pretrial detention center—his guilt in the case had not been proven, but in the chaos of the Russian offensive, the detainees were neither evacuated nor released.
The Russians quickly seized the detention center. In the spring of 2022, while shelling was still ongoing, Marina went there with a care package and waited outside the prison for three days. She begged the warden for at least one visit with her son. Finally, in May, she was allowed in.
The boy was in poor condition—by that time, the prison was already under the control of the Russian military. But at least she was able to see him.
After a successful trip to Zaporizhzhia in November 2022, Marina returned to Mariupol. It was a desperate, crazy move. But for her son’s sake, she was ready for anything.
Finding herself back in the occupied city, Marina began going everywhere she could: to the occupying authorities’ “military prosecutor’s office,” to the special units.
“Mom, you’ll end up right where he is,” the woman recalls the occupiers saying. They humiliated and intimidated her, but she didn’t give up.
They were planning to “try” her son. Marina begged for his release—she explained that her son has a disability and is not guilty of anything. But in response, she heard: “That didn’t stop him from killing our boys when he served in ‘Azov.’”
In the end, at the end of November, her son was released after a bribe was paid. The young man stayed with Marina’s husband for about seven months.
Marina left the occupied territory for the Netherlands—from there, through acquaintances, she sent him money to leave. But in June, they came for him a second time.
“The world isn’t without ‘good’ people. Someone turned him in. One summer day, he woke up to find four Russian soldiers standing over him. They arrested him.
We didn’t know anything for four months. It was a nightmare. And then a call: ‘He’s alive.’ I was lucky to have many friends, and that the Russians are greedy for money. We managed to make a deal through intermediaries. “They brought him back to the house where he’d been beaten and dumped him in the garden,” the woman says.
In the fall of 2023, the young man was sent for treatment to occupied Novoazovsk—they needed to change his location at least a little so it would be harder for the Russians to find him.
In the winter, he tried to leave the occupied territory for Taganrog; he miraculously passed the polygraph test but was denied. He hid for another two weeks, and then said, “Whatever will be, will be”—and tried again.
“There were a lot of people there… A young woman was sitting at the checkpoint. She looked at his passport and said, ‘You were here two weeks ago. Here’s your passport. Go on.’ His heart was in his heels—he rushed through customs.” Next came Taganrog, Rostov, and Moscow. Constantly looking over his shoulder, my son made it to Belarus and then crossed the border into Volyn. In the territory controlled by Ukraine, he found a job and began rehabilitation.
In January 2024, Marina was finally able to hug her son. But her daughter persuaded her to move abroad permanently and begin the necessary treatment.
When Marina visited occupied Mariupol for the second time, it was a completely different world. Ruins, fear, repression, chaos. Apartments were being given only to Russians and migrants from the Russian Federation, while thousands of Mariupol residents were left homeless.
At the market, Marina saw an old man—dirty, hunched over, his eyes filled with tears. He was staring into a paper coffee cup. She offered to buy him a new one. They started talking—it turned out he was from Kurchatov.
“Oh, we’re not far from there,” Marina said. She offered him her father’s old “guesthouse”: damaged, but with windows and running water. The man was very happy.
The streets were filled with lines and commotion. The townspeople were preoccupied with finding passes and documents, and trying to get their pensions. But there were also those who
rejoiced at the “Russian world.”
“Once I was sitting at a bus stop—two men approached me. One said, ‘Thank God, Russia has come. Finally. They’ll turn Mariupol into a pearl!’"
I wanted to reply, ‘Weren’t there enough pearls for you when we lived here?’—but I kept quiet. You couldn’t open your mouth in the city anymore,” the woman says.
One of the greatest misfortunes of the occupation is becoming disillusioned with people who seemed decent. At the boarding school where Marina used to work, there turned out to be many traitors.
“Our children and teachers were ‘Cossacks’ and ‘guardians’—and now the head guardian is advocating for ‘good Russia.’ I see her standing in the center, laying flowers for some ‘Afghans’ and giving speeches about how wonderful Russia is,” Marina says.
The deputy, who for years performed at their boarding school during holidays, took part in the Russian “Victory Day parade” on May 9, 2022. He shook hands with Pushilin and showed off a bottle of vodka with the letter Z on it.
