Mariupol, a port in southeastern Ukraine, has been under Russian siege for weeks. Fighting has been going on in the city center since Friday between local forces, the Russians and their separatist allies.
Odessa was under threat, Kyiv was under siege, Lvov, in the west of the country, was under attack. If the front line seems frozen for nearly a week, Russian military action in Ukraine is intensifying. In the east of the country, Mariupol still holds out, having fought the Kremlin army for twelve days and been bombarded since March 1.
But since Friday, the martyr city, in spite of itself, has entered a new phase of its war.
Russians control “90% of the city center”
Thus, the Russian General Staff confirmed that its troops managed to break into the center and fight there on the side of the soldiers of the separatist “republic” of Donetsk. In the video, we see how Chechen units come to support the Russian military and stage the process of evacuating civilians.
Russian officers say they already control – along with separatist allies – more than 90% of the city’s center.
It must be said that Mariupol has a powerful strategic and geopolitical attraction in the eyes of Moscow. The capture of this port on the shores of the Sea of Azov, which had about 400,000 inhabitants before the invasion and, according to the Ukrainian authorities, was supposed to accommodate another 350,000 people, will be a major turning point in the war and allow Russia to secure a continuity between its forces from the annexed Crimea and troops from the Donbass.
“Mariupol is a pebble in Vladimir Putin’s shoe. This is the last city on the coast of the Sea of Azov under the control of Ukraine, so its fall is necessary to ensure territorial integrity,” General Jérôme Pellistrandi confirmed this Saturday morning on our set.
Bombed theatre: assessment remains uncertain
In addition to that fight, Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian aircraft of “deliberately” bombing the Mariupol theater on Wednesday, which Russia denies. “More than a thousand” people, mostly “women, children and old people”, took refuge in a bomb shelter under this building, according to the mayor’s office of this port on the Sea of Azov. The refugees of the Drama Theater nevertheless took care to write the word “Children” in Russian in large white letters on the back of the building and in its courtyard in order to protect themselves from a possible strike, but in vain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who paid tribute to local heroism in a video filmed in Kyiv overnight from Friday to Saturday, said more than 130 survivors had been pulled from the rubble. “Some, unfortunately, are seriously injured. But at this stage, we do not have information on the number of” possible deaths, “he said, adding that “rescue work continues. “According to local authorities, who did not provide more details, there are still hundreds of people under the ruins.
“Hell”
Fleeing from “hell” from Mariupol, the families talked about corpses lying on the streets all day long, hunger, thirst and the piercing cold of nights spent in sub-zero basements. “This is no longer Mariupol, this is hell,” said Tamara Kavunenko, 58. The Russians “fired so many missiles,” she adds, that “the streets are littered with the corpses of civilians.”
According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, thanks to the humanitarian corridors created in the country, more than 180,000 Ukrainians, including more than 9,000 people from Mariupol, were able to escape from hostilities.