The Ukrainian army announced late Monday that its troops had completed their “combat mission” at the sprawling Azovstal steel plant, which for weeks had been the last major sentry in a city otherwise occupied by Russian forces. Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were evacuated from the facility and efforts were made to evacuate those still inside.
Now there are fears that the evidence of further atrocities will be lost forever.
“Murders are covering their tracks,” the municipality claimed.
The Kremlin has denied many of these claims, including using filtration camps to cover up wrongdoing and targeting civilians in Mariupol.
A symbol of resistance
Mariupol became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance during weeks of relentless Russian attacks. While most of the city had already fallen, the defenders held out at Azovstal, where at one point as many as 1,000 civilians had taken refuge. Ukrainian officers described a bleak situation at the steel mill as supplies of food and water dwindled and hundreds of injured were stranded without proper medical care.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously said “tens of thousands” have died in Mariupol, while the regional military governor last month said as many as 22,000 were killed, though the death toll is difficult to verify in the fog of war. The mayor of Mariupol estimates that 90% of the city’s infrastructure has been damaged, 40% of which is beyond repair.
Images of Mariupol’s destruction have become symbols of the Kremlin’s use of arbitrary firepower in Ukraine, drawing strong visual parallels to the leveling of cities like Aleppo in Syria or the Chechen capital of Grozny.
According to Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, Mariupol’s control is critical to Russia’s efforts to expand the wider Donbas region—beyond the separatist-controlled areas – to bring.
“It is unrealistic to declare control of the Donbas without actual control over the major cities,” he said in an email to DailyExpertNews last month.
Kofman said Mariupol’s fall should free up manpower and logistics for the Kremlin’s campaign in the rest of Donbas.
But keeping the city under Moscow’s thumb also requires significant resources. Russia likely needs all the troops it can muster for its offensive in eastern Ukraine, where it has refocused its military efforts after withdrawing from other parts of the country.
Dvornikov led a division in the Kremlin’s pacification campaign in Chechnya from 2000 to 2003 and led Russian forces in Syria from 2015 to 2016. In both cases, the Russian military left devastation and bombarded civilian areas with no regard for casualties.
“He basically destroyed and destroyed the second largest Syrian city of Aleppo. And his strategy was simply to bomb everything that was still alive, target civilian infrastructure – hospitals and schools – and then basically take over what was there. was left,” said Orysia Lutsevych. , a research fellow at the British think tank Chatham House.
“It’s a similar strategy that we’re already seeing in Mariupol,” she said last month, while the fighting was still going on.
Ukraine’s military intelligence has already accused Dvornikov of overseeing war crimes committed against the civilian population in Mariupol during the siege.
A complete accounting
Of the 450,000 people who lived in the city before the war, a third had already left by mid-April, Mariupol mayor Vadym Boychenko said. There are only 100,000 inhabitants, and those who have fled bring with them the horror stories of war.
Many said they hid for days in cellars to hide from the relentless artillery fire. A resident previously told DailyExpertNews he was standing in line waiting for fresh drinking water when an explosion killed three people in front of him, including one who was beheaded.
The Kremlin has denied many of these claims, including using filtration camps to cover up wrongdoing and targeting civilians in Mariupol.
But according to Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, Russian forces are soon clearing some of the areas worst hit by their offensive.
A Telegram channel that appears to be affiliated with the city’s new Russian-backed government has announced temporary work being offered “to gather the dead” as well as in city improvements.
A full account of the destruction there may be impossible as the city comes under complete Russian control.
Those in Mariupol could have endured the same kind of abuse. If the city remains under Moscow’s control, a true account of what happened there may be lost to history.