And the neighbors who returned to Mariupol from Krasnodar even threatened Marina—despite the fact that she had been bringing food to their elderly parents while they were holed up in the basement under shelling.
“The neighbors’ children said, ‘Either you shut your mouth, or we’ll turn you in first—so they won’t find your guts,’” the woman recalls.
Marina still keeps in touch with some relatives who remained in Mariupol. But not everyone is happy to hear from her. Those who once took pride in her son, a veteran, have, under the influence of Russian propaganda, decided that he is a “Nazi.”
“My relatives have basically disowned me. They said, ‘People like you should be slaughtered, and your children—as soon as they’re born. All of you, especially the Azov fighters.’
They believe that the Azov fighters destroyed Mariupol. I say: I was in Mariupol too; I saw who was shooting, who was using civilians as cover. You saw it yourselves… But in response, I hear the propaganda they show on TV.” Marina is currently in Europe as an asylum seeker and lives with an elderly couple who fled from Zaporizhzhia. Her fellow countrymen support Marina, but she cannot yet return to a normal life.
Moreover, the injury she sustained during the shelling has permanently affected her health—on March 26, the blast wave threw her into the space between the door and the wall, pinning her body tightly.
"I won’t say it’s bad here, but it’s not home. People are helping me, I’m getting treatment, and my tumor isn’t growing. The doctors are examining me, but psychologically, I’m at my limit.
Panic attacks, fear, high blood pressure. Sometimes I’m walking normally, and five minutes later—a panic attack, and that’s it. They’ve already called an ambulance twice—my blood pressure spikes suddenly,” the woman shares.
Even in safety, she feels no peace. The foreigners around her don’t understand what she has lost.
Her home on the Left Bank has been reduced to its foundation. Another family home in the Illich district has been completely destroyed. As a result of an airstrike, only four pillars remain of the 130-square-meter house.
But what hurts Marina the most is the loss of her parents. More precisely, the fact that she can’t even visit their graves.
Her mother died a year before the war began, and her father died about a year after the fighting started.
“My father survived the shelling, but then he had a stroke. I couldn’t go back even then. A friend I sent money to cashed it out and buried him. And I can’t even visit the grave…
I still can’t get over the death of my neighbors. The woman had worked in an ambulance her whole life. Her husband was a mechanic. Their daughter had just had an IVF procedure; she was four months pregnant. And they had a dog—a Labrador… Did they really think that on March 8 they were heading toward their deaths?
Those screams of people jumping off balconies. Burned, shot… Did people really think that was the last second of their lives? Sometimes you lie down and think—why did they do this to us? Some senile old man wanted land, and he killed so many people. For what?” Marina asks. But these questions will remain unanswered forever.
Mariupol was her whole world. And even though she had traveled all over Ukraine, she always returned to where her home was, to the yard with flowers. But now there is nowhere to return to.
Passes from two factories. A passport where her place of birth is listed as “Mariupol.” A residence permit. Keys.
That’s all Marina has left. Now she cherishes them as her most precious memories.
Author: Olena Barsukova
Marina used to love flowers very much. At home and at her dacha, she grew literally everything that could be cultivated in the Azov climate.
Roses, hyacinths, daffodils, dahlias, hibiscus, tulips of all colors and sizes, even blue daisies. There were also coniferous trees that she had planted herself.
Marina thinks of her garden when she talks about Mariupol. Like her hometown, it remains behind the barbed wire of the occupation.
Marina’s mother moved to Mariupol from Zakarpattia, but Marina was born here. Her daughter and son grew up in this city on the Sea of Azov. Her parents are buried here, and she can no longer visit their graves.
Despite her cancer, Marina survived the shelling; she and her daughter ended up in Russian torture chambers, and then she searched for her son, a veteran, from whom she had heard nothing for months.
After several failed attempts, Marina, her daughter, and her son managed to escape. Now they are free, but scattered across different corners of the world. Documents and keys are the only things they have left from their former life.
Marina told us about surviving in Mariupol, returning to the occupied city for her son’s sake, and fleeing the city that was once her home but is now under enemy control.
