Tamara, 71, cries in front of a destroyed apartment building in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, April 19, 2022 (REUTERS)
“The work of the armed forces to liberate Mariupol was successful,” Vladimir Putin said at a televised meeting of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu last Thursday. “Congratulations”. But in reality, the Russian President has one final act of cruelty in mind.
The Russian was speaking in the past tense of Mariupol, where Russian forces nearly reduced Ukraine’s strategically important port to rubble, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. Of the original 400,000 residents of Mariupol, perhaps 120,000 remain; Most of the survivors managed to escape to other parts of Ukraine, but many were also forcibly taken to Russia. However, he warns in an alarming editorial Washington Postthe work of the Russian armed forces there is not yet fully completed.
A remnant of the city’s defenders, estimated by Russia to number around 2,000 fighters, have been hiding in the basements of a labyrinthine steelworks on the local coast. Ukrainian authorities say the fortress complex is home to “a few thousand” people, but that number is including 500 wounded soldiers and 1,000 non-combatant civilians. This latter category includes numerous children. Recognizing that it would be too risky for Russian troops to storm the terrain, even against an outnumbered and outgunned opponent, Putin ordered his troops not to storm the plant any further, but to besiege it so that “not even a fly can get through.”
In short, The Post’s editorial denounces Putin’s concern for the lives of his own men does not extend to the lives of those in the factory who will die of disease, starvation, or thirst if their siege succeeds, which seems all too likely. Seemingly eager to gain physical control of combatants and civilians, dead or alive, trapped at the compound, Putin demanded their surrender and resisted Ukrainian demands for their evacuation to Ukrainian territory under the supervision of a third party. As of last Thursday, there had been no evacuation from Mariupol to Ukraine for weeks; On that day, around 90 civilians managed to get to safety in Zaporizhia.
“The United States, Europe, and indeed any decent government in the world should demand that Russia deal humanely with this disaster. That means negotiating something like the guaranteed evacuation proposed by the Ukrainians; If Russia does not allow this operation to be monitored by a third country, as the Ukrainians have requested, a neutral agency could be deployed, possibly the International Committee of the Red Cross,” the editorial demands.
Nevertheless, The defenders are running low on ammunition and food, and unfortunately there is nothing in Putin’s record that suggests he would heed a humanitarian call or in international law.
Satellite photos show their history includes the construction of mass graves, possibly large enough to hold hup to 9,000 civiliansas the city’s mayor denounced in a Telegram publication.
The new graves appeared between March 23 and 26, and there are now more than 200 grave sites adjacent to an existing cemetery (Maxar Technologies/Washington Post)
Therefore, the Post claims, President Biden was right to announce new shipments of heavy artillery and drones to Ukraine to repel the new Russian offensive in eastern Donbass. It may be too late to convince Putin to prevent further unnecessary deaths in Mariupol; US-supplied weapons will allow Ukraine to address him in a language he understands.
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Infobae in Ukraine: Alarm sirens in Lviv suffocate city, stoking fears of Russian rocket attacks They denounced that up to 9,000 civilians were buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol