The Washington Post: In embattled Mariupol, glimpses of devastation and misery emerge

© Evgeniy Maloletka/AP A woman covers herself with a blanket near a damaged firetruck after shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 10.

As conditions in the city have grown more dire and the death count has surged, word of the humanitarian catastrophe has leaked out through intermittent phone calls, shakily shot videos and testimony from the handful of aid groups still working in the city.

“People in Mariupol have endured a weeks-long life-and-death nightmare,” said Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose staff was trapped in the city. ICRC officials warned that time was running out for the civilians who remain there.

Some of the most harrowing images from the city have been captured by average citizens with cellphones.

“In the city center, it’s a real meat grinder: This land is soaked in blood, bitterness and despair,” one Mariupol citizen said in a video posted online Sunday. The video showed empty streets, blocks of broken windows and stores stripped of food by starving citizens. It lingered over men cooking their dinner over a campfire in a city that has endured subzero temperatures and nearly two weeks without heat or water.

“The world doesn’t know what’s happening here,” the narrator said as he navigated past blown out buildings. “It’s terrible.”

A major concern among military analysts is that Mariupol could provide a glimpse of what is to come in other Ukrainian cities, such as Kyiv, as the war grinds on. “We’re trying to understand the destruction, but the truth is that it is part and parcel of how the Russians fight,” said Rita Konaev, an urban warfare expert and associate director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “We keep hearing that Ukraine is not like Syria or it is not like Chechnya. In Mariupol, we’re learning that is not true.”

Even under the best of circumstances, urban warfare is a bloody business that exacts its heaviest toll on civilians trapped in the crossfire. The Russian version of urban warfare has proved itself to be especially cruel in recent decades, Konaev said. Because of their huge logistics challenges and seemingly poor morale, Russian forces have struggled to take large Ukrainian cities. The Russian forces, however, still possess the air power and artillery cannons to flatten them. Increasingly, the Russians appear to be using their massive firepower advantage — especially in Mariupol — to depopulate Ukraine’s urban centers and then take them over.

“It is easier to declare victory over rubble than resistance,” Konaev said, summing up the Russian approach.

© Provided by The Washington PostIn Mariupol, where Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital last week, the results have proved especially devastating, yielding some of the most searing images of the war. Among them was a shot of emergency employees and volunteers carrying a badly wounded woman on a stretcher from a shelled hospital. “Kill me now!” the woman was said to have cried out when she realized she was losing her baby.

Days later, the surgeon who had fought to save her told Ukrainian television from Mariupol that both she and her unborn child had died after desperate attempts to resuscitate them. The two lives were added to a death toll that has been growing at an alarming rate, according to Ukrainian officials. The city council reported that 1,582 civilians had died in the first 12 days of the fighting in Mariupol. In the last four days, 1,000 more civilians have been killed, driving the death toll to more than 2,500, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, told Reuters. News agencies, which have limited access to Mariupol, have been unable confirm the totals.

To survive, Mariupol residents have resorted to cutting down trees for firewood, melting snow and breaking open heating systems in search of potable water, according to aid groups with personnel in the city. Most supermarkets have been stripped bare of any remaining food.

“The sound of warfare is constant. Buildings are struck and shrapnel flies everywhere,” Sasha Volkov, the ICRC’s leader in Mariupol, said in a statement. “This is the situation every person in the city faces.”

In a rare call from the city, where cellphones work intermittently at best, a Mariupol official struck a similar note in a brief interview with NPR: “It’s absolutely terrifying. It’s absolutely destroyed now,” he said. “It’s more like a ruin from a historical movie about World War II.”

A photographer for the Associated Press captured an image of a Russian tank firing into an apartment building that exploded in orange flame.

A big remaining question is why the Russians have chosen to concentrate so much artillery and misery on Mariupol, which sits 35 miles from the Russian border and for years has depended on close relations and heavy traffic from its neighbor.

“Nobody in their right mind thinks this war can be solved with a full-fledged victory by one side or the other,” said Olga Oliker, a program director with the International Crisis Group, in a recent discussion posted online. “They are fighting for the negotiating table.”

“Mariupol is the outlier so far,” said Rob Lee, former Marine infantry officer and Russia defense scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Lee speculated that the presence of the Azov battalion, a Ukrainian armed group that has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle and disturbing far-right ties, could be driving the Russian campaign to retake the city.

Russian President Vladimir Putin baselessly claimed that he invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, which is led by a Jewish president. Killing or capturing the members of the Azov battalion could be an important public relations victory for Putin who must justify the loss of Russian soldiers in a war that increasingly appears unwinnable, Lee said.

To that end, Mariupol is one of the few places so far where Russian forces have pushed into a city and engaged in direct urban combat with the Ukrainian military.

Despite the carnage and suffering in Mariupol, military analysts warned that the situation could still get far worse. In Grozny, Russian forces fired as many as 30,000 artillery rounds into the city in a single day, said John Spencer, a retired Army major and chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum. In Syria, large swaths of Aleppo were rendered uninhabitable.

So far, Russian forces haven’t rained anywhere near that much firepower on a Ukrainian city.

“Having watched how the Russians fight wars over the years, this is nowhere close to all they can do,” said Oliker of the International Crisis Group. “They can do a whole not more if they really let go and attack civilian areas.”

In embattled Mariupol, glimpses of devastation and misery emerge (msn.com)