A Pyrrhic Victory for Putin in Mariupol – 95% of the City Is Destroyed.
Mariupol will remain a moral success for Ukraine.
The evocation of Mariupol will remain forever associated with that of a martyred city. The port city is not only emblematic of the Russian army's siege and its atrocities, but also of one of the most relentless sieges in modern military history, which is now coming to an end.
The Ukrainian army said Tuesday, May 17, 2022, that it was working to evacuate the last 600 soldiers trapped in the Azovstal steel site. “Ukraine needs its living heroes”, exclaimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
About 50 seriously wounded soldiers were transported on Monday 16 May 2022 to the hospital in Novoazovsk, a Russian-controlled town about 30 km from Mariupol, while 211 others were taken in five buses to the town of Olenivka, in the hands of pro-Russian forces. They should then be subject to a prisoner exchange, according to Kyiv.
Moscow speaks of “surrender” and says the fighters will be treated as prisoners of war. Hundreds of women, children, and elderly people who took refuge in the underground of this site, which was also designed as a fallout shelter in the Soviet era, had already been evacuated at the end of April 2022.
A humanitarian situation worthy of the apocalypse
Under siege since March 2, 2022, Mariupol has been the target of daily and indiscriminate bombardments for ten weeks. According to the municipal authorities, a quarter of the 400,000 inhabitants left the city as soon as the invasion began on 25 February 2022. The rest were quickly deprived of water, food, and electricity, and had to cope with freezing temperatures. Some 21,000 of them died, according to Mayor Vadym Boychenko. On March 9, 2022, the humanitarian situation there was described as “apocalyptic” by the Red Cross.
"We were lucky to live near a well," says Marta, 48, a former employee of the Azovstal factory who prefers to remain anonymous. “We used to go and fetch water at night, despite the bombing”. With her husband, Sasha, her mother-in-law, and her sister-in-law, she subsists on food stocks built up shortly before the beginning of the invasion. On March 23, 2022, Marta and her sister-in-law lost contact with Sasha and her mother, who had gone out to help a neighbor. “We were convinced they were dead,” she says.
A few days later, a missile hit their building. The two women took refuge at a friend's house, before crossing the separatist lines. After passing through several filtration camps, where they were interrogated and their phones were searched, they managed to reach Donetsk and found Sasha and his mother, alive. They had been forcibly evacuated by pro-Russian soldiers.
Since then, Marta has learned that her neighborhood, like the rest of the city, had been completely destroyed by the bombs. According to the municipal authorities, 95% of the buildings in Mariupol have been destroyed. If the Russians are relentless, it is because the port city occupies a strategic position between the Donbas and Crimea, illegally annexed by Putin's Russia in 2014.
The capture of the city will allow Moscow to consolidate its control of three-quarters of the Ukrainian coastline on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The largest city in Donetsk Oblast, Mariupol is also a major industrial center, home to the Illitch and Azovstal metallurgical plants, the largest in the country.
Mariupol will remain a moral success for Ukraine
Beyond economic and strategic considerations, the capture of the city would represent an important symbolic victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who claims that his military intervention aims to “denazify” Ukraine.
Mariupol is home to the Azov Regiment, a paramilitary unit founded in 2014 to fight pro-Russian separatists and has since integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces. Because of Azov's historical ties to the Ukrainian far-right and the presence of neo-Nazis in its ranks, the capture of its members would represent a valuable victory for Russian propaganda. Something tangible that Vladimir Putin could present to his people to keep their consent in the face of a war whose deepest motivations many do not understand. The majority of the combatants besieged in Azovstal were from this regiment.
However, the siege of Mariupol already represents a moral victory for Ukraine. In Kharkiv, a member of the city council proposed renaming the “Avenue of Heroes of Stalingrad” to “Avenue of the Heroes of Azovstal”.
Less than 2,000 fighters held out against vastly superior forces and massive bombardment for two months without being resupplied. This military feat is probably unmatched since World War II. The siege was also a setback for the Russian army.
The stubborn resistance of the Ukrainian soldiers prevented the Russian general staff from redeploying the twelve battalions engaged in Mariupol until the very last days. A precious time saved by the rest of the Ukrainian army. For the survivors, strategic considerations are of little importance. Marta, who had already had to leave her hometown of Donetsk in 2014 and now lives in Estonia, confides that she does not want to return to Ukraine. At least not right away. “I don't have anything waiting for me in Ukraine anymore. Even if the war ends tomorrow, I'm not sure I want to go back”.
On the Russian side, this victory looks more like a Pyrrhic victory as the cost to obtain it was immense and can be considered a defeat for the Russian army in public opinion.
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