Natalia Usmanova felt her heart stop as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with concrete dust. She was cowering in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal steel works.
Usmanova, 37, talked to Reuters on Sunday after being evacuated from the facility, a massive complex created by Josef Stalin and designed to survive attack with a subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels.
‘I was afraid that the bunker wouldn’t be able to survive it – I was terrified,’ Usmanova said of her time underground.
‘I was panicked when the bunker started to tremble; my spouse can attest to that; I was so terrified the bunker would cave in.’
‘We haven’t seen the sun in a long time,’ she said in Bezimenne, a village in Donetsk controlled by Russia-backed rebels 30 kilometres (20 miles) east of Mariupol.
She remembered the shelters’ lack of oxygen and the horror that had grabbed the lives of those hunkered down there.
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