Mariupol has become the most heavily bombed and damaged city in Ukraine’s war with Russia, bearing the brunt of an ongoing Russian offensive.
It is key to Moscow’s military campaign in the Ukraine. But why?
There are four main reasons why taking this port city would be such a strategic victory for Russia and a huge blow for Ukraine.
1. Securing a land corridor between Crimea and the Donbas region
Geographically, the city of Mariupol occupies only a small area on the map, but now it stubbornly stands in the way of the Russian forces that broke into the Crimean peninsula.
They are moving northeast to try to link up with their Ukrainian separatist comrades and allies in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
General Richard Barrons, a former commander of the UK Joint Forces Command, says capturing Mariupol is vital to Russia’s war effort.
«When the Russians feel they have successfully concluded that battle, they will have completed a land bridge from Russia to Crimea. and they will see this as a great strategic success, “he says.
If it seized Mariupol, Russia would also end up controlling more than 80% of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline, cutting off its maritime trade and further isolating it from the world.
By resisting the advance of the forces sent by Moscow during the last three weeks, the Ukrainian defenders caused uneasiness in a large number of Russian troops.
But that Russian failure to secure a quick capture of the city has led Russian commanders to resort to a 21st century version of medieval siege tactics.
They have hit Mariupol with artillery, rockets and missiles, damaging or destroying more than 90% of the city.
They also cut off access to electricity, heat, water, food and medical supplies, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that Moscow blames on Ukraine for refusing to surrender before 5 a.m. Monday.
A Ukrainian parliamentarian accused Russia of “trying to starve Mariupol into surrender.”
Ukraine has promised to defend the city to the last soldier. It may well come to that.
Russian troops are slowly advancing towards the center and, in the absence of any sort of viable peace agreement, Russia is likely to intensify its bombardment, making little or no distinction between its armed defenders and the beleaguered civilian population still numbering more than 200,000. people.
When Russia takes full control of Mariupol – if it ever does – it will release about 6,000 of its soldiers, organized into 1,000-strong tactical groups, and then go and reinforce other Russian fronts around Ukraine.
There are a number of possibilities as to how they could be redistributed:
- Northeast to join the battle to encircle and destroy Ukraine’s regular armed forces fighting pro-Kremlin separatists in the Donbass region
- West to advance towards Odessa, which would be Ukraine’s last remaining major outlet to the Black Sea
- Northwest towards the city of Dnipro.
2. Strangling Ukraine’s economy
Mariupol has long been a strategically important port on the Sea of Azov, part of the Black Sea.
With its deep docks, it is the largest port in the Azov Sea region and is home to a major iron and steel factory.
In normal times, Mariupol is a key export hub for Ukraine’s steel, coal and corn going to customers in the Middle East and beyond.
For the past eight years, since Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the city has been caught uncomfortably between Russian forces on that peninsula and pro-Kremlin separatists in the self-proclaimed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Losing Mariupol would be a huge blow to what is left of Ukraine’s economy.
3. An opportunity to make a propaganda coup
Mariupol is home to a Ukrainian militia unit called the Azov Brigade, named after the Sea of Azov that links Mariupol with the rest of the Black Sea.
The Azov Brigade includes far-right extremists, including neo-Nazis.
Although they form only the smallest fraction of Ukraine’s fighting forces, this has been a useful propaganda tool for Moscow, giving it a pretext to tell the people of Russia that the young men it has sent to fight in Ukraine are there to deliver to his neo-Nazi neighbor.
If Russia manages to capture a significant number of Azov Brigade fighters alive, they are likely to be paraded in the Russian state-controlled media as part of the ongoing information war to discredit Ukraine and its government.
4. A huge morale boost for Russians
Russia’s capture of Mariupol, if it happens, will be psychologically significant for both sides in this war.
A Russian victory at Mariupol would allow the Kremlin to show its population, through the state-controlled media, that Russia is achieving its goals and making progress.
For President Putin, for whom this war seems to be personal, all of this has historical significance.
He sees Ukraine’s Black Sea coast as part of something called Novorossiya (New Russia), lands whose link with Russia dates back to the 18th-century empire.
Putin wants to revive that concept, “rescuing Russians from the tyranny of a pro-Western government in Kyiv,” as he sees it. Mariúpol currently stands in his way to achieve that goal.
But For the Ukrainians, the loss of Mariupol would be a huge blow, not only military and economic.Obut also for the minds of the men and women who fight on the ground, defending their country.
Mariupol would be the first major city to fall to the Russians after Kherson, a strategically much less important city that was barely defended.
There is another moral aspect here and that is deterrence.
Mariupol has put up fierce resistance, but look at the cost. The city is decimated, lying largely in ruins. It will go down in history along with Grozny and Aleppo, places that Russia finally bombed and bombed into submission, reducing to rubble.
The message for other Ukrainian cities is clear: if you choose to resist as Mariupol did, you can expect the same fate.
“The Russians couldn’t walk to Mariupol,” says General Richard Barrons, “they couldn’t get in with their tanks, so they’ve reduced it to rubble. And that’s what we should expect to see anywhere else that really matters to them.”