> **Mariupol’s History Helps Explain Putin’s Ukraine Fiasco**
> His biggest military error was ignoring how the city’s character had changed since his 2014 annexation of Crimea, and assuming its inhabitants would greet Russian troops with flowers.
> Four weeks into its haphazard, brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military appears to have paused active operations everywhere except the devastated city of Mariupol. The Sea of Azov port has become the focal point of the so-called “special operation” and of the invaders’ hopes for an outcome they could report to Vladimir Putin as a victory.
> Mariupol, fully encircled by Russian forces at least since March 2, according to the Institute for the Study of War, is still not fully taken despite barbarous shelling and bombing. That makes it a symbol of Ukraine’s stubborn, desperate resistance. Ukrainian forces have been unable from the start to reinforce or relieve the city’s defenders, because it would have meant a more than 100-kilometer march across open terrain. So the defending troops — primarily the 36th Marine Brigade — have been fighting the war’s most protracted, bloodiest, most hopeless battle. The Ukrainian leadership recognizes that their determination may have forced the Russian invading army to stop trying to attack from every direction and concentrate on the Ukrainian pocket on the Azov coast.
> “The heroic defenders of Mariupol have played a huge role in destroying the enemy’s plans and enhancing our defense,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov wrote on Facebook on Monday. “By virtue of their dedication and superhuman courage, tens of thousands of lives throughout Ukraine were saved. Today Mariupol is saving Kyiv, Dnipro and Odessa. Everyone must understand this.”
> It’s no accident that the war has zeroed in on Mariupol, nor that it has held out for so long. Its geographical position, of course, is important: Without control of Ukraine’s biggest port on the Sea of Azov and its fifth biggest overall, Russia can’t create a land bridge between continental Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014. But Mariupol’s significance goes far beyond what can be gleaned from a map.
> Putin sees it as the cradle of Ukrainian “neo-Nazism.” In reality, it epitomizes the changes that have taken place in Ukraine, and in eastern Ukraine in particular, since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. It’s these changes that have made Ukraine such a tough nut for Putin to crack. Putin’s biggest military error was ignoring those changes and launching his catastrophic onslaught as if parts of Ukraine were still so pro-Russian as to greet the intruders with flowers.
> In early 2014, Mariupol was a typical mid-sized post-Soviet industrial city, dominated by two major steelworks, both under the control of the country’s richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, and the port used to export their output. Mid-sized is something of a misnomer by European standards: With a (declining) population of almost half a million, Mariupol was bigger than, say, Florence and almost as big as Dublin. Backed by Akhmetov’s political clout and resources, the Party of Regions of then-president Viktor Yanukovych held sway. The population, including tens of thousands of Azov Greeks — descendants of the city’s 18th-century Orthodox Christian founders, resettled by Russia from still-independent, Muslim-run Crimea — was predominantly Russian-speaking and had little to do with Ukrainian ethnicity or culture.
> In short, it was the kind of city that fit in nicely with semi-official plans by some Kremlin officials and ethnonationalist ideologues in Russia to create a separatist state called Novorossiya in eastern and southern Ukraine. During the chaotic spring of 2014, thousand-strong mobs hunted through the city for Ukrainian nationalists supposedly sent from the country’s west to suppress them, the city council building was seized by rebels who flew Russian flags from it, and a gun battle took place for the police headquarters. The post-revolutionary Ukrainian authorities were too weak to re-establish order quickly, and it fell to local irregulars, some of them ultranationalists with openly racist views and swastika tattoos, to fight off the Communists and pro-Russian activists who sought to make Mariupol, located in the Donetsk Region, part of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. It was in Mariupol that Azov, the far-right battalion later expanded to a 1,000-strong National Guard regiment, was created and first tasted military action.
> Somehow Mariupol avoided being taken by the separatists. Their then-military leader, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, had an explanation at the time: The Russian troops officially not present in Ukraine but fighting alongside the rebels had received orders from Moscow to stand down, he said.
> In early 2015, with the war in eastern Ukraine still in its active phase, the eastern suburb of Mariupol came under heavy shelling from the separatist side, and dozens of civilians died (Akhmetov stepped in with a large personal donation to repair the damaged infrastructure). That brought home to the residents that their city was now on the front line for the long term. But when a ceasefire negotiated in Minsk took effect later that year, the relative benefits of this status began to manifest themselves. With eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, Donetsk, under separatist control, Mariupol became the center of the region’s Ukrainian part, and the administrations of both Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskiy have sought to turn it into a showcase of what the Donbas could become under Ukrainian authority.
> Though the port could no longer operate at full capacity because of Russian naval blockades and weakened trade ties with Russia, the steelworks still provided a steady economic foundation to the city run since 2015 by Mayor Vadim Boychenko, a former manager in Akhmetov’s steel holding. Since 2014, the city’s budget more than tripled in hryvnia terms, about a 10% increase in dollar terms to $209 million despite a roughly 17% dollar drop in Ukrainian GDP. Given that Transparency International ranks Mariupol’s city government second in the nation by transparency level, the money has gone a long way toward its modernization. A popular Ukrainian travel channel on YouTube last year put Mariupol on its top-five list of cities to move to; the video is worth watching for images of what it was like before Russian artillery flattened it. Mariupol could afford a completely revamped public transportation system, new parks and roads.