The heroine’s name has been changed for security reasons.
"It was hell. You wouldn’t see anything like that in horror movies."
Marina used to live in the Kalmiuskyi district of Mariupol. She worked as a seamstress at a boarding school, then as a courier at the Illich and Azovstal plants.
She experienced both the drab Mariupol of the 1990s and the city it had become a few years before the war—with new parks, fountains, and bike paths. And then the Russians came—and the cozy city remained only in her memories.
The war found her in a private home near Sartana. Marina’s large family lived under one roof: her elderly father, father-in-law, husband, 19-year-old daughter, and son-in-law, who is in the military. In the yard—two large dogs.
Marina’s family did not leave the city because the older people categorically refused to leave their home. “This is our land; we will die here,” Marina recalls her elderly father’s words.
This wasn’t the first time war had knocked on the doors of Mariupol’s residents: the townspeople remembered the shelling and the relatively quick de-occupation in 2014, so many didn’t take the first explosions seriously.
The woman and her daughter considered evacuating in the early days when the opportunity arose, but they didn’t dare. In Marina’s neighborhood, it was quiet at first. Her daughter and son-in-law were in the middle of renovating an apartment on the left bank, and it seemed a shame to leave everything behind.
When the city lost communication, electricity, water, and gas, it became clear: they had to prepare for a long struggle for survival.
Marina still had a stockpile of food, plus everything they’d managed to buy in the early days while some stores were still open. She was also lucky with water—there was a large five-cubic-meter rainwater cistern in the yard, so she didn’t have to stand in line at the wells under shelling.
“The people on our street agreed: if a shell lands, everyone runs over, digs them out, and rescues them. We didn’t abandon each other.
There were a lot of elderly people—my daughter and I brought them food and medicine; we helped bandage their wounds while we still had bandages,” Marina recalls.
The first “Grad” rockets landed on March 7. One landed right on the edge of their garden. That day, neighbors knocked on Marina’s door—they had come for gasoline to drive to Dnipro.
“What are you doing? There’s no safe passage; no one is leaving,” Marina told them at the time, but they didn’t listen.
The next morning, on March 8, the Russians fired on their car as they attempted to evacuate. The husband, wife, their pregnant daughter, and their Labrador—everyone in the car—were killed. Their bodies lay by the roadside for a long time.
Later, Marina would go to the site where her neighbors died, see the wrecked car, and take a few photos. She would be tortured for those photos on her phone, but that would come later. For now, her daily life is a struggle for survival, but at least she is free.
She walked the broken streets in search of firewood, stoked the stove, baked bread, and fried doughnuts. Back then, there was still enough food to feed the cats and dogs abandoned by the city dwellers who had left.
Marina’s neighbor, who sold meat, began trading his supplies—which were starting to spoil without electricity—and gave away lard for free. Marina mixed the lard with garlic and delivered it to the elderly.
In March, shells were falling every day. The street where Marina lived was littered with craters, and her husband’s relatives had also moved into the house—a total of ten people under one roof.
Food and water supplies were running out. Marina and her daughter went out in search of water—but whenever the shelling started, they ran to the basement, where they had to sit for 3–4 hours.
“The Russians did things that could fill two whole volumes. It was hell. You wouldn’t see anything like that in horror movies,” the woman says.
Some memories from those water-searching trips still haunt Marina. Right before her eyes, the Russians shot a civilian man with a dog—just for his jacket, like they did to the workers at the Illich Plant.
“His head was blown to pieces, and he fell. My daughter and I ran away; someone was screaming,” the woman recalls.
Marina also saw how Russian artillery targeted lines for humanitarian aid where dozens of civilians were standing.
“We’re standing in line for humanitarian aid: they give us three carrots, two potatoes, some kind of coarse grain. People are gathering—and a shell flies right there. On purpose, to destroy them.
It hits—and that’s it, 10 to 15 people are gone. You can’t tell where the legs are, where the arms are. And the dogs were dragging them away. Sometimes you’d look and see one running with someone’s hand in its mouth.”
When the Russians seized the territory of the Ilyich Plant, they began conscripting people to clear the rubble in exchange for a meal. Marina’s daughter joined in to distract herself from the horror of daily life. But during this “work,” she had to endure the most terrifying experience of her life.
