Siege of Mariupol
Based on Wikipedia: Siege of Mariupol
The Red Cross called it "apocalyptic." For eighty-six days, from late February to late May 2022, the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol endured one of the most devastating urban sieges of the twenty-first century. When the guns finally fell silent, an estimated twenty-five thousand civilians lay dead, ninety percent of the city's residential buildings had been damaged or destroyed, and the last Ukrainian defenders had surrendered from the bowels of a massive steel plant where they'd made their final stand.
This was not just a battle. It was the systematic annihilation of a city.
Why Mariupol Mattered
To understand why Russian forces invested so much blood and firepower into taking Mariupol, you need to look at a map. The city sits on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, a shallow body of water connected to the Black Sea through the narrow Kerch Strait. Before the war, Mariupol was the largest city in the Ukrainian-controlled portion of Donetsk Oblast—one of the eastern regions where Russian-backed separatists had been fighting since 2014.
For Russia, capturing Mariupol offered three strategic prizes.
First, it would create a continuous land corridor from the Russian border to Crimea, the peninsula Russia had annexed in 2014. No more relying solely on the Kerch Strait Bridge; supplies and troops could flow overland.
Second, controlling both shores of the Sea of Azov would give Russia complete dominance over those waters, strangling Ukraine's maritime economy and military flexibility in the region.
Third—and perhaps most viscerally important to the Kremlin—Mariupol was the headquarters of the Azov Regiment.
The Azov Problem
The Azov Battalion began as a volunteer militia in 2014, formed during the chaotic early days of the war in eastern Ukraine. It drew recruits from Ukraine's ultranationalist fringe, including members with openly neo-Nazi sympathies. The unit's founding commander had made statements praising white supremacist ideology, and the group originally used the Wolfsangel symbol—a runic design that had been employed by several Nazi German military divisions.
Here's where the story gets complicated.
By November 2014, Azov had been integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine—the country's internal military force, subordinate to the Interior Ministry. Over the following years, the unit underwent significant changes. The most extreme members were pushed out. The force professionalized. A 2020 investigation by the Atlantic Council found that while far-right elements remained a concern, Azov had become more of a regular military unit than a political movement.
But Russian propaganda didn't let the story evolve. When Vladimir Putin announced one of his justifications for invading Ukraine in February 2022 was the "denazification" of the country, Mariupol—where Azov was based—became an obvious target. The city held symbolic weight far beyond its military value.
The irony is thick. Russia, in the name of fighting Nazis, would proceed to bomb maternity hospitals, shell civilians fleeing through evacuation corridors, and create mass graves in a city whose population was predominantly Russian-speaking.
A City Already Scarred
Mariupol had been through this before. During the chaos of spring 2014, when pro-Russian protests swept through eastern Ukraine following the Revolution of Dignity (the uprising that ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian president), separatist militants backed by Russia seized control of the city. Ukrainian forces retreated.
But not for long. In June 2014, Ukrainian troops recaptured Mariupol in an offensive. The city would remain in Ukrainian hands for the next eight years—though barely. In September 2014, forces from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (a Russian-backed separatist entity that claimed sovereignty over parts of eastern Ukraine) attempted to take the city again. Fighting reached the eastern outskirts before the separatists were beaten back.
In January 2015, rockets indiscriminately struck the city, killing civilians. Ukrainian forces pushed into nearby villages to create a buffer zone. An uneasy ceasefire, known as Minsk Two, froze the conflict in place. But tensions never truly subsided.
Then came the Kerch Strait incident of 2018. Russian coast guard vessels fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy ships attempting to transit from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov—on their way to Mariupol's port. Ukraine briefly declared martial law, fearing all-out war.
By February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Mariupol's residents knew what war looked like. About 100,000 of the city's roughly 430,000 inhabitants fled before the siege began. Those who remained—whether by choice, circumstance, or inability to leave—would face horrors that defied imagination.
The First Days
Russian artillery began bombarding Mariupol on February 24, 2022—the very first day of the invasion. Twenty-six people were reportedly injured.
The next morning, Russian forces advanced from separatist-held territory to the east. Near the village of Pavlopil, they ran into Ukrainian defenders. The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, claimed twenty-two Russian tanks were destroyed. The advance stalled.
But Russia had other vectors of approach. That same evening, the Russian Navy launched an amphibious assault on the Sea of Azov coastline, about seventy kilometers west of the city. American intelligence officials reported thousands of marines may have come ashore from this beachhead.
For the next several days, a grinding pattern established itself. Russian forces bombarded the city with artillery while probing its defenses with tank columns. Ukrainian defenders repulsed multiple advances. On February 27, a six-year-old girl was killed by shelling. Fighting continued through the night.
By February 28, electricity, gas, and internet connections had been cut to most of the city. The noose was tightening.