> It also became cool — more so than it had ever been in its rather grimy history. About 100,000 internally displaced persons from the Russian-controlled “people’s republic” moved to the city, replenishing its population after many years of outward migration and bringing creative and entrepreneurial ideas.
> “Many of the new cultural spaces that appeared after 2015 are initiated by refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” wrote Anna Balazs, a University of Manchester postgrad who studied Mariupol for her dissertation. “The creators of these places represent an example of strong regional identity: Among their motivations to work in the cultural sphere, they mention their local patriotism toward Donetsk and their firm belief in a Ukrainian cultural movement.”
> The refugees’ creative energy and pragmatic city management have changed Mariupol. Its residents have come to value what they had, compared with those who remained in the Russian-run grey areas, forced to observe curfews, often unable to find work and doomed to limited entertainment and cultural choices. Even if Ukraine as a whole wasn’t a paragon of economic and lifestyle success compared with Russia, Mariupol compared extremely favorably to the pro-Russian part of eastern Ukraine. “I remember Mariupol from 2014-2015, when there was fighting there,” the former Georgian President and later governor of Odessa, Mikheil Saakashvili, told an interviewer last year. “The city was in an awful state. Now it’s got this really cool mayor, Boychenko, and it’s changed beyond recognition — a beautiful center and good roads. I wish Odessa were even 10% like Mariupol.”
> Boychenko was re-elected with about 65% of the vote in 2020, beating a pro-Russian candidate. Mariupol was now a fully-fledged Ukrainian city. No wonder it didn’t greet the Russian invaders with open arms.
> The official Russian propaganda line, however, is that “neo-Nazi battalions” such as Azov are keeping the Mariupol residents hostage and using them as a “living shield.” Azov, with its inflated reputation and strong social media presence, has been held up by Putin and his propagandists as Exhibit A in support of their idea that Ukraine requires “denazification.” As civilians flee the ruins of Mariupol, Russian soldiers check them for those swastika tattoos, and filtration camps have been set up across the border to catch “neo-Nazis” attempting to infiltrate Russia as refugees.
Interesting. This article does not mention that after 2014, Mariupol was built to be a military fortress. During the 2022 sieg, in the city, there were at least 16 000 Ukrainian fighters. The article also does not mention that several attempts to evacuate approximately 200 000 civilians failed because someone opened fire. I do not remember whether the article said the proportion of Russians in Mariupol in 2022.
2 comments
> **Mariupol’s History Helps Explain Putin’s Ukraine Fiasco**
> His biggest military error was ignoring how the city’s character had changed since his 2014 annexation of Crimea, and assuming its inhabitants would greet Russian troops with flowers.
> Four weeks into its haphazard, brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military appears to have paused active operations everywhere except the devastated city of Mariupol. The Sea of Azov port has become the focal point of the so-called “special operation” and of the invaders’ hopes for an outcome they could report to Vladimir Putin as a victory.
> Mariupol, fully encircled by Russian forces at least since March 2, according to the Institute for the Study of War, is still not fully taken despite barbarous shelling and bombing. That makes it a symbol of Ukraine’s stubborn, desperate resistance. Ukrainian forces have been unable from the start to reinforce or relieve the city’s defenders, because it would have meant a more than 100-kilometer march across open terrain. So the defending troops — primarily the 36th Marine Brigade — have been fighting the war’s most protracted, bloodiest, most hopeless battle. The Ukrainian leadership recognizes that their determination may have forced the Russian invading army to stop trying to attack from every direction and concentrate on the Ukrainian pocket on the Azov coast.
> “The heroic defenders of Mariupol have played a huge role in destroying the enemy’s plans and enhancing our defense,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov wrote on Facebook on Monday. “By virtue of their dedication and superhuman courage, tens of thousands of lives throughout Ukraine were saved. Today Mariupol is saving Kyiv, Dnipro and Odessa. Everyone must understand this.”
> It’s no accident that the war has zeroed in on Mariupol, nor that it has held out for so long. Its geographical position, of course, is important: Without control of Ukraine’s biggest port on the Sea of Azov and its fifth biggest overall, Russia can’t create a land bridge between continental Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014. But Mariupol’s significance goes far beyond what can be gleaned from a map.
> Putin sees it as the cradle of Ukrainian “neo-Nazism.” In reality, it epitomizes the changes that have taken place in Ukraine, and in eastern Ukraine in particular, since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. It’s these changes that have made Ukraine such a tough nut for Putin to crack. Putin’s biggest military error was ignoring those changes and launching his catastrophic onslaught as if parts of Ukraine were still so pro-Russian as to greet the intruders with flowers.
> In early 2014, Mariupol was a typical mid-sized post-Soviet industrial city, dominated by two major steelworks, both under the control of the country’s richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, and the port used to export their output. Mid-sized is something of a misnomer by European standards: With a (declining) population of almost half a million, Mariupol was bigger than, say, Florence and almost as big as Dublin. Backed by Akhmetov’s political clout and resources, the Party of Regions of then-president Viktor Yanukovych held sway. The population, including tens of thousands of Azov Greeks — descendants of the city’s 18th-century Orthodox Christian founders, resettled by Russia from still-independent, Muslim-run Crimea — was predominantly Russian-speaking and had little to do with Ukrainian ethnicity or culture.
