Nation & World

‘By mid-March, corpses littered the street like newspapers’

August 4, 2025

long read

Young Ukrainian mother and her toddler left to fend for themselves after husband joins soldiers defending Mariupol

Excerpted from “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine” by Danielle Leavitt, Ph.D. ’23.

By the end of February, Leonid had begun taking food and supplies to the Ukrainian soldiers at the front lines of Mariupol’s defense. He talked about them constantly — he called them “his guys” — and he worried about them, regaling Maria with how their positions were changing and they weren’t getting the help they needed. He bought carton upon carton of cigarettes and as many jugs of water as he could find, then drove through the shelling to deliver them. He was eager to help, and even as the barrages intensified and Maria said she didn’t want him to go anymore, he still went several more times.

On March 1, Maria and Leonid decided that staying in their apartment for any length of time during the daylight hours was no longer an option. They would shelter in the basement. For the time being, they would still sleep in the apartment — mainly for comfort — but if things got even worse, they’d begin sleeping in the cellar, too. Explosions, shelling, and shock waves were so frequent that darting from the basement to do anything — grab an item from the apartment, get some fresh air, cook food — risked sudden death.

Maria’s older sister, her husband, and their toddler son had also joined Leonid, Maria, and David by the beginning of March, and they stayed in the cellar for 12 hours at a time, trying to keep everyone warm and fed and entertain the two babies. In their courtyard, Leonid broke down the crates and old furniture they found in the basement to build a fire. He melted snow to boil and cooked soup and dried pasta.

Photo by Carolyn Moffat

On March 3, Leonid began preparing his military clothes. He had received some ribbons from those he visited on the front lines — ribbons that suggested a specific group or unit — and she saw him sew them on the chest of his uniform. He was enlisting, and she was watching it happen. Before the full-scale invasion, young men in Ukraine were required to serve 12 to 18 months in the army, but as Russia invaded, Ukraine did away with that policy. The state instead implemented new conscription practices, allowing the government to summon for service any able-bodied man between the ages of 27 and 60, including those without former military experience. Later, Ukraine would lower this age to 25 years. Men would often receive a summons to report to a recruitment center, after which they would be medically examined and sent off for a short stint in training. Early on, many men and women volunteered without a summons, a surge that sustained the army in the first months of the war.

Leonid had completed his compulsory military service in the previous years. Though he was not summoned, seeing the situation deteriorate so rapidly in his hometown compelled him to rejoin the ranks.

On March 5, Leonid drove across town to wish his mother a happy birthday. It confused Maria that he’d risked exposure during an air raid simply to see her, but he insisted on going there in person.

Early the next morning, Leonid gently woke Maria. “We need to say goodbye,” he whispered. Still groggy, she shrugged him off. “Maria, it’s time to say goodbye,” he insisted. He had already been out that morning on a reconnaissance mission. She didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?” She yawned.

“Let’s say goodbye. I need to go.”

“Let’s say goodbye. I need to go.”

She pushed her eyes open, and he looked at her with a seriousness that scared her. He did not look away.

“No, no, Leonid,” she whispered. She would have to talk sense into him, beg him to stay. “No, Lyonya,” she said, using his familiar shortened name. “You can’t leave me,” she pleaded, “David, our life. What goes on there is not for you. Let’s leave together, we can try to get out through the humanitarian corridor, we can go as a family.”

He cast his eyes down. “I have to go, Maria.” Watching him carefully, she knew he was serious — she had never seen him this resolute, as though his face had turned to stone, as though nothing she did, no threats, no pleading, no weeping, could keep him there. He tried to embrace her, and she stiffened, flaring with anger and grief. He turned to walk out into the stairwell.

“I was in a stupor, I just lay there, stuck. I didn’t understand,” Maria said.

Her parents then told her to go chase after him, talk to him. Following him into the stairwell, Maria caught up with him. Leonid was upset. He twitched with agitation and emotion.

“Maybe you’ll at least hug me?” he said, and she did, and the pain sliced through them. Before he could change his mind or she could say anything, he turned and jogged down the stairwell.

Telling me the story several months later, her voice wavered with emotion: “I truly did not think he would go. But I watched him leave.”

