The hell of the Ukrainian city is reminiscent of what other places have suffered in the past, such as Aleppo, Hiroshima or our Gernika, destroyed by sieges and bombings
Mariupol’s dogged and heroic resistance lasted almost three months. The Ukrainian port city fell for good on Friday evening. It succumbed to merciless bombardments, days and nights, and has become part of the long list of martyr cities in war crime history. Such as Troy, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Aleppo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Warsaw, Grozny, Sarajevo, Beirut, Gernika… All the monuments of an inexplicable, unspeakable terror, returned to the Stone Age.
Putin proclaimed Russia’s “total victory” after the surrender of the last 591 fighters in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Azovstal steel mill, protagonists of a tooth and nail defense, to the last drop of blood. Brutality versus perseverance. The struggle for ‘liberation’ advocated by the Russian president has cost between 5,000 and 10,000 lives.
Beyond that lies a city in ruins, with streets littered with corpses. Roads, parks and gardens became gallows. An apocalyptic landscape reminiscent of Stalingrad in 1943 after the withdrawal of the Nazis and shows an endless battle, house by house, wounded by wounded, death by death… Today’s wars are not so different from the old ones.
Since the invaders cut off electricity, water and gas at the beginning of the attack on Mariupol in late February, the city has gone underground. Under the asphalt, in inhumane places, families with children or frail elderly who clung to their last chance of survival sought their habitat. Outside, death and war crimes reigned at the hands of soldiers with letters of marque, with more vodka than blood in their hearts and ready to take every life, to cut off the future from their fellows, even expressing themselves in their same language.
Mariupol was an obsessive target for the Kremlin after the failed occupation attempt in 2014, the year the war really started and when the attack was repulsed by Ukrainian forces. This time, the Russians arrived with artillery, aviation, and the determination to burn the city of 450,000 to ashes. They have done. Tyrants are always obsessed with clearing the maps of the cities that oppose them, such as Numancia. However, history remembers that destroyed cities are not abandoned by their people and are eventually rebuilt from scratch.
Mariupol’s streets are now a succession of rubble, burnt-out cars and makeshift cemeteries, as described by residents who managed to flee to Zaporizhzhya. “Not a single building remains standing. Everything is in ruins,” describes young Vitali, who returned to the city this week to look for his grandmother, who always refused to leave, determined to defend the house from looters. «On the main street there is a succession of wooden graves and unburied corpses. Everything they told me didn’t match what I saw,” he says.
“We’ve lost everything,” says Tamara, 56 years old and the owner of a dejected look. “We had everything in life and everything has been taken from us,” he sighs, thinking of a house and a city that no longer exist. “The day we were able to leave, Mariúpol appeared to be 80% destroyed. There were corpses everywhere. We neighbors organized to go out in groups and bury them, but the explosions often prevented us from doing that,” he adds.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin “the end of the operation” of the encirclement. Kiev had ordered his soldiers to lay down their weapons hours earlier to save their lives. Now they are prisoners hoping to become bargaining chips in a hypothetical exchange with captured Russian troops. Moscow and the separatists of Donbas want to condemn them and some even dream of executing them. The Geneva Convention and the law of war do not apply as long as the weapons are not silenced.
The city’s takeover has been plagued by allegations of war crimes by Kiev and Western powers. Biden, whose government has released $40 billion to guarantee supplies of weapons and economic support to Ukraine, openly speaks of a genocide of civilians in Mariupol, perpetrated with brutality, massacres and indiscriminate attacks on defenseless people.
The mayor, Vadym Boichenko, denounces that the real number of dead residents will never be known because Russian troops have created mobile crematoria to burn the bodies and destroy the evidence of their atrocities. “The Russians have turned all of Mariupol into an extermination camp. Unfortunately, this is no longer Chechnya or Aleppo. It is the new Auschwitz,” said Boichenko.
This city on the Azov Sea played a key role in Moscow’s strategy to conquer the east and south, with the aim of creating a corridor that would connect Odessa -and even Transnistria- with Russian territory. Like Mariupol, Rubizhne, Volnovakha, Severodonetsk have been destroyed… But there is hardly any news about these cities. Ukrainian President Volodímir Zelensky denounced that “they are trying to do the same with many other cities.” In any case, in his opinion, “the war will only end definitively through diplomacy.”
Source: La Verdad
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