We arrived in the city near the contact line 20 minutes after the ultimatum expired. The ones we come across first are the Chechen special forces. Cars without license plates, long beards and sophisticated equipment: these are the elite soldiers of Ramzan Kadyrov, experienced in urban combat. The objective of the moment, says the commander, is to “finish the work in the industrial zone”, to understand how to ensure total control of it, before attacking, he says, the bastion of Azovstal.
“We gave them two days to surrender. But there are no signs that they plan to do so, so now we have to move on, explains Zamid Chalaev, commander of a regiment in the Chechen Republic. In some places, work is done on territories close to the Azovstal plant. Because it’s not just the factory, but also the whole industrial park. We stopped moving on the front which goes directly to the factory. We must first control the entire industrial area. If we leave the industrial park as it is, then we will constantly receive attacks from the sides. We will solve this problem. We studied their strategy. They usually let our guys in, then surround them and do their job. But now we have found a good strategy against them, and they have screwed up several times.
The left side of Azovstal would already be taken. In this factory, again according to the Chechen officer, snipers and machine guns, supplied until two weeks ago by helicopter.
Yesterday Sunday, we could approach up to 300 meters from the factory. Behind a makeshift roadblock, a large row of cars. A sufficient distance for the pro-Russian soldiers to send small drones and have a precise image of the places.
Do these troops have full control of other areas of Mariupol?
It’s obviously hard to say: what these soldiers have been telling us for several days is that they fear infiltration. At the last checkpoint, before the front line, we witnessed a search: a man who wanted to take a friend home. “My house has burned down, he said to the soldiers, I welcome him into my home. “First you have to lift your T-shirt, show that you have no weapons or suspicious tattoos. Then, it is the total search of the vehicle, the inspection including the engine, then the verification of the papers… And in the end, prohibition to go to the requested address. The justification: “intense fighting in the area”. In fact, a few tens of minutes later, a few hundred meters away, a shot at a 5-storey building, flames and a column of smoke visible for miles…