civilians were still in mariupol have endured. to months ago they were a beautiful port city and now they re not only have many of them been forced to flee, not only are those who are still there now sort of in danger of losing their lives and limbs, but also the knowledge at the back of their minds even if and when all of this is over, they re going to have to rebuild their city. their city, if you ve seen from the images is levelled. nothing that is still standing can be rebuilt without having to be taken down and started up from scratch. so the pressure, the psychological toll from that is enormous not just on the folks off mariupol but all ukrainians including zelenskyy himself and
this situation in mariupol is worsening unfortunately. so far we re not able to achieve positive result there. our war, our troops are now defending hundreds of wounded and civilians. i would like to say that everything will be easy and we will have tomorrow to our troops and to our say vil yips in mariupol but i cannot say this. hi, again, everybody. it s 5:00 in new york. the crack is ticking and the battered city of mariupol saying they only have hours to live as russian troops pummel that city. take a look. city. take a look.
kind of war, this is squuls trud crude bombing of the city. this is a topic of a piece you ve written on this. i want to read what you re reporting. you write this, ukrainian officials estimate that some 100,000 civilians remain trapped in this city. david beasley head of the world food program warned they were being quote starved to death. an update on the war issued by the ukrainian embassy in washington noted more than 1,000 civilians including women and children remain in the basement of the steel plant. quote, this is what hell on earth looks like. that s major commander of ukraine s 36th marine brigade, which is still in the city. he wrote that in a letter to pope francis this week published in english later. i have little time to describe the horrors i see every day. women with children and babies are living in bunkers at the factory.
somewhere the russians have been trying to get since day one and because it s so important, that s why those fighters have been fighting so hard there and they didn t want to give vladimir putin that victory. it creates a land corridor from the russian mainland up to the donbas region. it gives them control over the sea of azof and the black sea and will give vladimir putin a victory in the war, which hasn t happened. it would be the most major city to fall into russian hands. they would probably have an ods victory parade there and we ve seen them taking down ukrainian flags and places they captured and would probably have a big military parade in a city decimated by the russians. this is a city that s been completely destroyed, burned, bombed and raped by the
the psychological impact that would be to see mariupol fall after such valient fighting. weinvestigators on the ground. this is an entirely different circumstance if russians control it. does the global community get involved? do satellite images get involved? what does it look like? we just don t know at this point. in terms of satellite imagery, even commercially available satellite imagery from groups from organizations such as maxr did show in the case of bucha quite physically there were bodies lying of the ground and so, those have not come to light yet from mariupol, we do have some satellite images from the city showing just the extent of the devastation there but it s we haven t yet seen that granular level. the other thing of course is what this means for the