There is a real fear that Russian forces will completely destroy the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov in order to take revenge and sow terror throughout Ukraine. Why this particular city?
A question that writer Fredrik Koehler tried to answer in a report in the Swiss newspaper “Le Temps”, pointing out at the beginning that the 430,000 residents of Mariupol have been subjected for 16 days to the Russian army’s bombardment by land and air, day and night.
He pointed out that this city has been suffering for at least a week from a suffocating siege, to the extent that the few news from inside speak of the spread of hunger among its remaining residents, as well as the accumulation of corpses in what can now be described as a “mass cemetery,” as he put it.
The head of the Red Cross mission in the city, Sasha Volkov, described the situation, saying that in this city there is no water, electricity, or gas for heating, as well as looting shops and pharmacies, and there are those who complain that they no longer have food for children, in addition to the fact that people have started quarreling for food and destroying cars to steal their gasoline .
The writer says that the residents tried to flee, but the fighting did not leave them an opportunity to achieve this and did not provide them with “humanitarian” corridors, noting that the number of trapped civilians is unknown; There are those who talk about 200,000 or 300,000, and they do not know the number of deaths there.
The Marimbolt?
This is what the writer answers by saying that this city was the most polluted in Ukraine, as there are steel factories in its suburbs, and its port is the largest on the Sea of Azov and is the gateway to eastern Ukraine, and in fact it constitutes an obstacle to the regional communication that Moscow dreamed of between Russia and Crimea.
The writer says that Mariupol has been in a state of war for 8 years, in which Ukrainian soldiers have been digging trenches and women have been weaving camouflaged windows, and the authorities have continued to prepare the population for this attack, turning the city into a fortified fortress. Ukrainian morale.
Koehler believes that “Putin in his all-out war wants to break the resolve of the Ukrainians, show his determination and sow terror, just as he did in Chechnya by destroying Grozny and in Syria by crushing Aleppo.”
The writer highlighted that Putin could not dare to destroy Kyiv because it is considered the “Jerusalem” of Russian Orthodoxy. He also ruled out destroying Odessa, which is full of Russian symbols, according to him, expecting that the Russian army would be satisfied with strangling these two cities and avoiding causing great destruction in them.
As for Mariupol, which is considered the crossroads of migration routes, the Russians do not seem to have anything to intercede for it, according to the writer, noting that the Ukrainian army recaptured it in 2014 after the Donbass rebels and their Russian backers were on the verge of controlling it, thanks to the support of the Azov and Azov battalions. “Bravi Sector” extremes. Since then, the writer says, these paramilitary and ultra-nationalist groups have fueled the Kremlin’s propaganda linking Ukrainian power with the Nazis, which is “ridiculous,” according to the writer, who asserts that there has been no member of these battalions, since their dissolution, in the Ukrainian government, “but The taste of the annihilation of Mariupol is also like revenge,” according to the author.
