Escape from Mariupol – “My mother will be 15 in six weeks. It’s been a hell of a wait, but she’s safe.

For Maksym, his tortured and traumatized looking mother seemed to have aged 15 years in six weeks. “You can’t imagine how sad it is for me to see my mother look like this,” the 42-year-old said.

“She’s in a terrible mental state. But the most important thing is that I got my mum and sister out – and they’re alive.”

For weeks Maksym, a professor of international relations in Kyiv, had been desperately trying to get his mother, a Russian-language teacher and sister Natalja (56), engineer, away from Mariupol.

This is the story of how, after losing contact with his mother and sister and not knowing if they were alive or dead, he managed to get them to relative safety in Russian-controlled Berdyansk – just for the close the humanitarian corridor from there to and have to face a dangerous journey again.

Their ordeal began on March 2 when the Russians cut power and all communications to Mariupol.

Maksym said: “At the beginning of the invasion, I asked my mother to go, but she refused. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll wire you some money, please use it to stock up on extra food and water.’

“Again, she was resilient, but thank God she listened because without her, she wouldn’t have survived.”

He added: “Over the weeks there have been reports of people running out of food and water, eating melted snow and drinking from filthy puddles. The Russians turned off the gas on March 5, which meant they had no way to cook food except on open fires in the streets.”

Maksym desperately set out to find someone local to get her out. “After three weeks of work with my niece, we finally found someone in a village about 20km from Mariupol who had a car and gas and would do it for $100. The challenge was to get him the money because the Russians had shut down the banking system. I found a friend with relatives in his village who brought the money and I gave him the address of my mother and sister who lived nearby.”

There were a number of unsuccessful attempts to get to Mksym’s mother and sister, but on March 24, the day Kateryna turned 78, he got the call he had been waiting for. “We’ve crossed the line,” his mother said.

Maksym said they could barely speak, they were so traumatized and exhausted.

They had driven through a devastated city and seen corpses lying in the street and had to pass through a dozen Russian-controlled and very tense checkpoints.

Maksym’s sister told him that she almost died to check on her mother.

“Natalya said the most terrible thing was the airstrike. She said you could hear the planes but not see them. When she got to our mother’s one day, she heard rockets flying in and rushed in and slammed the door and hit the deck. Two seconds later, a bomb fell 3 meters from the house, right where my sister was standing,” he said.

“She was two seconds away from being wiped out. Another bomb fell on a basement 200 m away, a direct hit. My sister said that 80 people who were hiding there were killed.”

For Kateryna, her life is marked by war. Born in 1944 during World War II, she was orphaned when her father and mother died at the hands of the Nazis.

Now she had reached relative safety in Berdyansk, a port city 85km from Mariupol that is still occupied by Russian forces but most importantly not under fire. There was talk of opening a humanitarian corridor, and Maksym hoped he would take them to headquarters Ukraine and then within a few days to Slovakia.

It didn’t happen. “The Russians turned off Ukrainian cell phones in Berdyansk, which in turn meant I couldn’t reach them,” Maksym said. “There were reports that a humanitarian corridor had opened and several buses from Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhia were making their way to the outskirts of Berdyansk on April 2, but I had no way of telling my mother where to go to to get access to the buses. When we notified them, they found that no buses had been let through that day.”

There were five attempts to evacuate his mother. All have failed. Then, last week, they found a volunteer who agreed to evict them.

However, Maksym was still afraid that they would be stopped and brutally mistreated at Russian checkpoints because of their connection to him. “I openly spoke out against the Russians on CNN and even in the Russian media, and the Russians would kill me if they found me,” he said.

“I told my mother and sister to delete all links to me on social media. Luckily they did so because they passed 15 checkpoints and their phones and computers were thoroughly searched.

“The 200 km to Zaporizhia took them seven hours, but from there it was quick to Dnipro.”

Maksym said it was hard to ask his mother how she felt. “She’s lost a lot of weight,” he said. “She told me that after all the bombing, she was too stressed to eat. When I see footage of her street, I’m shocked that she survived.”

For Maksym it was “40 days of hell”. “I have many feelings,” he said. “Anger – against the Russian terrorists who want to kill as many civilians as possible. Concern – about the hundreds of thousands of civilians stuck in Mariupol… But also great gratitude for getting them out. My mother said to me: ‘Leaving the hell of Mariupol is the best birthday present I’ve ever received’.” (© Independent News Service)