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A 36-year-old Ukrainian man who rescued over 200 people from the besieged southern city of Mariupol said he plans to turn his beat-up red bus into a "monument" once the war with Russia is over.
Mykhailo Puryshev drove into the embattled city six times throughout the month of March in order to rescue trapped civilians, he told Reuters in an interview published Tuesday. Mariupol, a strategic port city, has seen of the bloodiest fighting during the war. Last week, Russian forces officially claimed control over the city after the vast majority of its infrastructure had been destroyed and, according to Ukrainian authorities, tens of thousands of civilians were slain.
"The only injury I had was a glass shard in my side. But my coat saved me and I only got a scratch. God protected me of course. My bus looked after me," Puryshev told Reuters. "We'll turn [the bus] into a monument when we return to Mariupol," he added.
"When I first went [in March 8], the city was like a cloud of smoke, like a bonfire. The last time I went it was just ash with the black coal of buildings…" he told Reuters.
Puryshev once owned a nightclub in Mariupol, and he said he was determined to help those who were trapped and starving inside the city. Driving for hours at a time, Puryshev said he constantly feared hitting land mines and was forced to pass corpses strewn on the street, according to Reuters. He said that people had been buried near shopping centers, night clubs and in the grounds of a kindergarten. Some bodies were even rolled up in carpets and left on benches, according to Reuters.
Puryshev told the news outlet that his initial plan was to drive into the city to rescue his staffers. However, his employees had transformed the club's basement into a bomb shelter, where more than 200 people, including children, pregnant women and elderly people, were hiding.
During the rescue missions, Puryshev told Reuters that the most disturbing moments were when the streets would go quiet for hours at a time.
"The scariest moment was when it would go quiet. Once, it was quiet for eight hours. We thought: That's it, it's over. When it did start again, it was so awful that the children wet themselves," he said.
Though he was able to save those hiding in his nightclub, he said his missions were forced to end on March 28 when a Russian-backed separatist soldier warned him that he would be locked up—or potentially killed—if he returned. His bus came under fire several times throughout the trips, but no one was ever severely injured.
Ukrainian forces say that at least 100,000 Mariupol residents remain stranded and starving inside the city that is roughly the size of Miami.
"New graves of people killed by the occupiers are being found. We are talking about tens of thousands of dead Mariupol residents," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an address on Sunday.
"The Russian state has become a terrorist, and it is not ashamed," he added.
Newsweek contacted Ukraine's foreign ministry for additional comment.
