By Álvaro Peñas
As in most wars, the media’s eyes are focused on the centre of political power, in this case Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which the Russian army has tried unsuccessfully to encircle. But there is one city in eastern Ukraine whose strategic importance has made it the most brutal theatre of this war: Mariupol. It lies between the two ‘people’s republics’, controlled by pro-Russian separatists, and the Crimean peninsula, occupied and incorporated into Russia in 2014. For this reason, the conquest of Mariupol would give the Russians a land corridor between the two territories and control of the outlets to the Sea of Azov.
Mariupol was founded in 1778 as Pavlovsk around a former Cossack camp and received, a couple of years later, a large Greek population resettled from Crimea. The city was renamed Mariupol in 1779, Maria’s city, after Maria Fyodorovna who was the second wife of Crown Prince Pavel Petrovich, the son of Peter III and Catherine the Great. Like many other cities, Mariupol was renamed in the Soviet period and was renamed Zhdanov in 1948, after Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, a fervent Stalinist and founder of Cominform, the international branch of Soviet propaganda. Mariupol did not regain its name until 1989. The town also has a strong religious significance because of the icon of Our Lady of Mariupol in the Church of the Holy Trinity, which shows Mary holding the Child in her arms and pointing to the Child as the Way to follow. According to legend, a Crimean shepherd, possibly a Greek Christian, found the icon on a rock and a small chapel was built there. The icon was hidden to prevent it from falling into Muslim hands and would have been rescued during the founding of the city.
In 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the separatist outbreak in the Donbas, Mariupol became a theatre of war when pro-Russian separatists tried to take the city but were defeated by the Ukrainians (in the army museum in Kyiv there is a display case commemorating the Ukrainian victory in that city by the Azov volunteers). Eight years later, the Russians besieged the city and the Ukrainians defended it again. The importance of Mariupol is reflected by the presence of elite Ukrainian army units such as the 36th Marine Brigade and the Azov Special Operations Regiment of the National Guard. In fact, last Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine “for the defence of Mariupol” to the commanders of both units, Major Denys Prokopenko and Colonel Volodymyr Baraniuk.
Fierce Ukrainian resistance has so far held back the Russian armoured advance, but has not been able to prevent the continued bombardment of the city with missiles, aircraft and artillery, which, according to Ukrainian sources, have destroyed 80 per cent of the city’s buildings. Mariupol is being hit very hard and the picture contradicts the Kremlin’s narrative of a targeted operation. To think that Russian shelling, as Russian propaganda repeats, against civilian buildings is due to the presence of an Azov barracks, which seems to have more barracks than soldiers, is simply absurd.
Before the invasion, Mariupol had about 430,000 inhabitants. According to its deputy mayor, Serhiy Orlov, about 100,000 people left the city at the beginning of the war. When the city was encircled by the Russian army, humanitarian corridors were negotiated but have only allowed some 30,000 civilians to leave. The humanitarian corridors have failed amid accusations by both sides of ceasefire violations, leaving tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the city. It has happened before, in Grozny (Chechnya) and Aleppo (Syria), and, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted, it is the modus operandi of Putin’s government: “Bombings, proposal of humanitarian corridors, denunciation of the rupture of the corridor following a provocation by the corridor’s delimiter himself, attempt at talks and negotiations to better condemn the adversary who abandons the negotiations because he is forced to do so, bombing again and it all starts all over again”. In fact, the general leading the siege is Mikhail Mizintsev, who was in command during the Russian intervention in Syria.
Some analysts point out that this Russian strategy originated in the Chechen war, the so-called “Grozny doctrine”. According to Richard Weitz, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Politico-Military Analysis: “It is a strategy that consists of heavy bombardment that seeks to destroy as much as possible, to cause as much damage as the bombs can reach, to terrorise the civilian population, to force them to try to flee, and then to attack any remaining enemy forces on the ground on the ground”. Mariupol is on the way to becoming a new Grozny and the siege of the city, which is preventing water and food from reaching it, is causing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
Polish priest Paweł Tomaszewski, who was able to leave the city, presented a bleak picture of Mariupol to Vatican Radio: “People die when they come out of the cellars in search of water. Going out onto the streets is tantamount to suicide. There wasn’t a neighbourhood in the city where missiles didn’t fall, where there was no damage, no destruction of blocks and buildings. They destroy the city with diabolical intent, they raze it to the ground. Often, in order to get further, you have to negotiate the mountains of lying corpses. There is nothing, no water, no food. There are no more shops, so you can’t buy anything. Sometimes there are carts with water tanks or cisterns, but there aren’t many. There is also no tap water that is not fit to drink anyway. The food is running out and the shooting continues. People try to cope, but most of them have no supplies. And even if they set aside some food in advance, it can’t be prepared because there is no gas. Some are even looking in the rubbish”.
This situation has also been denounced in an article by Mstislav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka of Associated Press. They are the only journalists from the international press still present in Mariupol. According to their information, the local authorities had counted 2,500 civilians killed on 16 March, a figure which did not take into account many of the dead who could not be counted because of the shelling and which can only increase. Through numerous photographs, journalists have documented the deaths, the wounded, the mass graves and the hell that the Russians have unleashed on the city they intend to liberate.
The Russian Defence Ministry published last Monday the casualty figures in Ukraine: 9,861 dead and 16,153 wounded, equivalent to more than a thousand casualties a day and about 20 per cent of the initial invasion force (numbers that the Kremlin must not have liked and which were deleted yesterday as “manipulation”). These figures alone explain the Russian stalemate and even the ultimatum of surrender to the city of Mariupol two days ago, in which the defenders were threatened with trial by the people’s courts of the Donetsk republic if they did not accept the offer. The Ukrainians predictably rejected the ultimatum. “Our soldiers will fight to the last bullet. But people are dying for lack of food and water. I suspect that in the coming days there will be hundreds of deaths, if not thousands,” said Deputy Mayor Orlov a week ago. Unless food is facilitated or a humanitarian corridor is made possible with some kind of international mediation, the worst of Mariupol’s martyrdom is yet to come.
Source: El Correo de España