Mariupol, formerly a city of 420,000, is being used by Russia as a propaganda poster for what it is striving for in Ukraine, in an attempt to convince the population that its war of conquest in Ukraine is just. For their displaced neighbors it is continuous torture.
Russia has built twelve new five-story buildings in the year since the invasion began, its Defense Ministry recently reported. Hundreds of families received new apartments. A drone, which flies over to show the new buildings, fails to hide the charred buildings that are around since near the 90% of the buildings were damaged during the Russian siege.
Yesterday, the Russian president himself, Vladimir Putin, for whom the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant, visited Mariupol. The trip was made by helicopter. In the images released by Moscow, Putin is seen driving a Toyota himself, with which he tours various neighborhoods of the city, accompanied by the deputy prime minister. Marat Khusnulin.
He then appears visiting some units of newly built homes, with a playground in the center, and talking to a group of a few citizens, apparently locals. Putin’s visit has outraged Ukrainians and their government, who have accused him of being “cynical.”
But the truth is that hundreds of thousands of its residents are now scattered around the world, while between 90,000 and 150,000 remain in the city. For many who saw their city destroyed and their families die in front of them, the pride the Russians show in rebuilding the city represents the high end of the cynicism.
“It’s like when a soldier destroys your house and then gives you candy in return,” says Oleksiy, who spent nearly a month in a basement in the besieged city, struggling to survive.
Hanna, who left town with her husband and two children several days before their home was destroyed by a Russian bomb, loves Mariupol but doesn’t want to go back. “Our city was so beautiful, everything was beautiful there”, remember bitterly.
“I liked the flowers that were everywhere. And our Square of Freedom and Peace with 25 birds that symbolize all the regions of Ukraine”, shares Hanna. “They stayed standing, but the Russians took away their unique Ukrainian decorations. I wish they had not survived, it would have been better, ”she laments.
His mother-in-law still lives in the city. For many elderly residents, leaving their homes is out of the question. “Once they do that, someone else will move in,” Hanna explains. She says that they are repairing services such as water, electricity and internet, but the situation remains unstable. Prices go up, income goes down, public transport is irregular.
“The quality of life has been greatly reduced compared to how it was before the war, when the city benefited from decentralization and the large taxes paid by the local metal giants,” he explains.
“I felt physically sick when I watched the video,” Denis shares. The video to which he refers captured several children from Mariupol addressing a pro-war crowd at an event organized by the Russian state in Moscow before the first anniversary of the war. Children around 12-14 years old thanked Russian troops for “saving” themin line with the official Russian position that the invading force did nothing wrong in Ukraine and that all the destruction was caused by the Ukrainians.
“At first I thought it couldn’t be true. Then I recognized a son of a man with whom we stayed in the basement under the shelling, with whom we played our lives while looking for food and water.”
Denis survived a month in the besieged city, nearly lost his wife to a Russian bomb, and lost his home, demolished by the Russians, deemed beyond repair due to damage. He now only sees Russia as a big threat.
However, he confirms that some survivors in Mariupol do not share such views. “The residents can be divided into three groups. One is pro-Ukrainian, people who saw things as they happened. Another is pro-Russian. Those people would prefer to live in Russia no matter what was done to them. And another big group is the people who just adapt to anything. They can live in Ukraine, they can live in Russia.”
Anastasia, whose parents left Mariupol, stresses that many of the neighbors are still in “shock”. “Imagine losing everything and surviving months of shelling, starvation and cold. Have a distorted sense of reality and they appreciate even the little things.”
For Denis, this is a brainwashing that occurred already in Soviet times and continued by the Russian state. The communist regime tried to erase any ethnic, cultural or political differences between the people that constituted it. As a result, some Ukrainians lost their national identity, without becoming Russian, without knowing who they are. Denys believes that education must play an important role in ensuring that the next generations know who they are and what was done to them.
Still, for him, returning to the city would be like arriving at a graveyard, with many bodies still buried in the craters left by Russian bombs. According to Denis, the count of demolished buildings may be in the thousands, which helps hide the true number of victims of the Russian siege, concealing the destruction. The economic future of the city is now in doubt with its famous plants now in ruins and disassembled for scrap.
“We still want to go back to our city”, other displaced residents who came to commemorate the victims of the deadliest incident of this war, the destruction of their drama theater by a Russian bomb, agree. when about 600 people died.
“But how are we going to return to our homes?” asks a woman in her 60s anxiously. She is “lucky” as the building her apartment is in made it through the siege relatively unscathed. “They only blew out doors and windows, but it’s already repaired.” The problem is that she is afraid of how she is going to get the apartment back from her.
“There are few intact buildings in the city and all of the vacant ones now have new residents living inside. Or former residents who lost their homes, or people who came from Russia,” explains Dmytro, another displaced Mariupol resident.
“They say in internet messages that they have all the required documents and they are not going to leave,” shares the woman. “His documents are a fiction and will not matter when the city is back under Ukrainian control,” Dmytro argues. “All collaborators will go to trial.”
The idea of judgment is often repeated. “Just like the Nazis after World War II, the Russians must be judged for what they did,” says one of the speakers at the event.
Although Mariupol is currently relatively far from the front line, it is one of the possible targets of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive, which could try to cut off the Russian “land corridor” to the Crimea in the south. Several explosions have recently occurred at Russian warehouses in the city, as Ukraine said it could now reach the area with its weapons.
“I think Mariupol will come back under Ukrainian control and it will be rebuilt. But no one is going to bring back the lives of all the people the Russians killed. And no one will return our youth that is happening during this war”, says Andriy from Mariupol.
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