Mariupol, Shattered, Holding On

The Azovstal steel plant is seen in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Friday. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

"The conditions are not great for kids here."

"Children's teeth are getting worse. They're lacking in vitamin D. There's no sun."

Mother of three, Azovstal steel plant, Mariupol

"There are many children [here] of all ages, women, elderly people."

"They found that their only available shelter [was] next to the Ukrainian troops who are still defending the city from Russian invaders."

"Russian occupation forces...know perfectly well about the civilians here, and they keep using bunker-buster bombs, shelling them with missiles and all varieties of artillery."

Denys Prokopenko, commander, Azov Battalion

"The Azovstal factory is an enormous space with so many buildings that the Russians... simply can't find [the Ukrainian forces]."

"[Russians were] considering a chemical attack [to] smoke out [those sheltering in the plant]."

Oleh Zhdanov, military analyst, Kyiv

The Azovstal steel plant, seen above, is the last stronghold of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol. The city's fall would hand Russia its biggest military victory of the war and give it full control of a land corridor from the Donbas to Crimea, a southern region it seized from Ukraine in 2014. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

 

Video footage recently released was of families struggling to live in Mariupol's vast Azovstal steel plant where approximately a thousand civilians found refuge within the wide network of service tunnels and utility passages carved into the earth beneath the sprawling plant. Aside from the civilians, Ukrainian defenders are also present there. About 500 troops remain.

They are all, militia members and civilians alike, awaiting either death or liberation as powerful bunker buster bombs, capable of penetrating heavy fortification to hit underground targets, were being used by Russian troops to force those in hiding under the plant to surrender. "The world watches the murder of children online and remains silent", stated Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.

A fresh ultimatum was issued early in the week for Ukrainian troops to save their lives by surrendering, laying down their weapons. Not one Ukrainian soldier had responded in the affirmative to an earlier offer that expired on Tuesday, and the Wednesday ultimatum elicited a similar non-response. The proposal was that Russian troops were prepared to observe a ceasefire while the proposal was in effect beginning April 20. In the event, they failed to.

"But realizing that the commanders of Ukrainian units may not receive such commands from the Kyiv authorities; to stop the senseless resistance, we urge them to make such a decision on their own and to lay down their arms", Moscow's defence ministry stated. The leader of Russia's Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, predicted Russian forces would take the steelworks completely by Tuesday night. 

 

Pro-Russian troops are seen in Mariupol. Ukraine disputes Russian claims that the city has been captured. Russia is bent on capturing the Donbas after failing to take Kyiv. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

 

"Today, with the help of the Almighty, we will ... take over Azovstal completely", an audio message repeated on his Telegram channel. But they failed to. The Azovstal plant, built during the Soviet era, is the largest such metallurgical factory in Europe. It spans four square miles in its location along the city's waterfront. The plant was heavily fortified by Ukrainian forces. Without control of the plant with its giant footprint, Russia would find it difficult to hold Mariupol.

The month-long siege saw Russian troops encircle the seaside town with the intention of expanding control along the coast of the Sea of Azov. It was Russia's intention back in 2014, when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula to form a land bridge between the eastern Donbas bordering Russia, by capturing and annexing Mariupol eventually as well. That goal is now within reach.

Residents walk by a destroyed tank and damaged buildings in Mariupol, which has been encircled by Russian troops for weeks and seen some of the worst fighting in the war. The city is located in the Donbas — an eastern region partly held by Moscow-backed separatists. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Surviving Mariupol

"The stuff that you're hearing about chemical weapons, this is straight out of their playbook."

"They start saying that there are chemical weapons that have been stored by their opponents or by the Americans, and so when they themselves deploy chemical weapons, as I fear they may, they have a sort of ... fake story, ready to go."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

 

"In Russia, we are already considered dead. I was given the opportunity to call my parents and they told me that a funeral for me had already been arranged."

"If we are exchanged [as prisoners of war between Ukraine and Russia], then we will be shot by our own people."

