Outbreak of disease feared in Mariupol, Ukraine amid bodies

The exiled mayor of the devastated and occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol said on Friday he feared a rise in deadly diseases as temperatures soared, with bodies still littering the city’s streets.

“Ruhr and cholera break out. Unfortunately, this is the assessment of our doctors: that the war, which has struck over 20,000 residents … unfortunately, with these outbreaks of infection, will claim thousands more mariupolians,” Mayor Vadym Boychenko said on Ukrainian television.

Boychenko, who left the city during its siege and before Russian occupation, said Mariupol was recently quarantined.

The battered city has faced the grim need to bury its dead since the beginning of the war, when Russian blockades and constant bombing left the city’s morgues unpowered and overcrowded, forcing local authorities to dig mass graves to block the bodies from the streets to fetch.

Months later, the Russian occupiers are grappling with the same problem, struggling to collect the bodies of Mariupol’s dead civilians.

As a result, Boychenko said, wells were poisoned by decomposing corpses, and corpses rotted in the rising summer temperatures.

“They just tear down houses and carry away the rubble along with the killed residents of Mariupol. Because the actual number of bodies under the rubble of destroyed houses is frightening,” Boychenko said on Telegram.

“Nearly 50 to 100 people were killed under almost every destroyed house, and 1,300 high-rise buildings were destroyed in Mariupol.”

About 100,000 people are said to remain in the occupied city, which had more than 430,000 inhabitants in peacetime.

With postal wires