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On a proud June morning in 2014, Ukrainian forces hoisted their flag over the Mariupol City Hall to exciting choruses of the national anthem. For weeks, they engaged pro-Russian separatists in a battle for control of a port city of great strategic importance. The loss of Mariupol, the industrial center of the Sea of Azov, would risk losing control of part of eastern and southern Ukraine, a reward Russian President Vladimir Putin has been desperately seeking.
Now, after nearly a decade on the front lines of a low-class war, the de facto fall of Mariupol by Russian forces is a landmark moment in Moscow’s full-scale invasion. In a war marked by Russia’s poor performance, its inability to take Kyiv and its failed attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership, control of the devastated metropolis is tantamount to a significant and horrific victory for the Kremlin.
The fight is not over. Civilian and Ukrainian fighters – including fighters from the Azov Regiment, the same nationalist unit that helped return to the city in 2014 – remain trapped in a dramatic final battle at the sprawling Azovstal railway plant.
Outside the labyrinthine halls of the Soviet-era factory and the underground tunnels and chambers, little remains to be done.
The battle of Mariupol was an anachronistic siege – a picture of Guernica with fireballs of Russian missiles in the night sky, apartment buildings turned into smoldering scales, the destruction of museums and hospitals. Civilians died simply because of the accident at the place where they lived, including those who took refuge in a bombed-out theater with the inscription “children” painted in the front yard in an unsuccessful attempt to warn Russian fighters.
The almost complete leveling of a city caused the sieges of Aleppo, Syria, in 2010 and Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, but also the destruction of European cities from an era considered buried in the ashes of World War II and, according to -back, the 13th century looting of the Golden Horde, which conquered the lands where modern Mariupol now lies in ruins.
The conquest of Mariupol brings Moscow one step closer to the goal: building a land bridge from the Crimean peninsula – annexed by Moscow eight years ago – to the breakaway republics of Ukraine to the east, which are virtually under Kremlin control. The result could redraw the map of Europe, expanding Russia’s borders by hundreds of square miles.
To win this award, the Russians have been accused of war crimes, starvation, indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians. More than 100,000 civilians remained trapped as Moscow obstructed the creation of humanitarian exit corridors. Other residents were forcibly relocated to Russia, some to cities thousands of miles east. Approximately 20,000 lives have been lost in Mariupol, and satellite images published last week show mass graves 12 miles west of Mariupol. Mayor Vadim Boychenko called it the “new Babin Yar” – a reference to mass graves near Kyiv, where the Nazis killed at least 33,000 Jews.
“The biggest war crime of the 21st century was committed in Mariupol,” Boychenko said on Friday.
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Putin’s forces may find Mariupol difficult to pacify completely; Observers predict ongoing acts of sabotage by provocative civil resistance. But for Ukraine, a country that holds back the Russians despite all odds, the loss of the city is the biggest failure in the punitive war.
Mariupol was hit by fighting long before the Russian invasion began on February 24.
After an uprising in Kyiv in 2014 ousted Russia’s friend, Ukraine’s president, and Putin’s troops invaded Crimea, the city came under direct attack from Kremlin-backed separatists. His town hall was set on fire and destroyed. A few months after the successful expulsion of the Kremlin’s allies, a commander of the then Azov Battalion, a right-wing Ukrainian unit known in the past for attracting extremists, told The Washington Post: “This peace will not continue. Putin thinks he is a monarch, that we should all kneel before him.
A volley of Grad missiles hit a market in eastern Mariupol in 2015, killing 31 people. The city’s airport has been closed for years due to its proximity to the conflict to the east. Residents kept emergency bags packed in case the city was broken through again.
But at the same time, renewed investment from Kyiv injected new energy into the city. The streets were cleared. Stylish bars and cozy restaurants have sprung up in strange neighborhoods lined with Soviet-era apartment blocks. City life flourished again. The wrestlers once again competed for the sheep prize at the annual “Great Feast”, a celebration on the site of Mariupol in the center of Greek Orthodox life in Ukraine. The Nielsen 8-bit Club Museum contained a delightfully flashy gallery of retro electronics.
Until the Russian shells got stuck last month – destroying the gallery and home of its owner Dmitry “Brain” Cherepanov.