The next day, Leonid’s father came to check on them and bring some food.

“Where’s Leonid?” he asked.

Maria realized that Leonid had not told anyone else, not even his parents when he’d gone to see them.

“Where is Leonid?” her father-in-law asked again.

“He went to fight,” Maria said.

With Leonid gone, Maria knew she would need to fortify herself. Despite her stubbornness and resilience, she had come to rely on him in their relationship. Without him, Maria knew she could not expect anyone to help her anymore.

By the time Leonid left, her parents and sister, along with her sister’s husband and young son, were staying with her in the same basement. Their basement was large, and to get to the part of it where they could sit down, where they had built a small encampment, they had to walk through dark tunnels, feeling their way along the cold stone walls. Her mother did not hear well and her father did not walk well, and Maria’s days quickly evolved into the singular pursuit of food, water, and heat. I will do everything now, she told herself constantly, like a mantra. I can do everything now. I will be the strong one. Later that day Leonid’s colleague came and brought Maria a letter from Leonid. It was a short note, but he wrote that everything was OK with him, he was safe and healthy, he was thinking about them, he loved them. She knew he felt guilty for leaving, she could hear it in his note. If he would just come back, she thought, they could have a long talk and sort it all out. But with every passing day, he didn’t. She got very little concrete information from him — only an occasional check-in to say that he was OK and he loved them — and she was furious.

Though they never took off their coats or shoes in case they had to run, the children screamed constantly from cold. Maria and her family tried occupying them in the basement by playing games, telling stories, and rocking them to sleep. But explosions roared outside relentlessly, frightening and waking the children. They could not let the kids watch TV or play on tablets or phones because any battery life they had on their devices was a precious commodity reserved exclusively for communication.

They became dirty quickly, and there was no water to wash themselves. Maria crawled out of the basement a couple of times a day to make a fire in the courtyard and prepare soup with potatoes and canned fish. They also boiled pasta and fried it with tomatoes and onions. Sick to their stomachs with anxiety and constantly cold, Maria and her sister couldn’t bring themselves to eat much. They were both breastfeeding and started to lose their milk supply, which further distressed the children, who batted at their breasts begging for milk that was not coming.

Every day was the same: They were awakened by the sounds of shelling, a distinct metallic whir followed by concussive blasts at impact, then a couple of hours of silence. They waited every moment for it to begin again, wondering if the shelling would be closer this time. When the bombing began once more, she’d go so rigid that the edges of all her body’s muscles would ache. Taking a deep breath, she’d run to David, pick him up, hold him close, sing him songs, and rock him gently, a meditative motion she did as much for her own comfort as for his.

Periodically, at her own risk, she took David to the apartment to run around for 10 minutes or so. “It drove me crazy that I was sitting there in the basement,” she said. “It was so dark, my eyes couldn’t see at all when I came out into the light.”

When a bar of service appeared on her phone, she’d receive a handful of messages — from her sister in Kharkiv, from friends who had already evacuated, from Leonid. He would not say where he was fighting, but she knew he was in the city. Witnessing the daily carnage, he urged her and the family to leave Mariupol as soon as they could.

After he left on March 6, Leonid came back in person three times: once on March 8 to wish her a happy International Women’s Day — a major holiday in former Soviet countries — then on March 11, and finally on March 13. Each time it was, as Maria writes, “for literally one minute,” except the last visit, when he was able to stay for five. He met her outside the basement, hugged her, and ran quickly to the cellar to see David, swooping in, picking David up, and hugging him tight, trying to make him laugh. The last time Leonid came, he ran to the basement, where David was sleeping, and laid his face near his son’s for a moment.

The last time Leonid came, he ran to the basement, where David was sleeping, and laid his face near his son’s for a moment.

What kind of conversation can two people have in one minute? She told him that she had been making a fire in the courtyard, what they were eating, if they’d had any news from her sister. He told her to leave the city immediately, as soon as they could arrange an evacuation vehicle. He’d meet them wherever they went as soon as it was over. As he shifted to leave, they hugged, and she looked away so that she didn’t fall apart and cling to his clothes, begging him to stay like a woman possessed. Then he ran off.

