A mother’s desperate words
Fox News correspondent Amy Kellogg reports on the story of Lyudmila Rudenska who survived the Russian siege of Mariupol.
So much for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s line that life under the administration of Kyiv had been sheer hell for the Russian speakers of Donbas.
“The city (of Mariupol) was a beautiful, flourishing, little European city that had been becoming more and more attractive by the day,” says Lyudmila Rudenska in her native Russian. Recalling how Mariupol was before the war, she says, “There were lots of parks, squares, grandiose plans for a promenade. There was a new ice palace where children learned to figure skate. And a swimming pool was about to open after a renovation.”
Now the seaside city is rubble, in large part. In fact, according to Rudenska the Chechen fighters who famously led the brutal charge on the city, with swagger and plenty of Tik Tok videos to prove it, admitted to her that Mariupol got it worse than Grozny, the Chechen capital, ever did. Grozny, at the end of the second Chechen war in the ’90s, looked like the moon.
Sixty-six-year-old Rudenska is lucky to have made it out of Mariupol. But it was a long and uncertain journey. She was caught off guard by the suddenness and ferocity of Russia’s attack on the port city. She even reported to work in the first days of the assault, at a music school in town, but ended up primarily helping people into its large basement for shelter.
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An explosion erupts from an apartment building after a Russian army tank fired on it in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
Rudenska’s daughter Irina was living in Kharkiv when the war started. As she started to make her move west to safety, Irina tried to bring her mother along. But Lyudmila Rudenska said there was work to do in Mariupol and she wasn’t ready to go. Soon it was too late.
“On March 1, in the…