He was looking for help. Her 32-year-old husband was killed in front of their daughter in mid-March by a rocket. The makeshift morgue was buzzing with black flies hovering over dozens of corpses, some half-covered in plastic bags and blankets, as they rotted. The rotten smell reached Mrs. Tsigrina’s throat. “I have been everywhere. “I am here now to try to persuade the undertakers to move my husband,” she said, in a state of despair as she returned to her homeland after fleeing to Russia at the start of the conflict. Mariupol was once a thriving city of 400,000 people on the southern coast of Ukraine, along the Sea of Azov. A predominantly working class country, with Europe’s largest steel industry at the heart of its relatively prosperous economy. Now, instead, it is a place of death. Death, here, attacks the senses. You can see the miles of mass graves dug to bury thousands of citizens, smell the rotten bodies of those left unburied, and hear the silence of empty apartment buildings and damaged family homes.
