The Times - UK (2022-05-02)

10 2GM Monday May 2 2022 | the times

NewsNews War in Ukraine

tion they had to cross dangerous and

contested ground.

“We were running towards the

[meeting] place,” she says. “My son has

a heart condition, he was wheezing and

saying he couldn’t breathe. I thought he

was going to die. It was hard running

there — the road was littered with frag-

ments of shells, and bits of wood and as-

phalt and broken buildings.

“Then the shooting started. I told my

sons to get down. My parents were be-

hind me, and I was trying to tell them in

sign language, ‘Down! Get down!’ And

they lay down, but then they got up and

carried on running. I was signing to

them, ‘Down!’ but I don’t know if they

saw it. My boys were ahead of me — I

looked for them, and when I turned

round again, I couldn’t see my mum and

stepdad.”

Her parents had vanished and the

evacuation buses were about to leave.

“It’s true, I could have told my sons to lie

down so I could go back for my parents.”

Shumeiko says. “But I had seconds to

decide. We were starving and parched

with thirst. We were so weak.

“I had to decide whether to save my

sons, or to go back for my parents and

take the risk that I would leave my boys

as orphans.” She stayed with the boys

and the three of them got on a bus

which took them to the safety of Zapor-

izhzhia from where they made the long

journey to Germany. The guilt that she

More than a hundred women and
children have been evacuated from the
besieged steel plant in Mariupol, where
2,000 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds
of civilians are trapped after more than
two months of war.
President Zelensky confirmed on
social media that a second round of

Russian state media reported on Satur-

day evening that at least 20 civilians

had left the plant that night, the first

respite in a merciless confrontation.

“As of now, it’s true that both sides are

following the ceasefire,” Sviatoslav Pal-

amar, deputy commander of the Azov

Regiment, said. The nationalist group

that is part of Ukraine’s National Guard

has been holding the plant despite a

Russian assault that has destroyed

much of the city.

He said in a video posted on the Tele-

gram social media app: “We have

brought 20 civilians to the agreed meet-

ing point, whom we’ve managed to res-

cue from under the rubble. These are

women and children. We hope these

people will go to the agreed destination,

which is Zaporizhzhia, the territory

controlled by Ukraine.

“We hope that this process will be

further extended and we will success-

fully evacuate all civilians.”

Video recordings sent from the plant

show civilians and soldiers in terrible

conditions beneath the Azovstal plant.

Reports suggest supplies of food and

water are rationed and up to 600 people

Oksana Lysenko and Vladyslav Zrashba, who are deaf and have been cut off from the outside world, have managed to send

Civilians evacuated

from the horrors of

besieged steel plant

Richard Lloyd Parry Kyiv evacuations was carried out yesterday.
On Saturday night 46 people were
taken out in the first successful evacua-
tion of civilians after weeks of failed ef-
forts to secure safe passage from the
Azovstal steel works.
“Evacuation of civilians from Azov-
stal began,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter.
“The 1st group of about 100 people is
already heading to the controlled area.

Tomorrow we’ll meet

them in Zaporizhzhia.

Grateful to our team!

Now they, together

with #UN, are work-

ing on the evacuation

of other civilians from

the plant.”

The president said

last night evacuations

would continue today if “the necessary

conditions” were met. “Today, for the

first time in all the days of the war, this

vital corridor has started working,” he

said. “For the first time there were two

days of real ceasefire on this territory.”

The operation was overseen by the

United Nations and the Red Cross.

Most of the people appear to have been

taken to a refugee camp in the Russian-

occupied coastal village of Bezimenne,

under control of the self-proclaimed

Donetsk People’s Republic. From there,

they are to be taken to Zaporizhzhia.

“All of the civilians were given

accommodation, food and necessa-

ry medical help,” the Russian de-

fence ministry said.

A video released by the minis-

try showed a convoy of cars and

buses marked with a Z, the

identification used by the

Russian forces that has

also become a sym-

bol of support for

the invasion.

A Ukrainian

commander in

the steel works and

The shooting started

and I tried to sign:

Down! Get down!

begged people to go and check on them

— acquaintances of acquaintances,

strangers, anyone. Finally, I got this

film, and now I have to get them out.”

Even for hearing people, the task of

evacuating from Mariupol, all but con-

quered now by the invading Russian

forces, is hellishly difficult. For a deaf

couple, without friends or family, the

obstacles are all but impossible to over-

come.

“They are starving and their home is

destroyed, but the big problem is that

you can’t just tell them where to go and

when,” Shumeiko says. “Someone has

to take them by the hand and walk them

to the place.”

Shumeiko, 38, never knew her bio-

logical father. Her mother met Vlady-

slav 14 years ago at a social event for

deaf people and they have been to-

gether ever since. Before the war he

worked as a shelf-stacker in a super-

market.

Shumeiko is a sign-language inter-

preter. She has made it her mission to

give deaf people access to things that

the hearing population take for grant-

ed. She interprets for television news

and music videos — “singing with my

hands”, as she puts it. All of this has been

smashed to smithereens by the Russian

invasion.

The story of how she escaped, and

how her parents became stuck, illus-

trates the terrible moral dilemmas

being imposed upon Ukrainians. After

the siege of Mariupol began on Februa-

ry 24, they spent a month in Shumeiko’s

fourth-floor apartment on Budivelnyk-

iv Avenue — Shumeiko, her two sons,

aged 5 and 17, and her mother and step-

father. Even without hearing the explo-

sions, the percussive shaking of the city

was terrifying, and on March 22, Shu-

meiko, a single mother, decided to lead

the family to buses waiting to evacuate

people through one of the intermittent-

ly accessible “green corridors”.

“There were buildings burning all

around our building,” she says. “We had

nowhere else to run. The choice we

faced was to go, die of starvation or suf-

focate from smoke in a basement. I

wanted to escape to save my kids and

my parents.”

At that time, the front line between

the Russians and the Ukrainian de-

fenders was close to their home and to

reach the rendezvous for the evacua-

The hundred thousand people trapped
in the broken city of Mariupol are all
victims of war, but few are more vulner-
able than Oksana Lysenko and Vlady-
slav Zrashba. Like countless others,
they live in ruins, in the basement of the
burnt-out block of flats that was their
home. Like their neighbours, they cling
to existence in a city without electricity,
water or reliable food supplies.
But one thing distinguishes the
couple from most of the other people
remaining in the city — both Oksana,
57, and Vladyslav, 52, are profoundly
deaf. They communicate in sign lan-
guage; even the explosions of rockets,
bombs and artillery that have blasted
Mariupol for more than two months
are experienced by them as gut-
wrenching vibrations rather than
sound. This week, after being cut off
from the outside world, they finally
managed to send a message.
In a sign-language video, Oksana
pleads for a way out of the city and for
the chance to be reunited with her
daughter, who escaped to Germany
after being separated from her parents.
“Hello, my daughter and grandchil-
dren,” she says in front of the block of
flats, which was damaged by fire more
than a month ago. “I am crying desper-
ately that I am left without a home.
“We asked people if we could stay
with them, but they wouldn’t let us. We
want to move in the direction of Zapor-
izhzhia, but we can’t manage it... We
don’t know anything because we can-
not hear. There’s not much information
and a lack of food. We want to eat. My
heart is aching. My daughter, I love you,
I embrace you.”
The video was recorded last Friday
and sent to her daughter, Uliana Shu-
meiko, by a man who remains in Mariu-
pol. “We heard nothing from them for a
month,” Shumeiko says from Berlin. “I

Daughter reveals plight

of her deaf parents,

trapped and starving

in Mariupol,

writes Richard

Lloyd Parry