Mariupol: “It is civil war”

With its timeless lack of subtlety, summer happened today on the steppe of eastern Ukraine. It is in the mid-70s, little wind disturbs the gently undulating immensity. At least 10 degrees hotter than yesterday’s glowering  conditions.

Like every summer, it will be long, hot and punctuated by the flash and violence of sudden storms.

In the southern port city of Mariupol the heat hangs heavy. The sense of what lies ahead is ominous in the suddenly- arrived summer heat.

True, the gigantic steel plant at the edge of town works on, its plumes from still-productive smokestacks streaking out across the plains.

The charming battered old trams are running where they can. Indefatigable aged women bring home their vegetables for the pot from some unseen distant market.

But mostly the shops are shuttered or looted. One hardware and gunsmith’s store has a notice hastily daubed across the front: “There are no weapons in this shop.”

As we film – quickly – we are immediately clocked and reported by unsmiling men in battered cars who pause, bark into mobiles, and cruise on.

A mobile phone shop is not so lucky. Pillaged, its windows lie shattered across the pavement.

We do not linger.  Whatever you do in Mariupol, you’d best do it quick if you are an obvious stranger to town.

The entire central area and beyond is choked off by scores of roadblocks: trucks, tyres, pallets, planks – what have you got?

Any (conventional) law enforcement appears to have vanished. Instead toughs – men and women – guard their barricades. Some are angry. Some are drunk. Some are very angry and very drunk.

No weapons – or none visible, I should say. Just big sticks or baseball bats.

No interviews either from the people we saw, just the odd shouts:  “This is ours now! Our town. For our people. ”

Beside the barricades, groups of people quietly concentrating with funnels, bungs, fuel and bottles – turning out petrol bombs in the heat of the day in expectation. Expectation is everywhere.

We stop to speak to one passerby, a smartly-dressed middle-aged woman who looks as if she would never be seen near the wild-eyed men back on the barricades.

“What do you make of what’s happening here?” I ask.

She pauses, momentarily, and says: “It is civil war.”

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