“I didn’t know what he had become,” she wrote later. “I didn’t understand at all. I didn’t understand the essence of the disaster.”

Because the city was constantly, indiscriminately shelled, leaving it posed enormous risk. People who tried to escape were killed every day, hit by shells or shrapnel or snipers. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers often forced evacuees to undress and examined their tattoos. They confiscated phones and searched texts, emails, and photos for any indication of Ukrainian patriotism. Maria was 23 years old, and small. She worried that at a checkpoint she would have no capacity to defend herself against rape, assault, or abduction, especially because she would travel with her parents, both of whom were in poor health and could do little to protect her. They decided they’d wait a few more days to see if things calmed down. “How long could this unending bombardment possibly continue?” she wondered. But Leonid insisted that they must get out — that things would never return to normal, that there was no life left to be had in Mariupol. By then the police force in Mariupol had collapsed, and the next day, the Mariupol Drama Theater was bombed. A thousand civilians had sheltered underneath the building and several hundred were killed.

By mid-March, corpses littered the street like newspapers, victims of violence, hunger, or untreated infections. People were scared to look too closely. What if you recognized them? Eventually the Russian troops occupying certain parts of the city began collecting the bodies in trucks and depositing them in the city square.

Maria occasionally returned to the apartment to retrieve toys or secure the windows and doors, trying to keep it pristine. She still held out hope that eventually they’d return to that apartment and resume their life. From there, she caught broader views of the city. “I had a view from the window, I saw absolutely everything,” she wrote. “The whole city was burning.” She could see, in the distance, one of the large steel factories in town, Azovstal, glowing. Smoke rose in a continuous black cloud over the horizon. At night, the sky glowed pink, and buildings crackled in flames or smoldered, collapsing piece by piece.

By March 19, Maria decided they needed to leave. They had no more candles or matches. “We were just walking by inertia, in the darkness. I was trying to feel my way to the doors to get out of the basement.” She and her sister gathered their possessions in the apartment, letting the children get a better sleep in the beds a final time before departing in the morning. Through the middle of the night, Maria and her sister pumped breast milk for the journey to ensure that they would not need to lift their shirts and could calm the babies with bottles in a pinch. As they pumped in silence, they heard a whistle and planes roaring overhead. Somewhere near them an air assault was underway, and when the bomb dropped, they felt their building sway, the furniture sliding across the floor.

For most an evacuation ride was extremely difficult to secure. Though drivers came with their cars and buses from throughout Ukraine to help in the effort, the route was dangerous, and drivers began charging high prices — several hundred dollars — for rides just beyond the city limits. Maria and Leonid’s car had been damaged by a shell, so it was not reliable, but Leonid’s father agreed to take them. Only part of their group — Maria, David, and Maria’s dad — could fit on the first trip; the others, Maria’s sister, nephew, brother-in-law, and mom, would need to wait until Leonid’s father got back and was ready for another trip. It would be, they hoped, just a day or two. With a white ribbon tied to the car to indicate they were civilians, they inched through the city toward the checkpoint. They lived on the outskirts, and it was a short drive to the edge of the city. “As we pulled out onto the main street, I saw that every house was burned down. There were tanks lying around on the roads, buses overturned, people were digging graves at every step — every step, wherever there was a free spot.” Their city was gone, replaced with ghosts. She went on: “Where there had been trees, or in the fields, where there used to be just gardens, now bodies are just lying there. And people walk, people walk on them.”

Their city was gone, replaced with ghosts.

They crossed through 15 checkpoints to leave the city. Russian soldiers rifled through her bags, patted her body, looked at her son. They made men strip naked and stole food and belongings. After hours of waiting, Maria’s party crossed the city limits into a village on their way to Zaporizhzhya, the closest major city under Ukrainian control, 120 miles away. She had never been to Zaporizhzhya. In fact, she had never been much of anywhere at all. Except for a few short trips to neighboring cities and one to Kyiv, she’d spent her whole life in the city behind her, just like her parents, just like her grandmother Vera before her.

“She is nearby,” Maria said, “I know this for certain.”

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Danielle Leavitt. All rights reserved.