A daughter’s view from afar: life and fear on the Azovstal front line

Wed, 06 May 2026 20:07:00 +0200

This article presents an interview with the daughter of a Ukrainian soldier defending the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol during heavy fighting in spring 2022. The piece describes how Ukrainian forces had occupied the plant in early March and continued to hold it under constant shelling and air strikes, with Russian forces fully blocking the site by late April. Conditions inside worsened sharply as food and medical supplies dwindled and the number of wounded grew to around six hundred. The interviewee explains how her father, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, ended up at Azovstal with other troops and civilians, and how she keeps in touch with him only through rare, fragmented messages routed via comrades who find weak mobile signal in the plant. The article details the extreme hardships on the ground: extremely limited water (about two hundred grams per person per day), little bread, and heavy losses, even if the full picture is unclear to those inside. She describes watching