Nicolas Tonev, edited by Nathanaël Bentura
modified to
4:28 p.m., May 10, 2022
On the 76th day of the war in Ukraine, the city of Mariupol is still occupied by Russian forces. While Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, is on a surprise visit to Odessa, Sergei Orlov, the deputy mayor of the city, confided in the microphone of Europe 1 to clarify the situation within Mariupol, a martyred city ” 80% occupied by Russian forces”, specifies the mayor, but where a handful of Ukrainian soldiers are trying to resist.
100,000 civilians still live in Mariupol
“The situation in Mariupol is very complicated, we all know that”, begins by indicating Sergei Orlov. The city has been invaded by Russian forces since February 25. Since then, “we estimate that the number of killed is 21,000, and we have not yet identified them all,” added the deputy mayor of the city.
At present, there are still 100,000 civilians in the city, among the 430,000 who resided there before the war. “They live in very difficult conditions, because in Mariupol there is still no water, no electricity, no sewage, no gas. Our townspeople have to live without it. There is also a lack of food , water, medicine. There is no work.”
Moreover, Russian soldiers continue to shell the Avostal factory, even if there are lulls during the evacuation of civilians. However, the Ukrainian soldiers are not safe as they extricate civilians from the rubble. “The Russians are shooting at them. Our soldiers are risking their lives. Three were killed and six were injured during the last evacuation.”
“It is possible to unlock the city from a military point of view”
The Ukrainian soldiers are capable of retaking Mariupol, according to Sergei Orlov, but they lack the means. “We don’t know how to help the Ukrainian military… All of President Zelensky’s political appeals, be it Emmanuel Macron, the UN secretary general or the Pope, have yielded no results,” he said. lamented before specifying: “It is possible to unblock the city from the military point of view. The Ukrainian Army is able to do it, but for that, it requires heavy armaments and these war armaments coming from Europe are lacking still.”
Like President Volodymyr Zelensky, the deputy mayor of the city of Mariupol denounced a “genocide”: “They want to exterminate the inhabitants of Mariupol. I think that in the end we will have the same situation as in Boutcha, but in a larger scale, because there are many more inhabitants.” In this town in the kyiv region, hundreds of corpses had been abandoned by Russian soldiers after their withdrawal.