Evacuation from Mariupol/Dmitry Kovtun, zaborona.com
Before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Natalia Goncharova was not a volunteer, although she sometimes organized charity events with friends. The girl began to help others by going through the portal to hell, which the Russians opened in Mariupol.
Natalya Goncharova spoke exclusively to the Channel 24 website about how she managed to help take hundreds of families out of Mariupol, destroyed by the Russians, about hell and ways to escape under constant shelling.
The path to volunteering
First Natalya helped her relatives and friends get out of the city blocked by the Russians. Then – to everyone who can. Because – “there are no strangers in Mariupol”.
I myself am not from Mariupol. She moved to Mariupol 4 years ago. But this is such a unique city where you can live for a year, two, 30 years or all your life – you will have the same number of acquaintances. Everyone knows everyone there, everyone knows everyone there. When you start living there, the city accepts you, hugs you, and all the people living in Mariupol are already your family,” she explains.
In March and early April, a volunteer was able to organize the removal of hundreds of families from the city and delivery humanitarian aid to all those in need. She did everything remotely – she managed to leave in the very first days of aggression.
Natalia helped hundreds of people escape from the besieged Mariupol/Photo from Goncharova's social media page
We were dressed in what we left the apartment, without even documents. We just got into the car and drove to Zaporozhye, thinking that we would return home in two days. Then my godfathers called me and said that they were being evacuated. They lived in Sartana. This is the village that first suffered the most. They moved to me in the center of Mariupol. Already when they were leaving, they came under fire from the Grad. It was very scary – they have a little three-year-old daughter. The child saw it all. And somehow everything unfolded in such a way that we realized that we need to take people out, – the girl said.
In Mariupol, the beginning of a new phase of the war was not felt – the city has been front-line for eight years already.
“We have grandparents in Sartana. Every Sunday we go to them – if you leave from there in the evening, you will definitely see how it is bang somewhere, you hear how it is bang. That is, we are used to it. So then , at the very beginning, people returned to Mariupol. They returned to pick up someone, returned for property, returned for pets, just returned to the city from their vacation,” Natalia noted.
Therefore, according to her , the situation then became so critical: people were waiting for everything to be as always – the invaders would shoot and stop. Nobody believed in the blockade. And even more so – that the city will simply be erased from the Earth.
From the beginning of March, when the Russians began to systematically destroy Mariupol along with the inhabitants, dates and days of the week ceased to exist for Natalia. She lived around the clock from one evacuation trip to another.
Natalya refused to communicate with journalists for a long time – publicity could prevent the removal of people. She does not talk about many things – there are schemes for saving people, including those from Russian territory, which are not yet working and cannot be disclosed. Publicity will destroy them. We recorded this conversation before the evacuation of people from Azovstal began. However, she clearly emphasizes why it is important for us to take everyone we can out of Mariupol. Every life saved from hell matters.
The following is the story of Natalia Goncharova about how she managed to organize the rescue for many people from Mariupol, and what they were saved from.
About the beginning of the evacuation
“I made a story for Instagram, what are we looking for to rent or use a minibus in Zaporozhye, preferably with a driver. To take people out. I'm not a blogger, I don't have a large audience. But my stories went viral – absolutely everyone began to repost them. By the evening my phone was literally hot.
From the beginning of March, the invaders began to destroy Mariupol/Press photo service of the regiment “Azov”
We had several people who organized the columns. We were joined by volunteers who helped us systematize everything – forms, applications, lists. People who knew official organizations where humanitarian aid could be received joined. There were volunteers who helped us a lot with contacts and in organizing humanitarian issues.
Then people began to join the departures in the columns. We began to exchange information. We compiled a list of points of contact – places where you could call and get additional information. We passed this list of points of contact to drivers when they left for Mariupol. We realized very quickly that this list should be kept encrypted and non-public. Only about some point appeared information on the network – it came under fire.
We started looking for minibuses and drivers. Often people gave minibuses just like that. Someone gave them to us for money. Someone gave it to the driver to take his family out. Someone was following their family.
Since March 11, such serious convoys have started to travel to Mariupol. I don’t know how many cars we sent to Mariupol, how many humanitarian aids we took, how many people we took away. I was not ready for this, I was not ready for volunteering in such a volume.
Thousands of calls, thousands of messages that there are small children, there are sick people and everyone is asked to be saved. The scariest part was knowing that you couldn't help everyone. You understand that there are areas in which it is impossible to drive. I can't tell you how hard it was. Especially when there are no strangers in the city for you.
We once had a children's hairdresser's in Mariupol, so I know all the children by sight. I literally know the heads of those kids. When I see that the boy was left an orphan – his parents died, this is not a strange boy for me. Every three weeks he came to my mother and me to get a haircut. I have his photo on my phone more than my children. And so every day comes a new scary story that gets stuck in my head.
