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If one battle more than any other has defined the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it is the three-month siege of Mariupol’s steelworks this spring, and the harrowing experience of its last defenders.
Holed up in Azovstal, one of Europe’s largest metal-producing plants, hundreds of outnumbered, outgunned, wounded and emaciated Ukrainian soldiers, and more than 1,000 civilians, resisted one of Moscow’s fiercest military attacks for more than 80 days.
“No one came out of there unchanged,” says Oksana, an Azovstal employee who asked not to give her full name.
They were one person when they went in, and another person when they came out.
Soon after the Russian invasion in late February, Mariupol was one of the first major cities to be encircled. Viewed as a key Kremlin objective, the city was the scene of a siege that the Red Cross has defined as “apocalyptic”. The outskirts of the city became the site of a mass grave, and the bodies of many more men, women and children were either dumped in the streets or remain buried beneath the rubble.
Ukrainian authorities estimate that 22,000 people died during the fighting. Some survivors took refuge in the Azovstal steelworks, an industrial site covering an area of about four square miles, including a network of underground tunnels.
With the civilians were about 3,000 soldiers, many of whom were members of the notorious Azov brigade, which, at its inception in 2014, included far-right volunteers, some with neo-Nazi affiliations. In recent years the brigade has been fully integrated into the Ukrainian military, but for President Vladimir Putin it was the perfect propaganda opportunity to convince the public that his narrative about the “nazification” of Ukraine was true, and that his army would hunt them down like rats. Never would Putin have imagined that the last defenders of Mariupol would defy his plan for so long.
Cut off from the world and low on food, the defenders of Azovstal were holed up in the tunnels of the steelworks for over two months while the Russians launched rockets and incendiary bombs at the site.
Read the full story by my colleague Lorenzo Tondo here:
Related: ‘No one came out of there unchanged’: the Ukrainian soldiers who survived the siege of Azovstal