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Anonymous ID: 37bb0f Sept. 17, 2024, 6:48 a.m. No.21607960   🗄️.is 🔗kun

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-mariupol-azovstal.html

Last Stand at Azovstal: Inside the Siege That Shaped the Ukraine War

For 80 days, at a sprawling steelworks, a relentless Russian assault met unyielding Ukrainian resistance. This is how it was for those who fought, and for those trapped beneath the battlefield.

Deep beneath the steel plant were 36 bomb shelters, a legacy of the Cold War. The shelters, some more than 20 feet underground, had enough food to feed thousands of people for several weeks. Believing the fighting would not last long, Mr. Tskitishvili and the other executives saw the plant as a sanctuary and invited employees to come there with their families.

What Mr. Tskitishvili did not know was that Ukraine’s military was also arriving at Azovstal. To the Ukrainian soldiers, the plant was a stronghold, surrounded on three sides by water, ringed by high walls, as seemingly impregnable as a medieval keep. It was the perfect place to make a last stand.

“The military never told us, and we never supposed that they would deploy with us,” Mr. Tskitishvili said in an interview. “We planned only for the civilian population, and only as refuge from attack. We did not consider ourselves to be participants in the war.”

For the next 80 days, Azovstal would be a fulcrum of the war, as Russian brutality collided with Ukrainian resistance. What began as an accident — civilians and soldiers barricaded together inside an industrial complex nearly twice as large as Midtown Manhattan — became a bloody siege as roughly 3,000 Ukrainian fighters kept a vastly larger Russian force bogged down in a quagmire that brought misery and death on both sides.

Mariupol stood in the way of one of Mr. Putin’s key aims: the creation of a land bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea, the strategic peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014. But the fight also fit the Kremlin’s war narrative. Though several military groups were at Azovstal, many of its defenders were members of the Azov Regiment, a strongly nationalistic group of fighters whose fame in Ukraine and early connections to far-right political figures have been used by the Kremlin to falsely depict the entire country as fascist.

 

Ultimately, Azovstal became a trap. The presence of civilians hampered the soldiers’ ability to defend themselves. The presence of soldiers meant the civilians had to endure a vicious siege as food and clean water ran out.

Anonymous ID: 37bb0f Sept. 17, 2024, 7:05 a.m. No.21608030   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Unlike other industrial relics of that era, Azovstal thrived long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Metal from its furnaces was used for the protective sarcophagus around the damaged Chernobyl nuclear plant, as well as for more recent projects including Hudson Yards in New York, the Shard in London and Apple’s headquarters in California.

Soon, Azovstal began filling up with civilians who did not know that elsewhere on the vast grounds, soldiers were arriving, too. “If I had known there would be soldiers,” Ms. Tsybulchenko said, “we would have perhaps looked for another place to hide.”

But by early March, several thousand Ukrainian troops had converged inside Azovstal, and soldiers and civilians realized they were sharing the same refuge. Communications to the outside world were cut as Russian forces steadily took all but a few pockets of the city.

 

The city many of them saw now was an incomprehensible horror. Several fighters described streets littered with corpses that were being devoured by starving cats and dogs.

“I love cats,” said Ruslan, a fighter who arrived on a helicopter in April. “I didn’t know that a cat, when it’s hungry, could eat a person.”

Anonymous ID: 37bb0f Sept. 17, 2024, 7:16 a.m. No.21608104   🗄️.is 🔗kun

“I can see flying toward me this sparking, whistling thing on a wire and suddenly it just cuts through my leg like a sausage,” he said. “I’m screaming, ‘I’m bleeding out, I’m bleeding out. Give me a tourniquet. Shoot me, shoot me.’

“And some guy runs up to me and says, ‘Not today.’”

Ruslan — who gave only his first name to reduce risk to his brother, a soldier fighting the Russians in the east — was rushed to the field hospital in the bunker, where doctors performed a quick surgery and pumped him full of morphine.

When he came to several hours later, he received a shock. He was on a stretcher surrounded by Russian soldiers, their faces covered by Balaklavas. He said a Russian commander told him to “hang in there.”