> In short, it was the kind of city that fit in nicely with semi-official plans by some Kremlin officials and ethnonationalist ideologues in Russia to create a separatist state called Novorossiya in eastern and southern Ukraine. During the chaotic spring of 2014, thousand-strong mobs hunted through the city for Ukrainian nationalists supposedly sent from the country’s west to suppress them, the city council building was seized by rebels who flew Russian flags from it, and a gun battle took place for the police headquarters. The post-revolutionary Ukrainian authorities were too weak to re-establish order quickly, and it fell to local irregulars, some of them ultranationalists with openly racist views and swastika tattoos, to fight off the Communists and pro-Russian activists who sought to make Mariupol, located in the Donetsk Region, part of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. It was in Mariupol that Azov, the far-right battalion later expanded to a 1,000-strong National Guard regiment, was created and first tasted military action.
> Somehow Mariupol avoided being taken by the separatists. Their then-military leader, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, had an explanation at the time: The Russian troops officially not present in Ukraine but fighting alongside the rebels had received orders from Moscow to stand down, he said.
> In early 2015, with the war in eastern Ukraine still in its active phase, the eastern suburb of Mariupol came under heavy shelling from the separatist side, and dozens of civilians died (Akhmetov stepped in with a large personal donation to repair the damaged infrastructure). That brought home to the residents that their city was now on the front line for the long term. But when a ceasefire negotiated in Minsk took effect later that year, the relative benefits of this status began to manifest themselves. With eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, Donetsk, under separatist control, Mariupol became the center of the region’s Ukrainian part, and the administrations of both Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskiy have sought to turn it into a showcase of what the Donbas could become under Ukrainian authority.
> Though the port could no longer operate at full capacity because of Russian naval blockades and weakened trade ties with Russia, the steelworks still provided a steady economic foundation to the city run since 2015 by Mayor Vadim Boychenko, a former manager in Akhmetov’s steel holding. Since 2014, the city’s budget more than tripled in hryvnia terms, about a 10% increase in dollar terms to $209 million despite a roughly 17% dollar drop in Ukrainian GDP. Given that Transparency International ranks Mariupol’s city government second in the nation by transparency level, the money has gone a long way toward its modernization. A popular Ukrainian travel channel on YouTube last year put Mariupol on its top-five list of cities to move to; the video is worth watching for images of what it was like before Russian artillery flattened it. Mariupol could afford a completely revamped public transportation system, new parks and roads.
> It also became cool — more so than it had ever been in its rather grimy history. About 100,000 internally displaced persons from the Russian-controlled “people’s republic” moved to the city, replenishing its population after many years of outward migration and bringing creative and entrepreneurial ideas.
> “Many of the new cultural spaces that appeared after 2015 are initiated by refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” wrote Anna Balazs, a University of Manchester postgrad who studied Mariupol for her dissertation. “The creators of these places represent an example of strong regional identity: Among their motivations to work in the cultural sphere, they mention their local patriotism toward Donetsk and their firm belief in a Ukrainian cultural movement.”
> The refugees’ creative energy and pragmatic city management have changed Mariupol. Its residents have come to value what they had, compared with those who remained in the Russian-run grey areas, forced to observe curfews, often unable to find work and doomed to limited entertainment and cultural choices. Even if Ukraine as a whole wasn’t a paragon of economic and lifestyle success compared with Russia, Mariupol compared extremely favorably to the pro-Russian part of eastern Ukraine. “I remember Mariupol from 2014-2015, when there was fighting there,” the former Georgian President and later governor of Odessa, Mikheil Saakashvili, told an interviewer last year. “The city was in an awful state. Now it’s got this really cool mayor, Boychenko, and it’s changed beyond recognition — a beautiful center and good roads. I wish Odessa were even 10% like Mariupol.”
> Boychenko was re-elected with about 65% of the vote in 2020, beating a pro-Russian candidate. Mariupol was now a fully-fledged Ukrainian city. No wonder it didn’t greet the Russian invaders with open arms.
> The official Russian propaganda line, however, is that “neo-Nazi battalions” such as Azov are keeping the Mariupol residents hostage and using them as a “living shield.” Azov, with its inflated reputation and strong social media presence, has been held up by Putin and his propagandists as Exhibit A in support of their idea that Ukraine requires “denazification.” As civilians flee the ruins of Mariupol, Russian soldiers check them for those swastika tattoos, and filtration camps have been set up across the border to catch “neo-Nazis” attempting to infiltrate Russia as refugees.
Interesting. This article does not mention that after 2014, Mariupol was built to be a military fortress. During the 2022 sieg, in the city, there were at least 16 000 Ukrainian fighters. The article also does not mention that several attempts to evacuate approximately 200 000 civilians failed because someone opened fire. I do not remember whether the article said the proportion of Russians in Mariupol in 2022.