"Wait a few years, we have 26,000 unidentified bodies". In search of relatives missing since March

Eight missing Mariupol residents, including three children, have been searched for by their relatives for many months. The building where they were staying was destroyed by an explosion, but no bodies were found under the rubble. Are they alive or dead? It is unknown. The occupation "authorities" of the city are offering to "wait two or three years, as they have 26,000 unidentified bodies..."

Building 110 on Zelinskoho Street in Mariupol is a typical nine-story building in the city's central district. On March 12, 2022, at 4 a.m., something flew into the yard.

For the residents of the neighborhood, which was still partially controlled by the Ukrainian military at the time, the incoming shell was not a surprise. They knew that a Russian warplane was flying overhead almost every night, dropping bombs at around 4 a.m. and at around 4:15 a.m. when it turned around to head toward Novoazovsk. This was the case for almost the entire month.

A few days before, the Russians had bombed a children's hospital and a maternity hospital. The people of Mariupol did not have time to recover from the hell they found themselves in two weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion.

Olena, a resident of the Central district of Mariupol, says that the night of March 11-12 was loud. It was impossible to sleep. Clothed, with her bags packed, without heating, light or communication, she and her husband and her eldest daughter's family spent the night at home. One and a half kilometers away, on the third floor of a nine-story building at 110 Zelinskoho Street in Mariupol, lived the family of her younger daughter, Olha Tolstokorova.

Olha was well known in her building. An accountant by profession, she was in charge of the financial affairs of the condominium. Olha had a husband, Pavlo, and a three-year-old daughter, Nastia, who was loved by all the neighbors. Olena's grandmother recalls: "Nastia was like a sunshine for everyone."

On the night of March 12, the curtains in Olena's apartment were pulled tight. "So that, God forbid, the light from the candle would not be visible somewhere," she recalls.

At 4:15 a.m., the second explosion occurred. Again at 110 Zelinskoho Street. Presumably, the plane was returning to one of the air bases in Russia near the border. Residents of the neighborhood who testified to us said that the Russian warplanes were flying either from the south or the east and were returning east towards the border with Russia. Olena recalls: "I heard this second terrible loud explosion. I moved the curtain and told my husband: I think it hit Olena's apartment".

On March 20, a separate National Guard special forces unit Azov reported that Russian aviation was conducting about 100 air and helicopter sorties a day against Mariupol.

The destruction of part of the building was enormous. Floors one through four collapsed immediately. The higher ones fell in a few hours. The photo, taken an hour and twenty minutes after the explosion, shows the remains of a large-scale fire. Such severe destruction and the coincidence of the hit with the usual "schedule" of air raids indicates a high probability that an unguided aerial bomb hit the building. This weapon is a wide-area weapon, unlike precision weapons, and causes significant civilian casualties. International law prohibits the use of such weapons. Dropping high-explosive bombs on a city is a crime against humanity and a violation of four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Through tears, Olena says: "My husband and I couldn't wait for the curfew to end, so we went to our daughter's house. When we got there at 5:30 a.m., there was no one there. Not a single living soul. We saw the body of a man in the yard. Later we found out that he was a resident of the second-floor apartment. I poured water on my husband so that he would come to his senses from the shock and not get burned in the hot ruins. And he went inside. But there were no stairs after the second floor, it was just empty."

The family of the deceased man from the second floor, his wife and two daughters, aged 15 and 12, are missing. Olena's daughter Olha Tolstokorova and her granddaughter Nastia and son-in-law are also missing. An elderly couple from the fifth floor are also missing.

"No one took apart that pile," says Olena, "There were no rescuers or firefighters. But in April, when the ‘DPR’ representatives were dismantling the destroyed Drama Theater, which was three kilometers away, our relatives went there and demanded that the ‘DPR authorities’ bring their equipment to Zelinskoho Street."

On May 2, 2022, 52 days after the tragedy, emergency workers from the Russian city of Samara began to dismantle the rubble.

Liudmyla (name changed for security reasons) watched as the destroyed buildings were cleared. She is still in the city, helping Ukrainians to find their loved ones and searching for her own lost relatives. She recalls: "We had a lot of destruction. Every region (of the Russian Federation - ed.) sent some kind of emergency workers. The Leningrad Ministry of Emergency Situations was working in Pishchanka, and the Samara Ministry of Emergency Situations was working at Zelinskoho. There were also Voronezh lot, from all over the place. It was very hot in July. The corpse smell lasted for a very long time."

The Tolstokorovs were told in an "official" response from the so-called "General Prosecutor's Office of the 'DPR'" that no remains of their relatives' bodies were found under the rubble. The families of the other five missing persons received the same answers.

The Tolstokorovs' relatives claim that they closely followed the work of the "DPR" rescuers and that there were indeed no remains under the rubble. "There was never corpse smell there either. While the other buildings had this nasty sweet smell that you can't forget," says Liudmyla.

There were also no traces of the ammunition that hit the building. "We didn't see anything resembling the remains of a bomb or rocket. It is possible that the ‘DPR’ represetatives removed such things from the eyes of civilians as swiftly as possible," the woman adds.

The Tolstokorovs continue their search for Olha, Pavlo and little Anastasia. The girl turned four in May. "They could have gone towards Azovstal, they could have been wounded. The girl could have been deported to Russia separately without her parents," says Olena.

Four-year-old Nastia was put on the wanted list in Ukraine. The family hopes that the Tolstokorovs left the building before the explosion. After all, in the spring and summer, Olena's daughter's social media account went online several times.

"I don't know how to explain it," says Olena. "At first we were sure they all died there. But the activity of Olena's social media account gives us hope. In Mariupol, those ‘DPR’ lot have our DNA. They said we would have to wait two or three years, because they have 26,000 unidentified bodies."

The occupation "authorities" of Mariupol plan to demolish the building at 110 Zelinskoho Street in the near future.

This article was created as part of The Reckoning Project, an international project to document testimonies that will have legal force in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Author: Victoria Novikova