Twenty Kilometres from Mariupol: One Family’s Escape from a Dying City

By Matthew Parish

Monday 12 October 2026

A Mariupol mother remembers the destruction of ordinary life, three weeks without basic services, the struggle for food and water, and the extraordinary journey that carried her family out of the besieged city.

There is a peculiar cruelty in remembering an ordinary life after it has disappeared. The things that once seemed too mundane to deserve notice acquire, in retrospect, an almost unbearable significance: sending children to school, going to work, turning on a tap, buying food in a shop, charging a telephone and sleeping in a warm house.

For one woman from Mariupol, whom the Lviv Herald is not identifying in order to protect her and her family, these ordinary things belonged to a world that began to disappear on the morning of 24 February 2022. She was living in Mariupol with her husband and two sons. They had a house, jobs, schools, friends, sporting lives and plans.

Like millions of people, they knew that Ukraine had been living with war since 2014. What they did not understand was that within weeks the assumptions upon which their entire lives had been constructed would cease to exist. Four and a half years later, she spoke to the Lviv Herald about what happened.

“We simply did not want to believe it”

Lviv Herald: What was your life like before February 2022?

Interviewee: We simply did not want to believe it. Before 2022, we had the life that we had spent years building: our own home, work we loved, stability, plans for the future and children of whom we were proud.

We did not consider ourselves extraordinary people. We simply lived, worked, raised our children and believed that there were many good things still ahead of us. We could not even imagine how suddenly and completely everything could change.

Lviv Herald: What do you remember about the first day of the full-scale invasion?

Interviewee: The morning of 24 February began completely normally for us. My husband went to work, I was preparing to go to work myself, and the children were getting ready for school. Despite the tension, we still did not understand how serious the events of that day were going to become.

Then, early in the morning, we heard extremely powerful explosions. These were not the sounds to which, in some sense, we had become accustomed since 2014. They were much louder and much more frightening.

I immediately called my husband. He told me not to take the children to school. A little later a message appeared in the school chat saying that there would be no classes that day and that we would receive further instructions. My workplace also called to say that we would not be working.

I started reading the news and following what was happening across Ukraine. Very quickly it became apparent that the invasion was not confined to the east. It was coming from several directions, and I began telephoning friends in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and elsewhere to find out whether they were safe.

There was something paradoxical about those conversations. When friends asked me, “And how are you? It must be terrible there,” I would answer something like, “Oh, us? We are used to this. But what about you? Kyiv, Kharkiv. How are you?”

At the time, I thought that we in Mariupol already understood what a dangerous situation was and had learned, to some extent, to live with it. What was happening elsewhere in Ukraine seemed unbelievable to me. I worried about my friends without fully understanding that very soon our own lives would be transformed beyond recognition.

People began buying large quantities of food and queuing at cash machines. I went shopping too, but I bought ordinary groceries, just as I would on any other day. I did not stockpile food for weeks because I simply did not believe that this could last.

I saw a huge queue at a cash machine and decided not to join it. I thought people had panicked. In a day or two, surely everything would calm down. Why withdraw all that money when everything would soon return to normal?

During those first days I remained relatively calm. I understood that something terrible was happening, but somewhere inside me was this conviction that it could not last. One or two weeks would pass, the sides would negotiate and we would return to our ordinary lives. I could not imagine what was waiting for us.

The disappearance of ordinary life

At first, the family still possessed the infrastructure of civilisation. There was electricity, gas, running water and, for a while, the internet. They followed reports of negotiations and hoped repeatedly that an agreement might end the fighting.

Relatives began arriving at the house. The interviewee’s husband collected his mother and brother from another part of Mariupol where conditions had become more dangerous, and a nephew came too. Then a cousin arrived with her husband, son, mother-in-law and cat. The house filled with people seeking safety, and for a while the mere fact that they were together seemed sufficient.

Interviewee: At first we did not worry too much about the practical difficulties. We still had food. The important thing was that we were together and could support one another.

Then the electricity disappeared. Initially we thought it was temporary, but it did not return. On 5 March we lost the internet, and suddenly we had almost no reliable information about what was happening.

Fortunately, we had a generator. During the daytime we charged our phones and allowed neighbours to charge theirs. There was no mobile connection, but a telephone could still serve as a torch or a clock. We tried not to use the generator in the evening because its noise could attract unwanted attention.