“Russia must bear the heaviest possible punishment for what it has done,” Cherepanov, 45, told Telegram in an interview with western Ukraine on Friday, where he fled with his family. “Their soldiers just came to rob and kill us.”
Sergei Taruta, a Ukrainian MP and business leader from Mariupol, told Skype in Kyiv on Friday: “There was no way to break through [Mariupol’s] resistance to break his spirit. “This meant that the Russians had to physically remove the city, he added.
“It was possible to destroy our heroes only by destroying the city, and they did it from day one,” he said.
Mariupol survivors, dizzy and exhausted, describe the horrors they experienced
On February 23, Boychenko had his last day as mayor in peacetime, organizing a ceremony for smiling child skaters. The municipal council wrote in its Telegram profile that “the situation in Mariupol is calm. The city is under reliable protection. “
The next morning, Mariupol and Ukraine were attacked.
Residential buildings were shelled. People went to their basements. The electricity stopped in parts of the city, and then the water. That evening, the city imposed a curfew. “We are not panicking,” Boychenko said.
In the early days, Mariupol still felt like a relatively safe haven. Residents of Sartana, a village just northeast, packed their belongings in white plastic bags and boarded buses to the city center. Other refugees were encouraged to take refuge in the Grand Drama Theater, a city landmark that opened in 1960, but whose four Greek command posts made it look older.
Every sense of security evaporated quickly.
The Russians are “creating a blockade for us, as in Leningrad,” the Mariupol council wrote after a week of war, citing the siege of the imperial Russian city by Nazi Germany from World War II. “The horde of Putin’s troops is constantly shelling the city.
In the early hours of March 2, Artem Kishik was awakened by a rocket attack on his apartment building on Morski Boulevard in eastern Mariupol, an area dominated by a large, long path down to the sea.
“I opened my eyes and saw my brother and mother standing and shouting for me to run down the hall,” the 19-year-old wrote in an account he later posted on Instagram. “We knew we had to go, but it was too late.
Instead, he and his family trembled in their unheated apartment. “Without any light, we started living from dawn to dusk – going to bed around 6 pm and waking up from 4 to 5 in the morning,” he wrote. “But we woke up much more often even earlier because of the explosions.”
Eventually, the fighting came so close that Kishik’s family moved to the basement with other residents of the apartment complex. Hunger was complicated by the cold. The elderly began to die, which led to a horrific ritual.
“The cold prevented their bodies from decomposing, so we took them to their apartments, where they lived,” he wrote. His family ate from time to time with bowls of oatmeal, honey, and a few boxes of food. His brother was killed in a shelling.
After the Russians bombed the city’s water supply system, Nick Osichenko, chief executive of Mariupol TV, said his family had resorted to tearing down home radiators to drain them from their chemical-infused drinking water. He recalled the relief of a winter storm that sent street dwellers to fill buckets of snow to melt for water.
Like many parts of Ukraine, especially in the south and east, Mariupol is a predominantly Russian-speaking city with deep traditional and cultural ties to Russia and complex, overlapping loyalties to Moscow and Kyiv. But the sheer brutality of the attack turned the city against the Kremlin.
“I don’t think anyone but Putin could make Mariupol love Ukraine so much,” Osichenko said.
On March 9, Russians bombed Maternity Hospital No. 3, where generations of Mariupol children were born. Pregnant women wrapped in blankets fled through the smoke and broken glass. It was confirmed that day that three people had died.
“Kill me now!” a wounded pregnant woman screamed the day after the attack when she realized she was losing her baby, medics told the Associated Press. Both the mother and the child died.
A week later, an air strike struck the Mariupol Drama Theater, a refuge that looked like a refuge in the early days of the war. About 1,300 civilians took refuge there before the strike, authorities said; about 300 people are estimated to have died.
As the battle continued, even the dim basements were no longer safe. Confusion and chaos ensued as residents sought refuge.
Cherepanov’s Mariupol Life website is already one of several digital bulletin boards where desperate family members are searching for the missing. On the site, the child of Tatiana Lomakivskaya wrote: “Looking for a mother … born in 1939 in Mariupol … very thin, tall …
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