Captured Russian soldier, begging Ukraine not to return him to Russia 

"[The two Ukrainian de-bombers showed] mind-boggling bravery."

"This Russia-dropped bomb would flatten a building -- and yet these Ukraine EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] technicians defuse it with two hands and a bottle of water, while shells audibly land nearby."

Charles Lister, senior fellow, Middle East Institute think-tank, Washington

"Some people will have food but I'm not sure for how long it will last. Many people report having no food for children."

"People started to attack each other for food."

"People started to ruin someone's car to take the gasoline out."

Sasha Volkov, deputy head, International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Mariupol

"Because my mother is a midwife and my father owns a car, they are helping people and they can't just leave them."

"There are a lot of people who, for example, are too old or who have babies and they are scared to leave under the bombing and falling rockets."

"There is a humanitarian catastrophe happening in Ukraine and they need the world to help them."

Mariia Moskalenko, internally displaced

 

"Airstrikes started from the early morning. Airstrike after airstrike."

"All the historic centre is under bombardment."

"They want to absolutely delete our city, delete our people."

Petro Andrushenko, adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, East Ukraine

A number of civilians were killed and dozens injured after a Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol

 

Russian expectations -- for the time being in any event -- appear to have been dashed. Their lightning-strike invasion of Ukraine with the intention of swiftly bringing matters to a head by decapitating the government of the population's democratic choice has quite evidently not gone quite according to plan. Despite superior fighting numbers and a decided advantage in up-to-the-moment technical machinery of modern warfare, the Kremlin appears to have vastly under-rated Ukraine's indomitable spirit of resistance.

 

The Russian military has been given orders of priority; Mariupol and Kyiv. Kyiv is encircled and the Russian convoys have been bogged down, quite literally. Mariupol's fate has been far more immediate, bombarded from the sky, ground artillery aiming at the city's infrastructure -- hospitals not excluded -- it is in the process of being completely destroyed. A plight seen by other towns and villages in the northeastern part of the country, closer to Kyiv.

 

The bombing of Mariupol's children's and maternity hospital saw three people killed, with another 17 injured. Citizens of the city unable to flee the bombardment since evacuation routes are also targeted are running perilously low of the most basic requirements to prolong life. A situation which has resulted in people turning against one another to acquire for themselves what others too must have to exist; water, food, warmth, medication.

 

The people living in Mariupol this winter have been denied heat for days in -9C overnight temperatures and they are steadily running out of food. Which has led to events quite removed from normal life in the eastern city, where people have been breaking into shops and supermarkets hoping to garner food for their families. The deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation has reported that some people had taken to attacking others.

It is believed that over 1,200 civilians have been killed in the city of 430,000. The city's cemeteries no longer dig single graves for individual corpses and conduct ordinary funerals. Instead a 25-metre-long trench has been prepared to receive the overwhelming numbers of casualties that the city's morgues are unable to deal with. In every metric of human existence, this situation really merits the description of "humanitarian catastrophe".

 

A deep trench - some 25 metres long - has been dug in a cemetery in the heart of the city

 

"We do not have the opportunity to bury them in private graves", explained Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol's embattled mayor. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov saw fit to dismiss concerns surrounding civilian casualties, characterizing them as "pathetic shrieks", insisting the hospital was being used as a base by 'far-right fighters'. 

Residents of the city were advised to prepare dead bodies by tying their hands and legs together, to cover them and leave them outside their homes. Others drag bodies to the mass graves rolled into carpets or plastic bags. There is no count being taken of the numbers that have been buried in mass graves, nor are there records being kept of names and other identifying features.

For the most part the endless shelling by Russian forces is responsible for the dead, while some have died from natural causes at their homes, but because of full morgues, authorities are unable to arrange for their collection. Family and friends are not permitted to gather at the cemetery where those they know and love are being rolled into the trenches.

Tanya, a six-year-old, was among those killed in the shelling. She died of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of her home. Her burial too was among those other countless, unnamed corpses.

 

Dead bodies are placed into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022, as people cannot bury their dead because of the heavy shelling by Russian forces.

AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka