'We will fight. We are unbreakable': Mariupol survivor tells her story

euronews.com:

When Kateryna Polishchuk began her studies to become an opera singer, she could have never imagined that one day she would be performing surgery without anaesthesia on a wounded soldier while hiding away in a bombed-out steel plant.

But Russia's war in Ukraine made the unthinkable possible.

"The hell I went through in Azovstal – it cannot be dreamed by anybody or shown in any action film," Polishchuk told Euronews. "Not even (Quentin) Tarantino would know how to make such a film."

The 21-year-ago paramedic was among the Ukrainian contingent that defended the Azovstal plant during the three-month siege of Mariupol. The industrial site was the last stronghold in the ravaged city and quickly turned into an international symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

"We resisted the Russian army with a completely calm understanding of how it could end. We understood that we would all die. But we did not give up," Polishchuk said, speaking through a translator.

"From the very first days, when we were surrounded, we had no supplies, we had no medicines, food, water or ammunition. We had no proper equipment, and no air defence means."

"Unfortunately," she went on, "we had very difficult conditions to fight, but we had fighters who wanted to defend their home, who wanted to show the whole world that Russia can't take neither Ukraine nor Europe."

In her interview with Euronews, Polishchuk recalled the extreme conditions that Ukrainian soldiers were forced to endure throughout the relentless Russian attack. Some soldiers, she said, spent "three to four days" in a row without sleeping or eating, as the shelling lasted through the night – only to continue in the morning.

After 82 days of gruelling fighting, Mariupol fell to Russia and the remaining