“I told her, ‘Don’t do it.’ She said, ‘Mom, the girls are going, so I’ll go too.’ The Russians picked her along with two other girls to ‘clean their office.’
The first few days
seemed fine. But on the fifth day, a Kadyrovite who was in charge there raped her. My daughter came home in a terrible state. I thought I’d never bring her back to reality,” the woman says.
The consequences were irreversible. The girl began having epileptic seizures, hallucinations, and insomnia. But the suffering in the nearly captured city did not end there.
"My ex-husband told the Russians that we were with 'Azov'
In order for residents to move around Mariupol, they had to undergo filtration—a humiliating procedure from which many never returned.
Marina knew she wouldn’t pass it, so she bought a fake slip of paper—supposedly from the screening, but without the signature of the occupying “commandant.” This document allowed her to move around the city, but not to leave its borders.
As it turned out, Marina had been on the occupation authorities’ radar from the very beginning. The database contained information about her son, a veteran, and on top of that, Marina had been “turned in” by her ex-husband, the father of her daughter.
When the invasion began, her husband hid in the basement for three days. Marina and her daughter brought him food. Then he disappeared somewhere, and Marina found out—his “love” for the occupiers outweighed his paternal feelings.
“My ex-husband was always pro-Russia and would shout, ‘Here come our guys, you’re done for, run!’ When the screening took place, he brought them a phone with a photo of my daughter and my son-in-law in uniform. He told the Russians that my daughter and I had traveled to Kyiv for protests, that we were pro-Ukrainian, supported Azov, and supported our army,” Marina recalls.
Soon, the first inspections began. Books, insignia, flags—all gifts from Azov fighters—the woman buried them in her garden. The first visit by Russian security services passed without incident, but Marina realized she had to flee. They decided to contact volunteers. But the convoy that was supposed to go to Ukraine, for some reason, went to Russia.
In July 2022, Marina and her daughter were arrested at a checkpoint between Novoazovsk and Taganrog. They were immediately taken to separate rooms. Among the 40 detainees, they were the first to be called in for questioning.
“My daughter went in first, and then they called me. My daughter was no longer in the room; they had taken her out through another exit. I walked into the room—two large lamps, a table, a chair. I sat down; the lamps were shining in my face, and two men were sitting across from me.
One of them came over and kept pressing on a specific spot on my left shoulder. It still hurts—it’s hard for me to lift my arm,” the woman says.
They asked Marina about her son—where he was, where he went, what his views were. She said she didn’t know. For that, the Russians pulled her by the hair.
Then they forced her to write a statement promising she would never cross the border of the Russian Federation again, and sent her to the room where her daughter was being interrogated.
“Everything in the corner was covered in blood, but there was no blood on my daughter. She had bruises, her long hair was disheveled, as if they’d twisted it. Her face was black, and she was shaking all over. I realized they’d really tormented her,” the mother recalls.
After the interrogation, the women were taken down to the basement, where they were held for three days. They were forced to clean the rooms after the interrogations. The women didn’t see anyone, but there were teeth and hair in the bloodstained cells.
One evening, a Chechen soldier approached the exhausted Marina and asked, “Why are they treating you like this? Did they see some kind of murderers in you?”
Marina told him her story. The man asked again, “Do you have cancer?” Apparently, the Russians had rummaged through everything in Marina’s bag, including her medical records.
The Chechen must have taken pity on the women. During his shift, they were given their belongings back. He gave them some pieces of paper—something like passes to get through three checkpoints on the way to Novoazovsk—and told them to run.
“The Chechen said: ‘Go back to Mariupol and try to get out any way you can. I can hold things off for a day so you can leave. But right now, you need to be out of a 5-kilometer radius,” Marina recalls.
It was 11 p.m. Thunderstorm, downpour, lightning—such a gloomy scene would be perfect for a movie about the apocalypse.
Marina had a broken leg, but she and her daughter set off on the road. Then they were picked up by a couple who hadn’t managed to leave Mariupol after visiting relatives. Ironically, the couple was from Moscow.
