Today's Mariupol is a martyr city, and a hero city at the same time, blockaded by the Russian military, deliberately destroyed by their aircraft and artillery.
Every day we receive horrible reports about what is happening there. Today we decided to streamline them a bit so that you can imagine the whole picture.
Total destruction of Mariupol urban infrastructure
For the record, Mariupol was, before the war, a major port center on the coast of the Sea of Azov, with a population like today's Miami. And now imagine that within two months Ukrainian Miami was turned into a devastated and destroyed ghost town.
It should be understood that the Russians are deliberately destroying the largest steel plant in the region, Azovstal because this plant used to employ most locals and produce ¼ to ⅓ of all Ukrainian pig iron. Now it is a ruin and a place of fierce fighting.
Sadism and atrocities against the local population in Mariupol
Mass torture and execution of civilians who do not support the Russian occupiers have become the norm here. Russian fascists cannot defeat the Ukrainian army. And so they arrange an outright genocide of local residents.
But why such cruelty? As it turns out, they present this to their military leadership as a loss to the Ukrainian military, and receive rewards for it. Thousands of ordinary civilians were taken by the Russians at gunpoint to an unknown destination. We will most likely never see them alive again.
Today's Mariupol hordes corpses of local residents on the roads and sidewalks, in the yards of residential buildings. These people die suddenly, right in the street, as a result of another Russian missile bombardment. Most of them had never known war before the Russians came to "liberate" them.
Self-disposal trucks littered with the bodies of civilians killed by the Russians drive through the city. After the massive worldwide publicity of the genocide they had carried out in the vicinity of Kyiv. They began to destroy traces of their war crimes. Now they prefer to burn the bodies of the Ukrainians they tortured in metallurgical furnaces, and mobile crematoriums so that no one will ever know the truth. Truly fascist methods!
Death Is All Around
Meanwhile, civilians continue to die slowly and painfully under the rubble in their own homes. In the very homes, they had been building for years. These people, just like you, lived their normal lives, making plans for the future – raising children -being sad, and happy over little things.
Also just think about the content of one of the telephone conversations between the occupants, intercepted by the Ukrainian side. Two Russian soldiers shot up a bus with 25 unarmed civilians and received military awards for it. This is what demilitarization and denazification in the Russian way are like!
Cynical cruelty and inhumanity
As for the dead Russian soldiers; the same dump trucks take the tattered corpses of the Russian occupants to mobile crematoriums, or to mass graves. Think about it: they are disposed of like useless cattle!
And many of them will never be identified, but simply declared missing. That's the Russian way, it's cheaper for their country, and it's more convenient for their propaganda. "No losses" is how they report through their media about their military achievements in Ukraine. People are not a loss to them!
The story of a 91-year-old elderly woman who survived the German-Fascist occupation of Mariupol in one of the local basements at the age of 10 is highly symbolic. But she did not survive the occupation of Mariupol by Russian fascists these days.
The organization of humanitarian corridors in Mariupol to evacuate refugees from the blockaded city is a very painful issue. The Russians act like soulless terrorists, when, along with the civilians being evacuated, they demand the surrender of the Ukrainian military who remain in the city. For this reason, negotiations on the evacuation of civilians by Ukraine are constantly frustrated or stalled.
For their part, the Russians present the evacuation in their own way. They forcibly remove Ukrainians from Mariupol to Russia. That's what Stalin did back in the day when he Russified Ukraine! They put all the evacuees into old buses and take them thousands of kilometers away from home to a foreign country. Then they just leave them in a tent on the street – as homeless, without work, without means of livelihood, without Ukrainian documents. More than 33,000 residents of Mariupol were "liberated" by the Russians in this way.
Evil Propaganda
There is almost no way to buy food in the city. But you can get it from the occupiers in the form of humanitarian aid. At the same time, they will take your personal data and make a video of you for another propaganda story in which, a "good" Russian soldier "saved" a local resident from starvation. And no one in Russia will care that these products were Ukrainian-made, and that they were taken by the Russians from a Ukrainian supermarket that they looted. This is how propaganda works.
With the beginning of a new escalation of hostilities in eastern Ukraine, they came up with a new monstrous meanness. The Russians have declared a mobilization in the territories they have just seized. Consequently, and under the threat of being shot, they gather Ukrainians they have seized to go to war in order to force them to kill those Ukrainians they have failed to seize. And then they use them as hostages, as cannon fodder – forcing them to go ahead of their troops during the offensive. This is done in order to find the positions of the Ukrainian army and then attack them.
Unfortunately, it must be admitted that there is a small proportion of natives of Russia in border towns like Mariupol. They yearn for their historic homeland, support Putin's criminal policies, and want to officially become Russians without leaving Ukraine. Russian TV channels show their happy faces. While at the same time their military discusses Putin's intentions to wipe this city off the face of the earth in radio transmissions.
Rewards and Social Media
The degradation and inhumanity of the Russian occupiers is a subject of their special pride. There are many videos online of them shooting abandoned Ukrainian homes with tanks and grenade launchers – just for the sake of likes on TikTok.
In today's Russia, the highest expression of patriotism is to put the letter "Z" on everything, which, as it turns out, is a forgotten Nazi symbol from World War II. "I'm Russian, I'm not ashamed!" – This is how they now express their solidarity with the war criminals who are committing the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
The heroism of defending Ukrainians and their will to live
The Ukrainian military, who, even when blockaded in Mariupol, continued to methodically destroy an occupant who outnumbered them by 10+ times, has become a legend around the world. And these men have stated that they will fight to the last cartridge.
But you and I must make every effort to ensure that they don't run out of ammunition!
If you are an ordinary civilian in Mariupol, in some cases you may have only one way to leave the surrounded city without weapons and without fighting – to swim a few kilometers across the sea in icy water. And some people did escape that way. But some, unfortunately, did not make it to shore.
Few people can imagine how civilians, including medics and the wounded, are hiding in bomb shelters and other structures on the territory of the largest factory, but the Russians are dropping 3-ton bombs on this factory, and passing it off as their heroic battles with Ukrainian nationalists.
Conclusion
And in conclusion, imagine what a schoolboy barely learning to write experienced, who before evacuating left a note in his abandoned apartment with the coordinates of where he buried his dead mother – just in the middle of the street, where he could, while the Russians were preparing new missiles for a new shelling of Mariupol.
When this war is over, and Ukraine is finally victorious, Mariupol may be one of the cities where an international military tribunal will be held.
No doubt there will be a tribunal where war criminals and terrorists from Russia, who called themselves "liberators" and who brought death and destruction to the peaceful Ukrainian land, will be condemned.
And every Russian fascist who lives to see that day will be held responsible in full for the genocide of the free Ukrainian people.
Therefore, the task of Ukraine today is to stand and win. To win in order to restore justice. To win in order to be part of the civilized world and not a colony of a gas station country.