Nearly a month after the first Russian shells landed in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, the true extent of the horror that has unfolded there is not yet known.
WARNING: This story contains graphic content that readers may find distressing.
With the city under siege, communications have been disrupted and movement restricted. Updates come as anecdotes, uncertain estimates and unverifiable claims.
"There is nothing left there," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address to Italy's parliament on Tuesday (local time).
Witness accounts from those who have managed to escape paint a nightmarish picture.
The hands of one exhausted Mariupol survivor were shaking as she arrived by train in the western city of Lviv.
"There's no connection with the world. We couldn't ask for help," said Julia Krytska, who was helped by volunteers to make it out with her husband and son. "People don't even have water there."
"They bombed us for the past 20 days," said 39-year-old Viktoria Totsen, who fled into Poland.
"During the last five days [in Mariupol], the planes were flying over us every five seconds and [dropping] bombs everywhere — on residential buildings, kindergartens, art schools, everywhere."
Human Rights Watch this week released a report after interviewing 32 civilians who had escaped the city.
"Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings," said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher with the organisation.
"And these are the lucky ones who were able to escape, leaving behind thousands who are cut off from the world in the besieged city."
A school principal from Mariupol told the NGO: "The last two weeks were pure horror."
And a 32-year-old woman who fled to Zaporizhzhia with her three children said they left "because our city is no more".
The woman said that, when they left, their house was so full of holes it looked like a colander.
A 64-year-old woman said: "I think those who are left will get killed or starve to death. We have nowhere to come back to."
Mariupol siege a 'massive war crime'
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), nearly 6.5 million people have been "forcibly displaced" within Ukraine, while almost 3.4 million have fled across international borders, including 2 million to Poland.
Another 12 million people remain stranded within affected areas across Ukraine, unable to leave because of "ongoing clashes, destruction of bridges and roads, and a lack of resources or information on where to find safety and appropriate accommodation".
Mariupol had a pre-war population of about 430,000 people. Around a quarter were believed to have left in the opening days of the war, and tens of thousands escaped over the past week by way of a humanitarian corridor. Other attempts have been thwarted by the fighting.
For those who remain, conditions have become brutal. The assault has cut off Mariupol's electricity, water and food supplies and severed communication with the outside world, plunging residents into a fight for survival.
"What's happening in Mariupol is a massive war crime," European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
Perched on the Sea of Azov, the city has been a key target that has been relentlessly pounded by the Russians and has seen some of the worst suffering of the war.
Its fall would help Russia establish a land bridge to Crimea, which was seized from Ukraine in 2014.
But no clear picture has emerged of how close its capture might be.
"Nobody can tell from the outside if it really is on the verge of being taken," said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at the British think tank Chatham House.
Over the weekend, Moscow had offered safe passage out of Mariupol — one corridor leading east to Russia, another going west to other parts of Ukraine — in return for the city's surrender before daybreak Monday.
Ukraine flatly rejected the offer well before the deadline.
Francesco Rocca — president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies — urged Russia to abide by the Geneva Convention and to allow humanitarian aid into the city.
'The main goal for you is to stay alive'
The lack of news has left friends and relatives outside the city, and abroad, frantic with worry.
Brisbane resident Anna Golovchenko has not spoken to her 65-year-old mother, Kateryna Golovchenko, in Mariupol since March 1.
"I was talking to her last time and she was really, really upset," Ms Golovchenko told the ABC.
"I was saying to her, 'The main goal for you is to stay alive. Do whatever you want. I do not care. Just you must stay alive.'"
A week ago, her mother's neighbours said — via Ms Golovchenko's sister — that her mother was alive but the family has not received word since.
"[The neighbour said] they don't have water, don't have electricity or anything and she said that, 'We left some food to your mum, but it's not much'," Ms Golovchenko said.
"So, she probably relied on food supply from neighbours and I'm not sure what is going on later."
With the message, the neighbours sent through photos of Ms Golovchenko's mother's apartment building severely damaged by shelling.
Ms Golovchenko said that, if she does not keep busy — organising visas for her family, coordinating housing for refugees and working during the day — she would break down.
"This is a very stressful situation for me," she said.
Death toll uncertain
Mariupol officials said on March 15 that at least 2,300 people had died in the siege, with some buried in mass graves.
There has been no official estimate since then, but the number is feared to be far higher after six more days of bombardment.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) citied municipal authorities as saying the death toll was at least 3,000 on March 20, with the total casualties, including injured, more than 20,000.
Meanwhile, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reports that, across Ukraine, at least 925 civilians had been killed during the conflict, although they say that's likely to be an underestimate as "limited humanitarian access prevents corroboration in the hardest-hit areas".
Mstyslav Chernov, a video journalist for The Associated Press, was one of the journalists who reported the bombing of a maternity hospital, an act that caused outrage around the world.
One of the last remaining correspondents left in the city, Mr Chernov described in a first-person account risking his life to find wireless internet, nearly being killed by shells and becoming numb to sight of death.
He left the city a week ago after being told he was on a Russian hit list.
"By this time, I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in," he said.
No updates on art school and drama theatre
Mariupol's city council claims that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the city's buildings have either been damaged or destroyed.
On Sunday, an art school was flattened. About 400 people were reported to be sheltering in the building, but their fate remains unclear.
There has also been a lack of updates on the people thought to be trapped in a bomb shelter under Mariupol's beloved drama theatre that was destroyed, reportedly by a Russian air-strike, a week ago.
Moscow claimed it was a "false flag" attack, and the building was blown up by Ukraine's Azov Battalion.
In the days after the incident, Ukrainian authorities said 130 of the more than 1,300 people sheltering in the theatre had been rescued, but since then there has been no word and the rest remain unaccounted-for.
Ukrainian MP Dmytro Gurin told the BBC teams were still unable to clear the rubble of the theatre.
"The services cannot clean this rubble because the shelling never stops and bombing never stops. It's really dangerous," he said.
He could not give an estimate on how many people had managed to flee the area as "we don't have connection with Mariupol".
ABC/AP
