Forty days with no road in
Mariupol sits on the north shore of the Sea of Azov, where the Kalmius river meets the coast. About 430,000 people lived there before February 2022. Russian shelling began on 24 February, and within a week the roads heading northwest toward Zaporizhzhia were under fire. The last bridge over the Kalmius was destroyed. Fuel, flour, insulin and drinking water stopped arriving. Survivors describe the same sequence almost every time: shops stripped in three or four days, banks shut, mobile masts down, taps dry by 2 March.
By mid-March the city was under what aid agencies call a total siege. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) tried repeatedly to bring convoys in. Most attempts failed or stalled for days at checkpoints. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) logged more than a dozen announced humanitarian corridors that never opened.
The botany of a courtyard
Much of what people ate was already growing under their windows. Stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, comes up in southern Ukraine from late March, and by April it stands knee-high along fences, in yards and on the edges of rubble. Goosefoot, Chenopodium album, is the plant Ukrainians and Russians call lebioda. It grows on disturbed ground, in vegetable patches and between paving stones, and it tolerates almost anything.
Other plants filled out the diet. Common sorrel (Rumex acetosa) and sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella) gave a sour taste. Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) supplied leaves and, later, roots. Greater plantain (Plantago major), chickweed (Stellaria media) and shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) were picked in handfuls. People also took beet tops, carrot tops and the young leaves of amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus), a common weed of vegetable beds.
Boiling away the sting
A nettle leaf is covered in hollow trichomes that break on contact and release a mixture of histamine, serotonin, acetylcholine and formic acid. Thirty seconds in boiling water destroys the mechanism. Every cook in the city knew this without needing to be told.
The dishes were plain. Nettle soup with a spoon of flour or semolina if any remained. Lebioda chopped into a pot with whatever cereal could still be found. Greens salted and pressed into jars. Leaves dried on newspaper for tea. Something similar happened in Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, where lebioda bread appears in blockade diaries and ration records, and it happened again during the famine of 1921 to 1922 on the Volga and the Holodomor of 1932 to 1933. Grandmothers in Mariupol carried that knowledge, and pulled it out again in their seventies and eighties.
Water from rain, snow and radiators
Water was harder than food. Pumping stations lost power in the first days of the siege. Some people drew from wells in the private sector of the city, lowering buckets on ropes. Others collected rain in basins, melted snow in February and early March, or drained the water from heating systems and radiators. Cooking fires were built in courtyards from broken furniture, pallets and branches.
The Kalmius was available, but it also carried what the sewers carried. Aid workers later described outbreaks of diarrhoeal disease, the risk of cholera and typhoid, and a real danger of hepatitis A. Household chlorine tablets, sodium dichloroisocyanurate (NaDCC) and ceramic filters were on the wish lists of every convoy, along with insulin and infant formula.
What hunger does to a body
An adult needs roughly 1,800 to 2,500 kilocalories a day, more in cold weather or under stress. A bowl of nettle soup supplies perhaps 100 to 200. People lost weight steadily, and the weight loss was not the worst of it. Without protein, fluid collects in the legs and belly; the face thins while the abdomen swells. Thiamine deficiency brings beriberi, niacin deficiency pellagra, and a shortage of B12 and iron brings anaemia.
The greens did one thing well. Nettles and sorrel carry vitamin C and carotenoids, so scurvy, the classic siege disease, was less common than it might have been. That is a small, bitter piece of luck. The bigger danger arrived later, when food finally came. Refeeding syndrome, driven by a sudden drop in phosphate, potassium and magnesium in the blood, can stop a heart within hours of a first proper meal. Médecins Sans Frontières and other medical teams warn about it in every famine, and they warned about it here.
Who went out, and when
Foraging meant leaving the cellar. Shelling fell on courtyards and streets without warning, and the queue at a well was as exposed as any other gathering. People went early, in twos, kept low, and stayed close to walls. A pot of soup was stretched over three days. Children were fed first. Adults drank the liquid. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets in April, and pigeons went too. Residents have spoken about both without much drama, in the flat tone of people reading out a ledger.
What the convoys could and could not do
Small deliveries did get through. Volunteers drove vans in from Zaporizhzhia when corridors briefly held. The ICRC reached the city at the end of March and again in April, but the volumes were a fraction of what a city of that size needed. Ukrainian officials put the civilian death toll above 20,000. The UN human rights office verified several thousand deaths and stated that the true number was considerably higher. The Ukrainian garrison held out in the Azovstal steel plant until mid-May 2022, when the last fighters surrendered. By then the fighting had already moved on to other towns.
Nettles, years later
Nettles still grow in Mariupol. They grow in every yard, in every crack in the pavement, on ground that was cleared and on ground that was not. Some survivors say they cannot stand the smell of nettle soup now. Others kept the recipe. It is the kind of knowledge that sits quietly in a family for two or three generations and then, quite suddenly, becomes worth having.
