Sawt Falasteen - Desperate relatives seek news from Ukraine port siege

The city is without water, gas and electricity, with communications down since March 2.

A few patches of weak phone signal remain the only way for most residents to get news out, and the connection is unreliable.

Channels on messaging app Telegram have sprung up, with friends and family posting pictures and information about their loved ones, hoping that others may know something of their fate.

Yulia, a 29-year-old teacher who fled Mariupol on March 3, said her mother-in-law was able to call only by walking to a tower far from her home and it was "really dangerous for her to get there".

But she had managed to call Yulia's husband today to let them know she was still alive.

"She said she was OK but the attacks don't stop. There are many corpses on the street and nobody buries them. They lie there for days. Sometimes utility services collect them and bury them all together in one huge grave," she said.

- Constant bombardment -

Yulia and her husband are among the few people to have escaped Mariupol since the siege began, having to face checkpoints manned by Russian troops to leave.

After a shell fell 50 metres from a crowd of people hoping to evacuate, some started to beg drivers to take them out, she said, but few people had spare seats.

"On the road, we saw burnt-out civilian cars, some were overturned on the side of the road. We understood that Russians had shot them," she said.

"Two kilometres from Mariupol, we saw Russians, their military equipment marked with the letter 'Z'. We thought that was our end, that they would kill us."

Mariupol has been under constant bombardment for 10 days from artillery shells, and Grad, Smerch and Tochka U rockets, according to city council member Petro Andriushchenko.

Rough estimates by the regional military administration put the number killed in Mariupol at 1,207, but it is thought there could be more under the debris.

Attempts to establish a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians and to take in supplies have failed on multiple occasions, as Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of not abiding by agreed ceasefires.

On Wednesday, three people -– including one child –- were killed and 14 others injured in an attack on a children's and maternity hospital, causing international outrage.

- 'Help us' -

Yana Karban, 30, has not spoken to her parents, who live on Mariupol's Left Bank, since March 2 but spends most hours of the day trying to find news.

Their neighbours managed to find a patch of phone signal for long enough to call their own daughter, who passed on news to Karban.

She received a message that said: "It's a total disaster in the building. They were just hit by shelling and eight apartments are on fire.

"My parents were crying, saying 'help us'. They want to leave the city but it's impossible as the shelling is everywhere –- it's impossible even to get out."

Her parent's neighbours are now unreachable again and Karban is unable to contact anyone in the city herself -– she is just waiting for news about the fires, or if there were any victims.

Images sent to AFP show green and blue-tinged shrapnel that Karban says were found in a wardrobe in her parent's building after attacks in the morning, shared by the sister of another neighbour.

Karban, a PR manager for a tech company, lives in Kyiv but fled on the second day of the war to Zurich via Poland.

The stress means she is now taking Phenibut and her therapist has her practicing Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychotherapy treatment, to alleviate her distress.

"I couldn't even stay in Poland as I was always seeing our flag flying and couldn't stop crying. I never thought that I'd become a war refugee," she said.

"It's more than horrible, your brain just can't process emotionally what is happening. But who cares about mental health –- you just want your parents to stay alive."

H.Nasr--SF-PST