Woodkirk Stone
A website dedicated to locating missing loved ones in Mariupol has offered renewed hope in Ukraine’s months-long war.
Dmitry Cherepanov, a computer programmer and native resident of Mariupol, created the Mariupol Life website after fleeing the city with his family following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which began there. almost three months.
Even after he left, Cherepanov still wondered who had stayed.
“I’m also looking for many friends I’ve lost contact with,” he told CTV National News in Ukrainian.
“I hope this website will help me and many others. For example, I found out that a friend of mine died there.”
Its online message board allows users to follow missing people and leave messages, with thousands of people visiting the website in just over a week.
Searches for more than 1,000 people are still ongoing on Sunday, while a roughly equal number are listed as having left town. At least seven people on the forum are confirmed dead.
“It gives them a tool where they can post who they are looking for or who they have unfortunately lost,” Cherepanov said. “Plus, it can become a wall of memory for those we lost in this horrible war.”
Located on the Sea of Azov in the southeast of the country, Mariupol has seen heavy fighting since the start of the war.
Ukrainian forces and civilians now remain locked in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, as Russian troops have occupied the rest of the city.
It is believed that more than 100,000 people are still in Mariupol, compared to a pre-war population of around 430,000. Those who remain have faced a persistent lack of food, water and heating.
Putin has since declared victory in the city as his troops rally in the eastern region of Donbass, where separatist forces from Donetsk and Luhansk have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on the West for more weapons.
At a Saturday night press conference at a kyiv metro station, Zelenskyy announced a planned visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
“You can’t come empty-handed today, and we’re not expecting just gifts or cakes, we’re expecting specific things and specific weapons,” Zelenskyy said.
The White House had not yet commented on the visit Sunday noon.
With files from The Associated Press