Somewhere you see a photo of a girl who was hit by a stove in the basement. There are no more parents, only my aunt, who is 19 years old, is left somewhere in the West of Ukraine. This aunt is trying to find her niece, although she herself is still a child in fact. She is trying to find and save this child, whom I also know. She went to the same school as my son.
A rocket flew into our friend's house, it was a direct hit. She and her grandmother died in their beds. It was a private house in the center, and not only died in their beds, they stayed there forever. It is impossible to open them. Her husband was dragged out of there, taken away, taken to a village near Mariupol. Only there he realized that Christina was not around. That Christina is no more. And the grandmother who replaced his parents is also gone.
Or when a message arrives: “I'm nine months pregnant, I can't go there, but my mother is sick there, she has cancer, she needs medicine.” I read and understand that we cannot get to the area where the medicine is needed, because tanks drive there. Russian tanks drive around and exchange fire from time to time.
They have such a joke – when they get bored, the tanks turn around from each other and shoot anywhere. So they shot at my house. That's how my cat died because she couldn't hide. So I was left with absolutely nothing.
My neighbor died from such entertainment of the tankers – he lived in the basement for three weeks, and then he got tired and just went to his apartment for the night. He was 22 years old. He was a musician. Every evening we listened to him play the piano. And now we will not hear his music. Because there is nowhere to listen and nobody to listen.
There is death in every destroyed house. It's not just 90% of destroyed infrastructure, it's 90% of destroyed lives.
How the evacuation was organized
Every day, when they called, they asked if the convoy was going tomorrow, I told everyone to call after 22:00. It was only at night that we could understand whether we were going to collect a convoy at all tomorrow, or no one was going anywhere.
Since the night we have been compiling a list of drivers driving cars. For example, there is a driver who goes after his family. He has a car. If it is a passenger car, then there are from 1 to 3 empty seats, if it is a Gazelle or some kind of truck, then it has a lot of seats and it can pick up 40-50 people. If a 17-seater “Sprinter” is driving, then it can take out 30 – 40 people. People piled on top of each other and rode. Thus, we made a plan – who, which driver, goes to which microdistrict. From there, for example, he can take out his own people and pick up those who are nearby.
Ukrainian forces, despite the superior forces of the invaders, fought back and held the defense/Photo by the press service of the Azov regiment
We had a form – people wrote applications where their relatives are. But very quickly we closed the form for accepting applications for evacuation – there were too many of them. We started just tracking messages, who and where. For example, they wrote “Azovstal 41 – 11 sick children in the basement.” 11 sick children in the basement, they have E. coli. This is a simple cap. Or somewhere, for example, a woman with a younger sister fled, the younger sister is 9, she is under 30.
A piece of shrapnel flew into the face of this woman, and into the leg of the child. They came to the hospital, they were given first aid in the hospital and kicked out. My first reaction was: “How is it, Christmas trees, kicked out of the hospital?!” Then they realized that the doctors actually did the right thing and saved these people's lives. Because the next day information came that the hospital was being held hostage. If the doctors had not kicked them out, we would not have been able to take them out. Now this girl has already had an operation.
Next, with regard to the evacuation plan itself. We have sorted drivers. There were those who go for their own and can pick up someone else. There were volunteer drivers who don't have relatives in Mariupol, or never had any, and they just go to the city to help. We loaded all of them with humanitarian aid so that they could give it wherever they could get to. It was so hungry and cold there that it is impossible to talk about it.
Somewhere 60% of the drivers did not reach their own. They simply could not get into these microdistricts. Only 40% could go to pick up their relatives and relatives and pick up someone else at the same time. Wherever they could go, the rest went straight to the basements, handed out humanitarian aid to people and took people from the basements – those who wanted to be evacuated.
Many had to be persuaded to go
Evacuatenot everyone wanted. For perhaps half, if not more people, the road was much scarier than the cellars. When they shoot around, bombs fly around, when you are under siege, you haven’t eaten properly, you haven’t drunk, you haven’t slept for a long time, your basement creates the illusion of safety: if you survived here, then nothing will happen to you here .
Some people had to force the word to leave. Everything was used – from requests, passwords and code words transmitted by their relatives, to manipulation. The worst thing is when you have to manipulate and say: “So you want to be here? And if your child dies tomorrow, and not the neighbor’s, how will you feel?” It really was the end. But then it was just necessary.
When you take people out, for the first few days they don’t even realize that they have nothing left. They do not understand why humanitarian aid is needed. They understand that they are alive. And they say that nothing else is needed.