A few days later, the gas disappeared as well. It was extremely cold. At night the temperature outside fell to around minus ten Celsius, while inside our house it fell to about five degrees.

The cold did at least preserve food. We could keep some meat outside, but living in the house was extremely difficult. We slept close together, sometimes three or four people beside one another, to share body heat. Fortunately we had blankets and sleeping bags, and that was when we began truly to understand how serious the situation had become.

The shops were no longer operating. Before commerce stopped completely, we had managed to buy some food. At one point potatoes were still available at a market, so we bought a couple of sacks. We also had preserves and other supplies at home, but gradually everything began to run out.

We had children to feed, elderly people and relatives who had come to us for safety. We divided everything, cooked whatever remained and tried to economise on every item of food. We also had a dog, and even feeding her became a problem.

She was accustomed to her own food and had recently finished treatment for an allergy, but there was no longer any choice. We fed her from our own food and tried to make sure that she too received a portion. We all had to survive together.

Water

The family lived in a private house, and something as unremarkable as owning a barbecue and a supply of firewood suddenly became an instrument of survival. Food was cooked outside over a fire and water was boiled there. Every remaining household object acquired a new value according to whether it might keep somebody alive.

Then running water disappeared. The family had to discover another way of obtaining something that, only days earlier, had been available merely by turning a tap.

Interviewee: We learned about a well approximately one and a half or two kilometres from the house. The distance itself was not the problem. The terrifying thing was that the route crossed open ground while shelling continued around us.

We went for water knowing that a shell might land nearby at any moment. Eventually we even learned to distinguish the sounds and understand whether something was flying towards us or away from us.

You cannot imagine learning something like that in ordinary life, but it became part of our everyday existence. You had to find water, prepare food, keep warm and take care of everyone around you despite the danger.

The evenings were particularly difficult. It became dark early and light late. We sat together in the cold, with almost nothing to do and no way to distract ourselves.

Perhaps the most frightening thing for me, however, was the absence of information. The last thing we knew for certain was that war had begun throughout Ukraine. Afterwards, information came from people passing fragments of news from one person to another.

Someone had heard something from an acquaintance. Someone had met somebody who supposedly knew more. Word of mouth became almost our only source of information.

We heard that parts of Mariupol had come under Russian control, but we did not really understand where, how far things had progressed or what was happening in other districts. Our entire lives were reduced to the simplest and most fundamental tasks: find water, prepare food, keep warm, preserve whatever food remained and take care of those closest to us.

Before this, we had thought about work, repairs to the house, business, our children’s education and our plans for the future. Suddenly none of those things seemed to exist. The only things that mattered were that everyone should remain alive, that there should be enough food and water, and that another day should come.

Children who became adults

Her two sons could not be insulated from the war, and the family did not pretend to them that nothing was happening. The explosions were audible, the dangers visible and the changes to their daily lives impossible to conceal.

Interviewee: My sons have always been very sensible, responsible and independent. Perhaps they were even older than their years. I worried about them, as any mother would, and I wanted to protect them from everything that was happening, insofar as that was possible.

But they could see what was around them. They could hear the explosions and they understood how serious the situation was. So I did not pretend that nothing frightening was happening.

I told them what I myself believed at the time: we had to hold on, this would end, and eventually we would return to normal life. It was actually my younger son who first suggested clearing out the cellar beneath our house and turning it into a shelter.

He started doing it himself, and then we all joined him. It was an ordinary cellar where we kept preserves and supplies. We cleared space, made somewhere to sleep, put down inflatable mattresses and tried to insulate ourselves from the cold floor.

We took water downstairs and placed an axe there in case the entrance collapsed and we somehow had to dig ourselves out. Eventually my sons slept there all the time because they felt safer underground.

One of the most difficult moments came when we learned that a boy from my younger son’s volleyball team had been wounded. He was taken to intensive care and we hoped the doctors could save him, but several days later we learned that he had died. He was not yet sixteen.

That was the first terrible news that concerned not an abstract casualty of war but someone we actually knew. This was a child who had recently been playing sport, taking part in competitions and making plans for his life. He was the same age as our children, and that changes something inside you.

