A staff member of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provided the following account today from the besieged city of Mariupol, Ukraine. The situation in the city is increasingly desperate.
There is no drinking water and any medication for more than one week, maybe even 10 days without drinking water and medication. Also for today, there is no place where we can find food or even take any water.
The folks have to search for different sources of water from the ground, and they say that they were drinking after boiling because [there are] no other source of water. People have the lack of proper food. They have to use wood to prepare fire and to cook the rare other food they have. Also, no any hygiene available, so we have just a bit of water to wash hands and that's all that we can use this water.
Because the source of water [is] located very far and people have to go one or even two or three kilometers to find these sources of technical water. Another big problem is no [mobile phone] connection at all for at least one week. It's very informational vacuum: people do not know what is happening all over Ukraine and even what is happening in a neighboring district of Mariupol city. Only those who have radio, but there is a very, very few people who have radio, they can listen all the day the radio to understand what is the situation, even inside Mariupol.
People lost connection with their relatives. They don't know what is happening with their relatives in other districts of Mariupol. And this already lasted for more than one week, and people are very worried about their relatives. They don't know if they're alive or if they are maybe not alive. We saw people who died because of lack of medication and there are a lot of such people inside Mariupol, and many people who were killed and injured and they're just lying on the ground and neighbors just digging the hole in the ground and putting their bodies inside.
