Putin's lies about freeing Russian-speaking Ukrainians stumbled over Mariupol. The city hasn't betrayed Ukraine and suffers for it
Yuri Maznychenko 14 March 2022
My idol as a child was my grandfather, who was a reconnaissance pilot in World War II. I loved reading from an early age, and his stories about the war awakened in me an interest in the subject and gave me the courage to sit down for a huge thick encyclopedic book called "The Great Patriotic War. 1941-1945".
Among the tons of small text, I was particularly struck by the story of the diary of Tanya Savicheva, who was not lucky enough to live and die during the Siege of Leningrad. The 9 horrific lines about the death of the little girl's entire family painted unthinkable things in my imagination.
My childhood mind could not digest the information about the mass starvation, the mountains of corpses and the inhumanity that reigned around the city, which had been defended without food and livelihood for more than two years.
Soviet propaganda educated future generations in such heroic stories, telling children about the indomitable spirit of the Soviet people. In these stories, men and women did not evacuate to safety but died right at the factory floor working for the Red Army, while children did not hide from exploding shells, but threw themselves into enemy vehicles with Molotov cocktails.
I didn't pay much attention to wishes for a peaceful sky on another birthday or during family gatherings until the war came in 2014. Books presented the wars differently - large-scale battles with huge amounts of equipment and manpower for great aims. Soviet literature did not tell of covert operations using unmarked "green men," or omit the occupation of territories through the creation of terrorist and separatist states. All this was happening. First Transnistria, then Abkhazia and North Ossetia, and eight years ago independent Ukraine lost some of its territories to a war with expansionist Russia.
In 2018, I found myself in close proximity to war zones for the first time. Working as a press officer for the professional football club Lviv, I went with the team to an away match of the Ukrainian Premier League against Mariupol. The bus journey of about 22 hours seemed like hell. "How can you drive for a day from one part of the country to another, if in that amount of time you could already get from Lviv to Prague?", - I thought on the way. And after Zaporizhzhya it was hard to even think about it, so bumpy was the way to the city situated on the north coast of the Sea of Azov.
In Mariupol, I expected to encounter separatist sentiments, given the city's proximity to Russia, the pseudo-republics it had created, and the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population. But what I saw was an industrial, but tidy city with people who were reserved, but friendly.
The knee-deep sea, the soulful meeting between the team and the military, the chimney next to the Volodymyr Boyko Stadium, which smokes during matches and, according to the locals, gives the home team a gap - Mariupol left a mark in my memory. As a working city with Russian-speaking people that, in spite of prejudices, never stopped being Ukrainian. Ukraine is simply a very multifaceted country, where millions of people from West to East and North to South traditionally speak different languages and have significant differences in traditions and everyday life, yet get along with each other comfortably. Russia saw this as an opportunity to implement its geopolitical plans by brazenly snatching Crimea, along with parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in 2014.
On February 24, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine without a declaration of war to "protect the Russian-speaking population of the neighbouring sovereign state from the harassment of Bandera fighters and drug addicts".
Many videos posted on YouTube in the early days of the war show that the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was not expecting any "liberators" on their land and was sending the uninvited guests back home.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who bragged to his own people eight years ago about the return of the "native Russian Crimea" and all those years of telling people lies about the suffering of the "DPR" and "LPR" caused by the Ukrainian army, is in trouble. After all, the Putin regime's military operation envisaged only a few days for the "criminal Kiev authorities" to capitulate and for regions with Russian speakers to greet the Russian tanks with greetings and flowers.
Ukraine appeared to the Russian army absolutely different to what it had been in the intelligence reports and imperial plans of Putin's regime. It turned out that the Ukrainian soldiers were not confused "suckers," but Cossacks who had learned by experience in combat, not just to hit back, but to kill mercilessly. What Russia did not expect at all was the people's total support of the government and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which resulted in the most powerful volunteer movement to help the army and lines of ordinary people in all cities for weapons.
Putin had been feeding his people all these years with fabrications about Ukrainian Nazis, and when he ordered his army to liberate the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine from them, he found himself confronted with the fact of the nation's total resistance. The Russian dictator believed so much in the myths artificially created by his regime that the picture for Russian television was too ugly and unpleasant.
He could foresee any situation in Ukraine in order to retransmit it to the Russians in the way necessary for the authorities. Except that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians would send liberators exactly the same direction the Ukrainian border guards had sent the Russian warship. That's when it came to a turning point in a war that Russia can't win now. But Putin threw all his fury precisely at those whom the aggressors came to set free - apparently for not accepting the idea of unity with Russia and the pro-Western stance of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
No one will ever remember of Tanya Savicheva again, because right now Ukraine is praying for Mariupol, which has been under a ruthless Russian encirclement for two weeks. Occupation artillery and aviation have not stopped razing the Azov city, which is in its 19th day of war and is facing a humanitarian disaster. There is no electricity, communications, gas, heating, or even water in Mariupol, and more than 2,000 civilians have already been killed by regular shelling.
All of Ukraine lives in permanent tension from the Russian army's military actions, but what is happening these days in Mariupol is beyond the limits of humanity in the 21st century. The bombing of residential neighbourhoods, the sneaky rocket attacks on civilian infrastructure, including a functioning maternity hospital, the shooting of humanitarian corridors through which civilians hiding in depots are left without the means to survive. And the corpses of innocent people who remain in the streets, because due to the continuous shelling of Russian occupants, people cannot even bury them in a civilized manner, dumping them in mass graves.
"Martyred city," - even the Pope reacted to the crime against humanity in Mariupol, calling on Russia to stop its unacceptable armed aggression before it turns the city into a cemetery.
The overwhelming desire to cut a corridor between occupied Crimea and both the DPR and LPR, as well as to take possession of a large metallurgical centre led Russia to cross the border and violate all laws of war. And sowed a fierce hatred among the Azov people, which now nothing can eradicate.
The end of the war will be met by silence in Mariupol. Dull, heart-piercing, pain will leave no emotion for those who survive this catastrophe. There will be no strength to cry for the children who should have been the future of their hometown and country, but were left buried under its ruins.
Let the siege of Leningrad remain a black page in the history of an unfriendly nation. Against its backdrop, it shames itself with the events in Mariupol and other ruined Ukrainian cities. The Ukrainian people are purged of Soviet-Russian propaganda and will always remember the tragedy of Mariupol, which is being experienced these days, something that should never happen again after the end of World War II.