The women spent the night at a hotel in Novoazovsk, returned to Mariupol, and turned to the volunteers again.
The car picked them up at 6 a.m. They drove through the fields to avoid the checkpoints. There was a checkpoint only at the entrance to Berdyansk—the women then spent a week in a hotel, waiting for permission from the occupation command.
And then the Russians gave the “go-ahead.” Marina and her daughter finally got into the car, which was moving in a convoy through Vasylivka to Zaporizhzhia—to the “mainland.”
“When we saw our Ukrainian flag, we cried with joy and fell to the ground. I couldn’t believe we’d finally escaped from hell…” the woman recalls.
Soon after, she returned to the occupied territory in search of her son. His arrests and imprisonment are a separate, long story.
“Mom, you’ll be right there with him.” The search for her son
Marina’s son had served in the Azov Regiment back in 2014, but was discharged a few years later due to a civilian injury. At the start of the full-scale war, he was in a pretrial detention center—his guilt in the case had not been proven, but in the chaos of the Russian offensive, the detainees were neither evacuated nor released.
The Russians quickly seized the detention center. In the spring of 2022, while shelling was still ongoing, Marina went there with a care package and waited outside the prison for three days. She begged the warden for at least one visit with her son. Finally, in May, she was allowed in.
The boy was in poor condition—by that time, the prison was already under the control of the Russian military. But at least she was able to see him.
After a successful trip to Zaporizhzhia in November 2022, Marina returned to Mariupol. It was a desperate, crazy move. But for her son’s sake, she was ready for anything.
Finding herself back in the occupied city, Marina began going everywhere she could: to the occupying authorities’ “military prosecutor’s office,” to the special units.
“Mom, you’ll end up right where he is,” the woman recalls the occupiers saying. They humiliated and intimidated her, but she didn’t give up.
They were planning to “try” her son. Marina begged for his release—she explained that her son has a disability and is not guilty of anything. But in response, she heard: “That didn’t stop him from killing our boys when he served in ‘Azov.’”
In the end, at the end of November, her son was released after a bribe was paid. The young man stayed with Marina’s husband for about seven months.
Marina left the occupied territory for the Netherlands—from there, through acquaintances, she sent him money to leave. But in June, they came for him a second time.
“The world isn’t without ‘good’ people. Someone turned him in. One summer day, he woke up to find four Russian soldiers standing over him. They arrested him.
We didn’t know anything for four months. It was a nightmare. And then a call: ‘He’s alive.’ I was lucky to have many friends, and that the Russians are greedy for money. We managed to make a deal through intermediaries. “They brought him back to the house where he’d been beaten and dumped him in the garden,” the woman says.
In the fall of 2023, the young man was sent for treatment to occupied Novoazovsk—they needed to change his location at least a little so it would be harder for the Russians to find him.
In the winter, he tried to leave the occupied territory for Taganrog; he miraculously passed the polygraph test but was denied. He hid for another two weeks, and then said, “Whatever will be, will be”—and tried again.
“There were a lot of people there… A young woman was sitting at the checkpoint. She looked at his passport and said, ‘You were here two weeks ago. Here’s your passport. Go on.’ His heart was in his heels—he rushed through customs.” Next came Taganrog, Rostov, and Moscow. Constantly looking over his shoulder, my son made it to Belarus and then crossed the border into Volyn. In the territory controlled by Ukraine, he found a job and began rehabilitation.
In January 2024, Marina was finally able to hug her son. But her daughter persuaded her to move abroad permanently and begin the necessary treatment.
The neighbors said, “Either you shut your mouth, or we’ll turn you in—and they’ll never find your guts.”
When Marina visited occupied Mariupol for the second time, it was a completely different world. Ruins, fear, repression, chaos. Apartments were being given only to Russians and migrants from the Russian Federation, while thousands of Mariupol residents were left homeless.
At the market, Marina saw an old man—dirty, hunched over, his eyes filled with tears. He was staring into a paper coffee cup. She offered to buy him a new one. They started talking—it turned out he was from Kurchatov.
“Oh, we’re not far from there,” Marina said. She offered him her father’s old “guesthouse”: damaged, but with windows and running water. The man was very happy.
