A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022
ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERSA boy stands next to a vehicle and an apartment building t hat were destroyed in Mariupol. The Ukrainian city’s de facto fall to Russian forces stands as a landmark moment in Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
a delightfully nerdy gallery of vin-
tage electronics.
Until Russian shells struck last
month — destroying the gallery
and the home of its owner, Dmitry
“Brain” Cherepanov.
“Russia should suffer the most
severe punishment possible for
what it has done,” Cherepanov, 45,
said in an interview on Telegram
on Friday from western Ukraine,
where he fled with his family.
“Their soldiers just came to rob
and kill us.”
Serhiy Taruta, a Ukrainian law-
maker and business leader from
Mariupol, said in a Skype inter-
view from Kyiv on Friday: “There
was no way to break [Mariupol’s]
resistance, to break its spirit.”
That meant the Russians had to
eliminate the city physically, he
added.
“It was possible to destroy our
heroes only by destroying the city,
and they did it from the first day,”
he said.
On Feb. 23, Boychenko had his
last day as a peacetime mayor,
holding a ceremony for smiling
child figure skaters. The city
council wrote on its Telegram ac-
count that “the situation in Mari-
upol is calm. The city is under
reliable protection.”
The next morning, Mariupol —
and Ukraine — was under attack.
Apartment buildings were
shelled. People took to their base-
ments. Electricity in parts of the
city went out, then water. The city
imposed a curfew that evening.
“We’re not panicking,” Boychenko
said.
In the first days, Mariupol still
felt like a comparatively safe ha-
ven. Residents of Sartana, a vil-
lage just to the northeast, gath-
ered their belongings into white
plastic bags and boarded buses
toward the city center. Other refu-
gees were encouraged to shelter
in the grand Drama Theater, a city
landmark that opened its doors in
1960 but whose four commanding
Greek pillars made it look older.
Any sense of safety evaporated
quickly.
The Russians “are creating a
blockade for us, as in Leningrad,”
the Mariupol council wrote after a
week of war, referring to Nazi
Germany’s World War II siege of
the imperial Russian city. “Putin's
horde of troops is constantly
shelling the city.”
In the early hours of March 2,
Artem Kischik was awakened by a
rocket strike on his apartment
building on Morskyi Boulevard in
eastern Mariupol, an area domi-
nated by a grand, long path down
to the sea.
“I opened my eyes and saw my
brother and mother standing and
shouting at me to run into the
corridor,” the 19-year-old wrote in
an account that he later published
on Instagram. “We realized that
we had to leave, but it was already
SEE MARIUPOL ON Arestaurants sprang up in quirky
neighborhoods lined with Soviet-
era apartment blocks. Urban life
bloomed anew. Wrestlers once
again competed for the prize of a
sheep at the annual “Great Feast,”
a celebration of Mariupol’s place
at the center of Ukraine’s Greek
Orthodox life. The Club 8-Bit Mu-
seum on Nielsen Street harboredupol in 2015, killing 31 people. The
city’s airport closed for years be-
cause of its proximity to the con-
flict in the east. Residents kept
emergency bags packed in case
the city was breached again.
Yet, at the same time, renewed
investment from Kyiv injected
new energy into the city. Streets
were fixed. Stylish bars and cozycalled the Azov Battalion — the
right-wing Ukrainian unit known
in the past for attracting extrem-
ists — presciently told The Wash-
ington Post: “This peace will not
last. Putin thinks he is a monarch,
that we must all kneel before
him.”
A salvo of Grad rockets struck a
market in the east part of Mari-ment buildings reduced to smol-
dering husks, the destruction of
museums and hospitals. Civilians
died simply for the accident of
where they lived, including those
sheltering in a bombed theater
with the word “children” painted
across its front courtyard in a
failed attempt to warn off Russian
fighter jets.
The near-total leveling of a city
has evoked the sieges of Aleppo,
Syria, in the 2010s and Grozny,
Chechnya, in the 1990s — but also
the destruction of European cities
from an age thought buried in the
ashes of World War II and, further
back, the 13th-century pillaging
by the Golden Horde that overran
the lands where modern Mari-
upol now lies in ruins.
Capturing Mariupol brings
Moscow a major step closer
toward achieving a goal: Estab-
lishing a land bridge from the
Crimean Peninsula — annexed by
Moscow eight years ago — to
Ukraine’s breakaway republics in
the east, which are effectively un-
der Kremlin control. The result
could redraw the map of Europe,
expanding Russia’s borders by
hundreds of square miles.
To win this prize, the Russians
stand accused of war crimes, of
starving a population, of indis-
criminate bombing and civilian
killings. More than 100,000 civil-
ians remained trapped as Moscow
hindered the establishment of hu-
manitarian exit corridors. Other
residents were forcibly relocated
to Russia, some to cities thou-
sands of miles east. An estimated
20,000 lives have been lost in
Mariupol, and satellite images re-
leased last week showed mass
graves 12 miles west of Mariupol.
Mayor Vadym Boychenko called it
a “new Babyn Yar” — a reference
to the mass graves near Kyiv
where the Nazis massacred at
least 33,000 Jews.
“The biggest war crime of the
21st century was committed in
Mariupol,” Boychenko said Fri-
day.
Putin’s forces may find Mari-
upol hard to fully pacify; observ-
ers predict continued acts of sabo-
tage from a defiant civilian resis-
tance. But for Ukraine, a country
that has held back the Russians
against the odds, the city’s loss
represents the single biggest set-
back of the punishing war.
Mariupol was battle-scarred
long before the Russian invasion
began on Feb. 24.
After an uprising in Kyiv ousted
Ukraine’s Russia-friendly presi-
dent in 2014, and Putin’s troops
invaded Crimea, the city came
under direct assault by Kremlin-
backed separatists. Its city hall
was scorched and ruined. A few
months after the successful oust-
er of the Kremlin’s allies, a com-
mander from what was then
MARIUPOL FROM A
‘While the world is asleep, in Mariupol, the guys are dying’
ALEXEI ALEXANDROV/ASSOCIATED PRESSEVGENIY MALOLETKA/ASSOCIATED PRESSABOVE: Part of a destroyed
tank and a burned vehicle
sit in an area controlled by
Russian-backed separatist
forces in Mariupol on
Saturday.
RIGHT: Ukrainian
emergency workers carry an
injured pregnant woman
from a maternity hospital
damaged by shelling in
Mariupol on March 9. The
baby was born dead. Half an
hour later, the mother died,
too. Generations of
Mariupol’s children had
been born at Maternity
Hospital No. 3.war in ukraine