Lowering your eyes to the ground can be dangerous. Here, in what was once a city, fragments of things crunch under your feet, pieces of people, small scraps of existences that were, it seems a thousand years ago. What remains are splinters of something that once made sense, its place in the world. But in the huge Mariupol steel plant, nothing makes sense anymore, no one has a place anymore. The war explains with facts the meaning of “razed to the ground”, “canceled”, dismembered into pieces so small that to understand everything it is not enough to look. The road that enters the industrial area of the Azovstal, the last refuge of Ukrainian soldiers and, it seems, a thousand civilians, passes under a sky of mortar and heavy artillery that are loved without stopping. From every hole, behind every trench, a sniper could be hiding, from one side or the other. Nothing here is left standing. Not the houses, the trees, the factories, the shops, the railway, anything built by man or nature is devastated. An irreversible process that has engulfed soldiers and civilians, who now lie abandoned in the middle of the road, not even the dignity of a common grave.
At the entrance to the city, Chechen flags fly, including those of the Dontesk militias. The fabric is shiny and new, it seems to shine against the background of the rubble. Even yesterday, far from the perimeter of the steel mill, the next war trophy in view of Putin’s May 9, civilians lined up for bread and water. The long main street, attached to the few trees still standing, are red flags that indicate the Russian humanitarian corridor that led out of the city from the steel mill. No one has ever used it.
Everywhere there are carcasses of cars and military vehicles, now rusty, as if they were the remains of another war. But the war is the same, only the front line has changed. Now it is here, around the great steel mill, where Dontesk soldiers dig new trenches and Chechens defuse booby traps. The manholes have been blown up, they want to prevent Ukrainian soldiers from coming out “from underneath”.
Along what used to be the railway, as the Azovstal approaches, the blows get stronger, people dissolve into thin air. The scenario is apocalyptic: you walk among the bodies, over the bodies, among rubble, mines, boxes of abandoned hand grenades, remnants of the battle. It is as if someone had taken the city and shook it with unspeakable violence. Below, along with the civilians, remained the soldiers of the Azov battalion and the 36th Brigade of the Ukrainian Navy, above there are the Chechens waiting for them: “We are going to cut their throats one by one,” says a militiaman from Kadyrov brandishing a knife.
Hour after hour the circle tightens more and more around the Azovstal, which has become an open-air prison for the last Ukrainian soldiers. “We put a barbed wire around us and we’re fine, they don’t come out of there anymore,” says a soldier from Donetsk. The strategy is clear, with the rest of the city under Russian control, it’s just a matter of time. And more than a prison, the steel mill looks like an open-air tomb, where it becomes increasingly unlikely that anyone will get out alive.
Even the second lines have now reached the Azovstal front, there are at least 12 other Russian units on the way. If it weren’t for the women, the elderly and the children hiding in the bunkers beneath the steel mill, they would have already raided.
Mariupol, reduced to smoking rubble, appears on Russian state television, close-up on the separatist flag flying over the television tower, the highest point in the city, and the warehouses of the burning Azovstal. “The humanitarian truce will begin when the Ukrainian forces holed up in the Azovstal plant raise the white flag,” the Russian general Mizintsev made clear.
At stake is the entire Russian offensive, the one that has suddenly had a clear and definitive logic since yesterday, and that cannot ignore Mariupol. Taking it would deprive the Ukrainians of a viable port and complete the land corridor between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, perhaps beyond. The games now seem over, the only, very heavy unknown, weighs only on the fate of the last soldiers of Kiev.
Unlimited access to all site content
€ 1 / month for 3 months, then € 3.99 / month for 3 months
Unlock unlimited access to all content on the site
#hell #Azovstal #steel #plant #Mariupol