The streets were filled with lines and commotion. The townspeople were preoccupied with finding passes and documents, and trying to get their pensions. But there were also those who
rejoiced at the “Russian world.”
“Once I was sitting at a bus stop—two men approached me. One said, ‘Thank God, Russia has come. Finally. They’ll turn Mariupol into a pearl!’"
I wanted to reply, ‘Weren’t there enough pearls for you when we lived here?’—but I kept quiet. You couldn’t open your mouth in the city anymore,” the woman says.
One of the greatest misfortunes of the occupation is becoming disillusioned with people who seemed decent. At the boarding school where Marina used to work, there turned out to be many traitors.
“Our children and teachers were ‘Cossacks’ and ‘guardians’—and now the head guardian is advocating for ‘good Russia.’ I see her standing in the center, laying flowers for some ‘Afghans’ and giving speeches about how wonderful Russia is,” Marina says.
The deputy, who for years performed at their boarding school during holidays, took part in the Russian “Victory Day parade” on May 9, 2022. He shook hands with Pushilin and showed off a bottle of vodka with the letter Z on it.
And the neighbors who returned to Mariupol from Krasnodar even threatened Marina—despite the fact that she had been bringing food to their elderly parents while they were holed up in the basement under shelling.
“The neighbors’ children said, ‘Either you shut your mouth, or we’ll turn you in first—so they won’t find your guts,’” the woman recalls.
Marina still keeps in touch with some relatives who remained in Mariupol. But not everyone is happy to hear from her. Those who once took pride in her son, a veteran, have, under the influence of Russian propaganda, decided that he is a “Nazi.”
“My relatives have basically disowned me. They said, ‘People like you should be slaughtered, and your children—as soon as they’re born. All of you, especially the Azov fighters.’
They believe that the Azov fighters destroyed Mariupol. I say: I was in Mariupol too; I saw who was shooting, who was using civilians as cover. You saw it yourselves… But in response, I hear the propaganda they show on TV.” Marina is currently in Europe as an asylum seeker and lives with an elderly couple who fled from Zaporizhzhia. Her fellow countrymen support Marina, but she cannot yet return to a normal life.
Moreover, the injury she sustained during the shelling has permanently affected her health—on March 26, the blast wave threw her into the space between the door and the wall, pinning her body tightly.
"I won’t say it’s bad here, but it’s not home. People are helping me, I’m getting treatment, and my tumor isn’t growing. The doctors are examining me, but psychologically, I’m at my limit.
Panic attacks, fear, high blood pressure. Sometimes I’m walking normally, and five minutes later—a panic attack, and that’s it. They’ve already called an ambulance twice—my blood pressure spikes suddenly,” the woman shares.
Even in safety, she feels no peace. The foreigners around her don’t understand what she has lost.
Her home on the Left Bank has been reduced to its foundation. Another family home in the Illich district has been completely destroyed. As a result of an airstrike, only four pillars remain of the 130-square-meter house.
But what hurts Marina the most is the loss of her parents. More precisely, the fact that she can’t even visit their graves.
Her mother died a year before the war began, and her father died about a year after the fighting started.
“My father survived the shelling, but then he had a stroke. I couldn’t go back even then. A friend I sent money to cashed it out and buried him. And I can’t even visit the grave…
I still can’t get over the death of my neighbors. The woman had worked in an ambulance her whole life. Her husband was a mechanic. Their daughter had just had an IVF procedure; she was four months pregnant. And they had a dog—a Labrador… Did they really think that on March 8 they were heading toward their deaths?
Those screams of people jumping off balconies. Burned, shot… Did people really think that was the last second of their lives? Sometimes you lie down and think—why did they do this to us? Some senile old man wanted land, and he killed so many people. For what?” Marina asks. But these questions will remain unanswered forever.
Mariupol was her whole world. And even though she had traveled all over Ukraine, she always returned to where her home was, to the yard with flowers. But now there is nowhere to return to.
Passes from two factories. A passport where her place of birth is listed as “Mariupol.” A residence permit. Keys.
That’s all Marina has left. Now she cherishes them as her most precious memories.
This is an automatic translation generated by DeepL.