You realise that you can tell your children to be careful. You can tell them that you are together and that one day this will end. But you cannot promise them the most important thing, which is that nothing will happen to them.

Insulin, biscuits and a box of dates

Food became scarce, but medicines became scarcer still. The interviewee’s mother-in-law had diabetes and required insulin, while other elderly members of the extended family depended upon medicines for chronic conditions. The pharmacies were closed, and an inconvenience that in peacetime could be solved by walking to a chemist became potentially a matter of life and death.

Interviewee: Whenever we encountered soldiers, we asked whether they knew where medicines could be found. We were prepared to go anywhere. But even medical workers told us that almost nothing remained, including medicines for the wounded.

We never managed to find the insulin and other medicines we needed. That was terrifying because this was no longer simply about discomfort. It was about the lives of people close to us.

Food was slightly different. Sometimes we heard that a food warehouse had been damaged but that it was still possible to reach it. We would go there and take whatever we could find.

At first I found this morally very difficult. I had never imagined finding myself in a situation in which I would take food from a warehouse that did not belong to me. In ordinary circumstances I would have regarded that as stealing.

Then I looked at my children, my husband and our elderly relatives. We had no alternative, and I had to feed them.

We searched warehouses and what remained of the market for anything edible. At one point I found an entire box of dates, and it seemed like salvation. Dates contain a lot of energy, and I knew that if there was nothing else, they might help us survive.

You begin to see food completely differently. In ordinary life you wonder what you would like for lunch. Then you think only about what you can feed your family today and what might remain for tomorrow.

Once we found a warehouse containing biscuits. We had reduced ourselves to two meals a day, and biscuits with tea became one of those meals. We no longer thought about variety or whether our diet was balanced because food was energy, and energy meant surviving another day.

Another unexpectedly valuable discovery was disposable plates and cups. When there is almost no water, washing dishes becomes a serious problem. Disposable plates meant that precious water did not have to be wasted.

For drinking and cooking we tried to find water from sources we trusted. For other purposes we collected rainwater and melted snow. We calculated every bucket.

We even found a warehouse containing socks and wet wipes. Today that sounds insignificant, but at the time, when you could not wash yourself properly, launder clothes or buy the most basic things, a few pairs of socks and some wet wipes felt like a gift.

Yet even then, people shared. There was an elderly woman living in a neighbouring house, and whenever we managed to find something and had food to spare, the children would take some to her.

We could not give away everything because we did not know what we ourselves would eat the next day. But when we could help, we did.

17 March

The family had already packed suitcases, although their assumption was that they would leave Mariupol for a couple of weeks and return when the fighting subsided. They waited for an evacuation corridor because an organised departure appeared less dangerous than attempting to navigate the fighting alone.

On 5 March, while they still had internet access, word reached the family that such a corridor might open. They prepared to leave. Friends departed ahead of them, while other relatives set off but returned after an explosion and the apparent cancellation of the route. The family remained in Mariupol for another twelve days, until waiting ceased to be an option.

Interviewee: On 17 March, at approximately five in the afternoon, air strikes began on our street. One of the strikes hit our yard.

Our house was badly damaged. The roof collapsed, the windows and doors were blown out, and there was an enormous crater in the yard, almost like the foundations for another house. We survived almost miraculously.

After that, we understood that we could not remain there under any circumstances. But it was already evening and there was a curfew, so we could not leave immediately. We spent that night in our neighbours’ basement.

At about five the following morning there was another strike close to their house. Twice in twenty-four hours I found myself not knowing whether my family was alive.

They might be only a few metres away, on the other side of a wall, but you do not know what has happened. You do not know who has been injured or whether you will see the people you love again.

That was when everything finally changed for me. Until then, some part of us still believed that we could wait, that a safe opportunity to leave would appear and that somehow the situation would improve.

After those two strikes, I understood that we could wait no longer. We no longer cared how we would leave, which road we would take or where we would end up. The only thing that mattered was getting out of Mariupol and saving our family.

Leaving

They packed what remained of their food, blankets, sleeping bags, pillows, photographs and essentials. Everything else stayed behind. Their vehicles had survived the strike, so the family took two cars, while neighbours joined them in a third. Nobody organised their evacuation for them; they left on their own.

