Mariupol’s outnumbered defenders refuse to give in

THE WORLD has grown used to Ukrainian forces beating the odds, but the 51-day defence of Mariupol almost defies the imagination. Russia has already declared victory several times in the near-destroyed port city on the Azov sea. Yet Ukraine’s massively outnumbered soldiers refuse to concede. On April 13th commanders of the Azov Battalion and the 36th Marine Brigade, the two main units charged with defending the city, issued a defiant message. They would fight to the last drop of blood, they said: “Our moral spirit is strong, we know what we are doing and why we are here.”

The Russian army has left a heavy footprint wherever it has trod in Ukraine, but it has reserved its cruellest for Mariupol, a city it claims to be liberating. From the first days, it targeted critical infrastructure: electricity substations, hospitals, public bomb-shelters. The campaign left tens of thousands dead, bodies abandoned on streets and an estimated 80,000 residents in cellars on the edge of life and death. Reports of mobile crematoria being deployed suggest the full scale of the slaughter may never be known. The ruthlessness appears to be aimed not just at concrete strategic gains, such as a land corridor to Crimea or a stranglehold on Ukraine’s economy. For Vladimir Putin, victory in Mariupol is symbolic: beating the ultra-nationalist Azov regiment would be a prize he could hold up as proof of his bogus “denazification” of Ukraine. But so far it has proven elusive.