yevgeny Tuzov, a 37-year-old wrestling coach and volunteer, is an ordinary man who found himself under siege in Mariupol at the beginning of the full-scale war. He not only managed to leave, but also saved thousands of people by becoming the commandant of the largest shelter in the city. In an exclusive interview with as part of the special project “Ukraine on Fire: Non-Fictional Stories “, Yevhen told about life in the blockaded Mariupol: without water, food, electricity, medicine and communication under round-the-clock bombardment.
In Mariupol, Yevhen Tuzov was a well-known personality, especially among athletes. He was known for his coaching and organising mixed martial arts (MMA) tournaments in the city. Tuzov was also known as an active social activist: he organised the Green Planet Challenge in Mariupol and provided assistance to the poor.
Before the outbreak of full-scale war, Yevgeny, known to many as “Zheka the trainer”, worked as a chief lifeguard on a cruise ship and conducted training in various martial arts in Mariupol. In the first days of the full-scale invasion, Yevhen became the commandant of three shelters where 6,000 people were hiding from the constant bombardment.
The hellish days of survival in Mariupol
As we are talking shortly before the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, I would like to start with a retrospective question. How did the morning of 24 February 2022 start for you?
The morning probably began, like all Mariupol residents, with some kind of anxious misunderstanding of what was to come. We were at home that day: me, my mum and the dog. At first, we did not understand the true scale of what was happening. We thought, well, what can happen? After all, the day before, we were all reassured that there would be no offensive. It looked like something similar to the shelling in 2014, but the mayor was convincing us to stay in the city, although he was actually in Zaporizhzhia. We thought that something would happen again, and then the politicians would agree with each other and everything would calm down and go back to normal.
Later, we started to think that we would have to evacuate to wait it out if there was more shelling.
In the first days of the great war, everyone was panicking. What were your actions then?
The panic started when people started to leave the shelled areas around Mariupol and the first shelters started to be set up. We started to see the first people who told us that their houses were completely destroyed, some people were trapped under the rubble, some people were killed.
The TerraSport sports complex was the first to take people in. There were wrestling, cross-fit and dance gyms in the basement.
I came to see what conditions they were living in and whether they needed help. And the first thing that caught my eye was the large number of mirrors on the ground floor. I thought that if one exploded nearby, it would cut everyone with shards. And there was no way to remove the mirrors because they were firmly glued to the wall. I went to the hardware stores, but they were all closed. With difficulty, I managed to find the owner of one store, who gave me a whole bag of tape. We all used it together to seal the mirrors.
From that moment on, I stayed there. I brought my mother and dog with me. Later, people started arriving en masse. And I realised that there was no more room in the sports complex. We began to equip the basement of the Savona cinema, which is literally a hundred metres from the sports complex. And when the cinema was full, we began to equip the basement of the trade school.
What were the main problems in the first place?
People were fleeing not only from shelling and fires, but also from completely burnt-out apartments. We had to provide water and food. We organised security services, a kitchen, etc.
In the yards of the sports complex, the cinema and the technical school, we cooked food on bonfires. Many entrepreneurs gave away perishable food from their warehouses for free, as there was no electricity at the time.
At the same time, there were those who did not miss the opportunity to profit from other people’s grief. In some stores, price tags were rewritten several times a day to increase.
Sometimes the police and military brought food.
Among our “guests” in the shelters were babies – from birth to one year old. About fifty of them. A lot of children and teenagers. And at some point, there was a huge problem with baby food. Just imagine, a woman gives birth to a child, breastfeeds him or her, then after some shocks, her milk runs out, and there is simply nowhere to get baby food. There is nowhere to buy it. There is fighting everywhere. There are no shops, no pharmacies, no way to go out of town. And there were cases, I know, when children died because there was nothing to eat. I know of a case when a grandfather exchanged his six for two cans of milk formula for his grandson.
Then the supply of purified water was cut off, and later the tap water. We used to go to the well in our car. One day, we arrived and found all the dead people lying there because a shell had hit it. We dragged the bodies away so that the blood wouldn’t flow into the well, and took water because we needed it.
Water and food were our main concern. When you have several thousand people and all this water has to be collected somewhere. Because you know that there are already battles where you used to collect it. And you start thinking about where to collect it elsewhere. So these were some of the main tasks.
What was the most difficult thing in the first days of the full-scale invasion?
Absolutely everything. It was like turning your life upside down. No one has ever been in such a situation. We were completely surrounded, when the city was being broken down brick by brick.
You don’t know how to react to artillery fire. Then you learn to tell the difference between different types of artillery and shells. And then there are the constant air strikes. I mean not with missiles, but with bombs. And in our case, it was high-explosive bombs that fell on houses.