Not everybody could leave. Some relatives remained behind after a member of their extended family was killed. They had to bury him, and the ground was still frozen.

Interviewee: At that time funerals did not look like funerals should. People were buried in yards, gardens and beside streets. In districts of apartment buildings, neighbours sometimes dug common graves.

The morgues were not functioning normally and there was no ordinary way to collect and bury all the dead. I remember another incident from earlier in the war when we saw a woman lying in the street covered with a sheet.

Later we encountered a soldier and told him where she was, asking whether somebody could collect her. He told us there was nowhere to take her.

We left without knowing precisely where we were going. The objective was simply to get out of Mariupol. We did not travel towards Donetsk; we tried to go in the direction of Berdiansk and Zaporizhzhia.

Driving was terrifying. There were destroyed and burnt-out vehicles everywhere, debris and pieces of metal across the road. At one point a tank came towards us around a bend, so we turned around immediately and drove the other way.

We passed the Mariupol Drama Theatre. It had been struck on 16 March and, when we passed on the morning of 18 March, it was still smoking.

We had lived only about five kilometres away, yet we had no idea what had happened there. We had almost no information about events elsewhere in the city.

Eventually we reached a checkpoint. Only after we had passed through did our neighbours tell me that it had been manned by forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. I had not even realised.

That was the state I was in. I was so completely focused upon continuing to drive and getting my family out that I barely absorbed what was around me.

Barbed wire became tangled around one of my wheels as I drove through the obstacles. Other people helped me untangle it, and fortunately the tyre was not destroyed.

We spent almost the entire day at that checkpoint. There were enormous numbers of cars, while people walked past with children’s pushchairs, pets, bags and suitcases. Everyone was carrying whatever fragments of their former lives they could manage.

Aircraft were constantly overhead. After everything we had already experienced, standing in an enormous crowd of people and vehicles in an exposed place was terrifying, but eventually we passed through and left Mariupol.

Twenty kilometres

Then came perhaps the strangest moment in the entire story. After weeks without reliable electricity, running water, gas, communications or functioning shops, the family travelled approximately twenty kilometres from Mariupol, and their telephones suddenly came alive.

There was mobile reception and there was internet. Even more disorientatingly, the rhythms of ordinary civilian existence had apparently survived almost within sight of the city they had just escaped.

Interviewee: People there were living ordinary lives. The shops were open, there was food, there was electricity, gas and water, and people were walking around and attending to their everyday affairs.

It was only about twenty kilometres from Mariupol. We had just left a city where people had spent weeks struggling to survive, and suddenly we found ourselves somewhere where life was continuing almost as before.

It was a shock. How could that be possible? Here people were simply living, while only a short distance away others had been almost completely cut off from the world.

I think that was the moment when I understood just how isolated we had been. We had not merely lost communications; we had lost any reliable sense of what the world beyond our immediate surroundings had become.

“Aunt Masha”

Leaving Mariupol did not mean reaching safety. The family spent most of their first day waiting at the checkpoint and needed somewhere to sleep. With communications restored, acquaintances helped them locate a woman prepared to take them in.

Her name, the interviewee recalls, was Aunt Masha. In a narrative dominated by things disappearing, her little house represented the sudden reappearance of warmth, hospitality and ordinary human generosity.

Interviewee: She was an extraordinary woman. She took ten people into her little house, heated the stove, and the house was so hot.

After almost three weeks of cold, after living in a house where the temperature had fallen to about five degrees, that warmth seemed incredible. I think it was only then that I realised how profoundly cold we had been.

Simply being inside a warm house and understanding that, for a moment, you could relax was an entirely new sensation. We stayed with Aunt Masha for two days.

Once our telephones worked again, relatives and friends began calling. Everyone wanted to know whether we were alive and where we were.

For almost three weeks we had disappeared, and our relatives had no idea what had happened to us. We had assumed that nobody had communications. We had not understood how desperately everyone outside was worrying.

Through relatives, the family then contacted a man from the same settlement who had already left. He had never met them, but nevertheless he offered them his house. They remained there for almost a week.

Fuel was scarce. People joined queues from four o’clock in the morning without knowing whether petrol would arrive at all. Yet for the first time in weeks the family had a roof, warmth and water. They washed themselves properly, laundered their clothes and recovered sufficiently to continue.

Seventeen checkpoints

Before heading towards Ukrainian-controlled territory, the family diverted to collect relatives who had reached Berdiansk but could not continue because their vehicle had been damaged. They then sought a route towards Zaporizhzhia and ultimately Dnipro.

They were advised to wait for an organised evacuation corridor, but decided not to do so. By then, friends had managed to get through, communications had been restored sufficiently to exchange information about the roads, and remaining on occupied territory appeared to them no safer than attempting the journey.

Interviewee: There were seventeen checkpoints ahead of us. At every one, our documents were inspected and the cars and our belongings were searched. As we approached Ukrainian-controlled territory, the inspections became more intensive.

They emptied bags and searched our luggage. There was a seven-month-old baby travelling with us, so the car contained baby clothes, nappies, bottles and everything else you need for an infant. Everything was searched, and afterwards we would have to put it all back again.

At the checkpoints we were repeatedly warned about the consequences if anything prohibited was found. Vehicle documents were examined, while men were made to undress. Their shoulders were inspected for signs associated with weapons, and their tattoos were examined, including for Ukrainian national symbols.

Several times people asked us, “Why are you going there? There is nothing good there. Nobody is waiting for you. They will not accept you.”

Every checkpoint meant another search, another interrogation and another period of waiting. You never knew how it would end or whether they would allow you to continue.

Even as we approached Zaporizhzhia, the difficulties were not over. A bridge had been destroyed, so we had to travel through fields and along alternative roads. Cars became stuck, and there were holes and obstacles everywhere, but we continued towards Ukrainian-controlled territory.

What remains

War is often described through maps. Cities become coloured areas, arrows represent offensives and lines represent fronts. From a sufficient distance, the destruction of a city can acquire the deceptive neatness of cartography, but there was nothing neat about this family’s experience of Mariupol.

For them, the collapse of civilisation occurred incrementally. First there were explosions, then school stopped and work stopped. Electricity disappeared, the internet vanished, gas stopped flowing and water stopped running. Shops and pharmacies closed. Medicines became unobtainable, and food became something to search for in damaged warehouses.

Snow became washing water, while a box of dates became a strategic reserve. Biscuits and tea became a meal, wet wipes became precious, a cellar became a bedroom, and an axe beside the mattress became insurance against being buried alive.

The horizon of human ambition contracted accordingly. Careers, education, renovations, businesses and plans for the following year disappeared from consideration, and the future became tomorrow morning. Survival was no longer an abstraction but a series of practical calculations about calories, water, warmth, medicine, roads and the distance between one explosion and the next.

Yet this account is not solely one of destruction. Again and again, other people appear in it, often at precisely the moment when institutions and ordinary systems have disappeared.

Neighbours charged their telephones from the family’s generator, while children carried food to an elderly woman living alone. Strangers freed barbed wire from a car wheel. A woman called Aunt Masha opened a tiny house to ten displaced people, and a man who had never met the family gave them the use of his home. People exchanged fragments of information about water, food, roads and escape routes.

These were small acts measured against the enormity of the siege, but for the people receiving them they were not small at all. When almost everything that structures ordinary social existence has disappeared, individual acts of generosity cease to be merely kindnesses and become part of the machinery by which human beings keep one another alive.

Perhaps the most unsettling image in this testimony is therefore not an explosion, a checkpoint or a destroyed house. It is the moment when a telephone began working again, because that small electronic sound revealed something almost impossible to comprehend.

Twenty kilometres from Mariupol there was an internet connection. Shops were open, water came from taps and houses were warm. People attended to the ordinary irritations and pleasures of an ordinary day, while only a short distance away another population had been reduced to melting snow, searching ruins for food and learning from the sound of incoming fire which direction a shell was travelling.

For the family arriving from Mariupol, ordinary life had become almost incomprehensible. They had crossed only twenty kilometres geographically, but in human terms they had travelled from one reality into another.

Behind them remained the house they had built, the routines they had assumed would continue indefinitely and the future they had imagined for their children. They had departed believing, even then, that their absence might be temporary.

“We thought we were leaving temporarily,” she remembers. “We thought we would come home when it was over.” They did not yet understand that sometimes the most consequential departure of your life begins with a suitcase packed for two weeks.