Vadym Boychenko made the statement on social media on Wednesday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Mariupol’s reconstruction to take up to a decade & USD 14 billion
According to the mayor, Russian forces completely destroyed or damaged 1,356 apartment buildings and around 40 percent of private houses in the city, the PAP news agency reported, citing a social media account of Mariupol’s City Council.
Some 220,000 people need new flats, officials said. They estimate that the reconstruction of Mariupol will take seven to 10 years and cost over USD 14 billion.
‘We’ll learn from the experiences of Warsaw, Gdańsk’
Boychenko said: “In planning the reconstruction of Mariupol, we are working with experts from cities that suffered during World War II.”
He added: “We’ll learn from the experiences of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Dresden and Rotterdam.”
In April, councillors in Poland's Gdańsk named one of the plazas in their city “The Plaza of Heroic Mariupol.”
Boychenko on Wednesday thanked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the European Investment Bank for their commitment to helping Mariupol.
“I’m confident that thanks to our joint efforts Mariupol will be resurrected even more beautiful than before the war,” he said.
Mariupol councillors said “Ukraine’s big business” planned to help rebuild the city.
Humanitarian crisis
After a bloody and brutal siege, Mariupol fell to Russian forces in May. The humanitarian situation in the southeastern port city has been described as “catastrophic.”
There is an acute shortage of food, water and hygiene supplies as Mariupol teeters on the verge of an epidemic of infectious diseases, such as cholera, according to news outlets.
Meanwhile, Boychenko has said that the civilian death toll from the siege, originally estimated at around of 22,000, may have been vastly understated, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, t.me/s/mariupolrada