People received shrapnel wounds and contusions. For example, I probably had a medium contusion. I don’t know, because I can’t determine the degree, because there was no one to help me.
We had to arrange life in the shelters, distribute the food and everything else. We also had to deal with those who tried to steal something from our own people.
There were many other things. For example, how to establish discipline so that when the shelling starts, people don’t run over each other’s heads and trample on each other. Because old people were running after children, pushing them around. I had to explain who goes in first and who goes in second.
So, in those early days, we had to establish the very process of life and discipline.
And when the first corpses began to appear around, you would drive and see a leg or an arm lying somewhere. People started to panic. Some men refused to go out because they were scared. And every day we had to collect water.
Every day there were some tasks and difficulties. It’s just that when a person takes care of only his or her family, it’s one thing, but when you feel responsible for several thousand, it’s another.
When did you manage to get out of the city?
on 16 March, when a Russian tank approached our shelter and I realised that it was extremely dangerous for so many people to be there if mortars, Grads or something else started flying in… It would be a crypt.
On the same day, I and several thousand residents of our shelters left Mariupol.
When we were leaving, we were checked. “Take off your clothes, show me the marks from your body armour, from your rifle butt, show me the marks on your feet from your boots…”, “Do you have Nazi tattoos, no?”. “Did you serve or not? The phones were searched completely. And so on at all 26 checkpoints.
Where did you move to?
At first we stayed in Yalta, near Mariupol. We stayed here for three days to catch our breath. Then we went to Tokmak and lived in a kindergarten for two days. Then we went to Zaporizhzhia. We stayed with my mum and dog at a friend’s house in Dnipro.
In Dnipro, I found a team of like-minded people to go to evacuate Mariupol residents. Whenever possible, we went to the addresses given to us by relatives and picked up people. We took humanitarian aid to Mariupol and people from there. We helped more than a hundred Mariupol residents to get out of the hell. And then they introduced special entry passes, and it became both difficult and dangerous to evacuate.
But I’m not used to sitting around, and on 12 April 2022, I opened a shelter in Dnipro for everyone in need. People could sleep there, get a hot meal and medicines.
What did you do during the two years of the full-scale invasion?
During these two years, our team helped everyone who asked. We took people out of the areas where there was heavy shelling. For example, from Bakhmut, Kupyansk and Izyum. We brought food to people who stayed there and took away those who wanted to leave.
We were constantly travelling with humanitarian aid to the settlements that had just been de-occupied.
“For example, when Kherson was liberated, we did not go there to hype like everyone else. We went to the place where there were fierce battles towards Nova Kakhovka. To give you an idea, there were corpses of people rolled onto the road. We were delivering food packages and medicines.
The team also went to help when the occupiers blew up the dam. We evacuated people and animals by boat.
In December, we went to Avdiivka. On some sections of the road, we were within two kilometres of the positions of Russian troops. We brought aid there and took out a wounded man.
We came under fire several times.
What is the warmest and most terrible memory of the full-scale war?
The warmest is the story of a baby who was brought in at night wrapped in a jacket after another shelling. We were told that he was the only one who survived, and the whole family was killed. The grandfather almost sat on it. I wondered why he was sitting on that jacket. I held him, looked, and something moved. And his (the baby’s – ed.) face was covered in soot, so dirty, you couldn’t see him.
Local mothers tried to nurse the baby. I wanted to adopt him, took care of him. But due to carbon monoxide poisoning, he was getting worse and finally, under mortar fire, a volunteer took him to the hospital. In which, to everyone’s surprise, the boy’s mother was found. We communicate and help this family.
The most terrible memory is when a man from the private sector came running and asked for help. There was a very heavy shelling, which ended. We immediately ran to the house and saw that the girl was covered with slabs and bleeding to death. Or the story of a man whose whole family was trapped under the rubble and could not be reached. He went to them for several days, lying on the rubble until he could no longer hear his family’s voices.
I also have another terrible memory in my head, when I first saw a large stray dog running with a human leg. It was on 14 or 16 March.
The blitz
Your first thought after the start of a full-scale war?
It can’t be..
If it wasn’t for the war, I would have never…?
For the second year in a row, the word “never” has not been used for me. Because, firstly, “never say never”. And, secondly, there is a saying that “I will not be surprised by anything anymore”. I don’t have this expression either, because life will always find something to surprise you and in what way.
During the full-scale I first …?
It was the first time I saw so many deaths, explosions and destruction with my own eyes.
What will be the first thing you do after the war is over?
I would like to go around the world, to travel the world on a yacht.