Those who can cower in underground shelters, without heat, light, food or water. But when a direct hit turns the building into rubble, as a recent Russian attack did, the 400 civilians taking shelter in an art school are buried alive. Others in the besieged town of Mariupol try to lead normal lives, checking on neighbours or walking the dog amid blackened ruins where bodies are laid out on the balconies to await burial. More than 350,000 civilians are trapped in the city. Russia is demanding the immediate surrender of Mariupol. For those who refuse to give up, Moscow threatens military tribunals in the Donbas where civilians would face the death penalty as “Nazis” or “bandits”.
The evidence of war crimes is appalling and overwhelming. A harrowing report by Mysuslav Chernov, one of the last reporters in the city, describes the daily slaughter he witnessed before he was able to escape. Now there is no one to tell the world of the atrocities that Russia is desperate to discredit. His testimony will prove vital if the West is able, as the European Union is now demanding, to arraign President Putin for the systematic destruction of Mariupol, something the EU has described as a “massive war crime.”
Already the city is being compared to Guernica, Coventry, Leningrad or Dresden, cities where the aim was not only to destroy the infrastructure and all resistance but to terrorise whole populations though the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said there was “no question” of Mariupol’s surrender. The besieging Russians, frustrated at still being unable to capture this strategic target, are likely now to resort to mass terror bombing, targeting not only hospitals, theatres and civic buildings but housing estates and the entire city centre in the way they obliterated all opposition in Grozny and Aleppo.
Mariupol is of huge strategic importance to Russia. It is the last main obstacle preventing the establishment of a Russian corridor from the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. This would cut Ukraine off from the Sea of Azov. A further attempt to seal off the whole of the Black Sea is now likely in the west, where Russia aims to capture Odesa and control the entire coastline.
Bogged down in the north, unable to advance on Kyiv, stranded in tank columns without provisions or reinforcements, the Russian invasion is proving a disastrous display of inept military tactics, low morale and vulnerability to sophisticated missile defences. It is, nevertheless, continuing a slow advance, at huge human cost to its own forces but also taking a dreadful toll on Ukrainian cities and their inhabitants. Both sides are still officially conducting fruitless “peace” talks, but President Zelensky is now calling for more substantial negotiations, with Jerusalem as a possible venue.
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The Ukrainians, with plenty of Western warnings, are wary of an obvious trap. The Russian aim will be to use any ceasefire as a chance to rebuild forces and meanwhile seize as much land along strategic corridors as possible so that in any eventual settlement they will be poised for a second onslaught. Mariupol will, if necessary, be razed. The West should use any lull to resupply Ukrainian defenders with a massive arms airlift. It should also not lift sanctions until all Russian troops are withdrawn and a full settlement agreed. And, without question, there must be a reckoning for Mariupol.
