The Economist March 26th 2022 15
BriefingThe war in UkraineI
n geophysics, an epicentre is the place
on the surface of the Earth closest to the
point in its depths where intolerable pres
sure has triggered an earthquake. In war
torn Ukraine, the Epicentr hypermarket in
Zaporyzhzhya is the rallying point in gov
ernmentheld territory closest to the intol
erable pressure Russian forces have im
posed on Mariupol, some 220km away.
Many of those fleeing the violence—
some on foot, some in wheelchairs—have
nothing but the shopping centre’s address
to guide them. Some make it only to inter
vening villages. But 2,0005,000 a day are
reaching the hastily organised gathering
point, as shocked as the survivors of earth
quakes and tsunamis. More shocked, per
haps: the destruction they escaped was not
some sudden act of God, but a protracted,
deliberate and horribly human assault.
You can sense the arrival of a new con
voy before you encounter any of the survi
vors on board—they carry the smoky smell
of the burning city even after days of travel.
On arrival they get soup and bread—which
they hold to their noses before devour
ing—fresh clothes and first aid deliveredby local volunteers. They fight back tears,
not always successfully, as they work out if
friends and relatives have managed to es
cape. They are the lucky ones, they keep
saying; the ones who found cars and pet
rol. They are not still trapped in base
ments. They are not the old women beg
ging for a lift on the edge of town, money in
one hand and icons in the other.
Mariupol, once a city of 400,000, was
surrounded by Russian forces from Crimea
and Donbas in the first week of the war. It
has fared far worse since than the other cit
ies around which the Russians are en
camped, in part because of its strategic im
portance—it is crucial to the establish
ment of a land bridge from Donbas to Cri
mea—in part because, unlike Kharkiv or
Kyiv in the north, it is entirely encircled.
The Russian forces close to Kyiv have
been held at bay for the past two weeks. Ki
ra Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, says the capital is the “best de
fended place in Ukraine”. No one in the city
now believes that Russian forces have the
fighting power needed to take and occupy
it. There are even some areas where Ukrai
nian troops are reported to have pushed
back the invaders, though at least some of
those reports have turned out not to be
true. In Makariv, 50km west of the capital,
the Ukrainian authorities claimed the Rus
sians had been “driven back”. When your
correspondent tried to visit he found a dif
ferent situation. Fierce fighting made it
impossible to get into the town. The local
mayor said the Russians had seized 15% of
it at the end of February and had neither
advanced or been pushed back since then.
In the centre of Kyiv, however, life is im
proving. Petrol is no longer rationed, and
there is more traffic on main roads than at
any time since the invasion began on Feb
ruary 24th. Bread is back on supermarket
shelves.Trains enter and leave the city.
But the signs, sounds and horrors of
war persist. Every day since around March
14th the capital has been struck by a hand
ful of missiles, with the northwest hit par
ticularly badly. Late in the evening of
March 20th a Russian missile pulverised a
gym, a shopping centre and an office build
ing, hurling debris for hundreds of metres.
According to the Russian Ministry of De
fence, which produced a video to support
its claim, there were Ukrainian missile
launchers in a parking area underneath the
gym. If true, their detonation in the blast
could explain the force of the explosion. K YIV AND ZAPORYZHZHYA
Russia’s atrocities in Mariupol have not brought it closer to victory. But they have
not yet spread farther afield, eitherAn uncertain outlook
→Alsointhissection
17 Russia’s cult of war