The BBC has had a couple good articles up over the past couple days. This first one looks at the timeline of Mariupol’s place in the war: Mariupol: Key moments in the siege of the city. It seems to pretty well cover the events.
This second article is definitely a more reflective one, and has some great pictures of what Mariupol used to look like: Mariupol: The 80 days that left a flourishing city in ruins. One of the people interviewed confirms something that I had been thinking. It seemed odd to me that Russia was spending so much effort taking down Mariupol. Grinding it down, destroying the people and the culture, wiping it from the face of the map. If all Russia had wanted was a land-bridge to Crimea, they had control of enough land surrounding the city to do that. So why the intense focus on Mariupol? From the article:
...[W]hile Mariupol flourished, rebel-held Donetsk mouldered. When the rebels returned to Mariupol, Volodymyr, the paramedic, believed they were driven by revenge to destroy the city. "'If we live in sh[*]t, then you will live in sh[*]t as well,'" Volodymyr says they told him at a checkpoint as he finally escaped the city. "They just looked at us and envied how we lived."
I think you kind of see that in the stories of the Russian soldiers who took anything and everything they could get their hands on. Ukraine was becoming the paradise that Russia could only hope to be, and Mariupol was one of the crowing jewels of that success.
I only got to see the start of some of the public works and improvement projects the last time I was there. It’s sad that I didn’t get to see the results, but Viktoria was there a lot last year and has told me that things were looking great. (And that’s from someone who had lived in the city all her life.)
I know that Mariupol will be in Ukrainian hands again, and I hope that’s sooner than not. Russia’s had 8 years to turn the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk that they controlled into examples of the “Russian world,” and perhaps that’s just what they did. If Mariupol is their idea of “rescuing” the people of Ukraine, the sooner they’re gone the better.
One quick add-on: I’m not a big fan of this cartoonist, but in this case I think he nailed it.
