Vladimir Putin has not waited until the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany the May 9 from 1945 to sing victory at Mariupolthe port city in southeastern Ukraine that would allow his troops to establish a territorial continuity between his conquests in crimea and his ambitions in donbas. The Russian president said Thursday that the military operation that has demolished the city, strewing it with corpses, has been “a success”, despite the fact that his own advisers acknowledge that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers continue to resist in Mariupol. Many of them are in the labyrinthine subsoil of the steel plant in Azovstal, a bone so difficult to crack that it has forced the leader of the Kremlin a change tactics: no longer seeks to take the plant but to strangle it.
In a meeting with his defense minister, duly choreographed in front of cameras, Putin announced that plans to take control of the steel company have been aborted. “There is no need to penetrate those catacombs and crawl through the subsoil of those industrial facilities,” said the Russian autocrat after stressing that it is important to “preserve the life and health” of his soldiers. “Let’s block off the industrial zone for what not even a fly“, he added in front of the minister Sergei Shoiguwho looked at him with a gloomy face.
The Kremlin’s swerve reveals Putin’s refusal to stay bogged down indefinitely in the 24 kilometers of underground tunnels that pierce the subsoil of Azovstalwhere would be some 2,000 Ukrainian militaryaccording to Russia’s own estimates, in addition to a thousand civilians and about 500 wounded soldiers. Such land is conducive to all kinds of ambushes and trapsa potential mousetrap for an army that has lost thousands of soldiers and officers in Ukraine and is beginning to hear the angry protests of their relatives, as happened after the recent sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea .
Corpses in mass graves
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“They have understood that they cannot physically seize Azovstal, where they have suffered heavy losses,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, a day after the commander of his forces at the steel mill called on the world to encourage the “extraction of “of the soldiers and civilians who remain hidden there and take them to a third country. But in this war things are not always as they seem and the use of propaganda It is still as fashionable as in its heyday. And it is that, according to the Ukrainian Army, a few hours after Putin announced the change of tactics in the steel mill, his troops would have tried to break in with everything in your gutsinformation that has not been independently corroborated.
What is clear is that Russia still does not accept humanitarian corridors to evacuate the 120,000 civilians who would remain in Mariupol, civilians who are trickling out at their own expense and risk. Amid so much desperation, the mayor of the city accused the enemy troops of having committed “barbaric” war crimes in Mariupol. Vadym Boichenko assured that the Russian military have buried civilians killed in the bombings in common pits from the neighboring town of Manhush. “The Russians have dug gigantic trenches 30 meters wide. And they have dumped the bodies there,” the mayor said.