With the evacuation, it gradually got worse and worse, each exit was more and more difficult. If the first trips could be calculated: the day – the road there, the night in Mariupol, and the next day – the road to Zaporozhye. So every day the road took more and more time. There were more and more Russian checkpoints. Last times – it was 36 roadblocks. On each you have an inspection. At each of our guys stripped to underpants. They looked for tattoos, looked for traces of a machine gun, checked if they were wearing body armor and the like.
We had cases when drivers from the Dnieper arrived who did not know Mariupol. No matter how well we explained to them where everything was, they could not travel further than a mile and a half. Satellite GPS-navigators did not help – there were no more streets left in the city, there were no landmarks left. Everything is broken and littered with mines. It is unrealistic to navigate if you have never seen this city.
These drivers, when they drove in, came under the first shelling, turned around and left. They said, “We won't go there again.” I cannot blame them. It was unrealistic to help non-locals there, but simply to survive.
The Russians enjoyed the power
It used to be that in some areas people walked around, they were stopped by Russian soldiers and their passports were taken away. They said: “If you want to leave your passport, you will be shot” – either a passport or life.
I don't know for what purpose. Sometimes it seems to me that they did not have an ultimate goal. They were just curious about it. There were Russian soldiers who treated people normally, this cannot be denied. But most of them enjoyed their power. Especially those who stood at checkpoints near Berdyansk.
There was a very interesting case when they decided to joke. Dressed in the form of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Unfortunately, I think I know how they got her, it's very sad to be aware. It was at a checkpoint in front of Berdyansk. Here you are passing 14 Russian checkpoints, and then suddenly there is a checkpoint, and for some reason the soldiers are in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Happy at first, and then you realize that something is wrong.
The soldiers begin to be rude, pester the girls, say: “Take off your blouse.” When the girls realized that these soldiers were speaking Russian suspiciously, they began to speak Ukrainian. The Russians had such a hitch, and then they said: “Drive, drive.” Now the Russians are again using the techniques that they used in Donetsk. There they also dressed up as our soldiers and committed atrocities.
Their biggest and worst banter is the phrase “We set you free.” What did you free us from, from a normal life? From people, from our relatives? From property, from happiness, from life?
The last time we organized columns, there were fewer and fewer people who followed their own. There were those who just went to help. They drove into the city, traveled by different roads to get to different microdistricts. They left, went into the cellars, distributed food and took people away. Then they did a few more walks. We had a driver who took out more than 100 people in a 17-seater bus in 3 trips. He brought 112 people to Mangush, it seems.
We worked around the clock. I constantly repeated: “Perhaps tomorrow will be the last trip, the last column.” We didn't know how long they would let us into the city. No “green corridors” have ever worked. There were no guarantees for each trip that our drivers would take someone out or leave on their own. The drivers fueled the cars at their own expense. People gave us humanitarian aid – water, food, medicines. They handed it out wherever they could get. They sent a lot of medicines. It happened once that 8 boxes of medicine were delivered to one address. There, people first grabbed what they saw, and then went around, changed, who needed what.
About the search for the missing
Every Mariupol family has losses. From the first, from the second line of relatives, but every family has lost someone. We have a nurse friend who left Mariupol. She was in the drama theater at the moment when the bomb fell there. On the first day, they took out about 200 bodies from there. They were taken out and placed near the drama theater – just so that dead people would not lie next to the living. The number of victims is much greater than all the data that they talk about.
You can learn about the fate of people from Mariupol. I'll tell you how we did it. For example, I know that my sister should be in this house. I find all the information related to the house, the people who moved out of there. I start writing to everyone in a row – who saw her last time.
This is how the panorama of besieged Mariupol looked at the end of March/Screenshot from video of the press service of the Azov regiment
I’ll tell you one story – a Turk wrote to me on Instagram before March 8. He was looking for a wife. She is from Mariupol. She went home to do paperwork – she left her husband and 11-month-old son in Turkey. This man found her friend on Instagram, and wrote to everyone who was online from her subscribers. Absolutely everyone. She has over 6 thousand subscribers. That's how he got to me.
I had already started looking for his wife through those I knew here. Finally, I found information about his wife and got through to her. She explained that her husband was looking for her, wrote to him that she was alive, and then she got in touch the next day and thanked me for telling my husband. She thus believed that she could still survive. At the moment, as far as I know, she is already in Turkey with her family, with her child.
You need to look for any information and look for those people who were with your relatives where – something in the same room, in the same basement, in the same yard, even in the same microdistrict. Because they still intersect.
When the connection was cut off in Mariupol, people began to talk to each other. They exchanged information – in the entrance, in the basement, in the bomb shelter. You need to ask people and they will help.”