Encirclement
On March 2, Russian forces completed their encirclement of Mariupol. The siege—in the classical military sense of surrounding and isolating a fortified position—had truly begun.
That day, shelling killed a teenager playing soccer outside. Two other teenagers were wounded. Mayor Boychenko announced the city was suffering massive casualties and a water outage. He also reported something chilling: Russian forces were preventing civilians from leaving.
The bombardment that followed defied description. For nearly fifteen hours, Russian artillery targeted a densely populated neighborhood. Deputy mayor Sergiy Orlov reported that "at least hundreds of people are dead."
The next morning, a spokesman for the separatist militia formally called on Ukrainian forces to surrender or face "targeted strikes." Russian military officials announced that three nearby settlements had been captured, further isolating the city.
The Humanitarian Catastrophe
By March 4, Mayor Boychenko's pleas had grown desperate. The city's supplies were running out. Russian Grad rockets—multiple rocket launcher systems that fire salvos of forty rockets in seconds, saturating areas the size of football fields—were striking hospitals. Residents had no heat, no running water, no electricity.
A temporary ceasefire was proposed to allow civilian evacuation.
It failed.
The International Committee of the Red Cross—the humanitarian organization that has served as a neutral intermediary in conflicts since the 1860s—attempted to guarantee safe passage for 200,000 civilians. On March 5, a ceasefire was announced from eleven in the morning to four in the afternoon. Civilians began to move.
Then Russian forces resumed shelling. The evacuees had to turn back.
The next day, March 6, a second evacuation attempt also collapsed under Russian bombardment. The Red Cross reported "devastating scenes of human suffering." A Ukrainian member of parliament announced that the fuel pipeline supplying the city had been damaged, leaving more than 700,000 people without heat as temperatures regularly dropped below freezing.
The last functioning cellular tower in the city was destroyed.
On March 7, Red Cross officials revealed why the evacuation corridors kept failing. The humanitarian agreements had been made "in principle" only—without specifying routes, times, or whether aid could be brought in. Worse, one proposed corridor road was discovered to be mined.
March 8: another evacuation attempt. Russia allegedly bombed the corridor.
March 9: another ceasefire. Russian soldiers allegedly opened fire on construction workers and evacuation points. Deputy mayor Orlov described conditions so severe that residents were melting snow to drink.
That same day, a Russian airstrike struck a maternity ward and children's hospital. Three civilians were killed, at least seventeen wounded.
The Mass Graves
The Associated Press reported on March 9 that city workers had begun burying scores of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in a mass grave at one of the city's cemeteries. The previous day, Russian shelling had interrupted the burial work, damaging a cemetery wall.
This was only the beginning. Later analysis by Human Rights Watch, examining mass burial sites, estimated that at least 10,284 people died in Mariupol from March 2022 to February 2023. The organization explicitly stated this was likely an undercount.
The United Nations, using more conservative verification methods, confirmed 1,348 civilian deaths in Mariupol—while warning the true toll was likely thousands higher. They also documented that ninety percent of the city's residential buildings had been damaged or completely destroyed.
Ukrainian officials put the death toll higher still: approximately 25,000 civilians killed, with at least ninety-five percent of the city destroyed.
The discrepancies in these numbers reflect the grim reality of counting the dead in an active war zone controlled by an occupying power with no interest in transparency.
The Theater
Of all the atrocities in Mariupol, one image came to symbolize the siege for the outside world.
The Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre was a beautiful building with white columns and a broad lawn. As the city descended into chaos, hundreds of civilians had taken shelter inside its thick walls—a seemingly safe refuge from the shelling.
To warn Russian pilots, someone had painted two enormous words on the pavement outside the building, visible from the air: "ДЕТИ" on one side of the lawn, "ДЕТИ" on the other. The word means "children" in Russian.
On March 16, a Russian airstrike hit the theater directly.
The building was destroyed. The number of casualties remains disputed—Ukrainian authorities initially feared hundreds dead, while later investigations suggested the death toll may have been lower than first feared due to many sheltering in the basement. What's not disputed is that Russia bombed a clearly marked civilian shelter containing children.
The same day, Russian forces targeted the Neptune swimming pool, another civilian gathering point.
Street by Street
On March 12, Ukraine's military acknowledged that Russian forces had captured the eastern outskirts of Mariupol. The fight was moving into the city itself.
Small victories punctuated the grinding defeat. On March 13, the National Guard of Ukraine reported damaging several Russian armored vehicles with artillery. Ukrainian officials claimed to have killed 150 Russian soldiers and destroyed ten vehicles the following day. On March 14, more than 160 cars finally made it out of the city—the first successful evacuation of the siege.
But the noose continued to tighten. On March 15, about 4,000 vehicles carrying roughly 20,000 civilians escaped. These would be among the last large-scale evacuations.
March 18 brought the fall of Mariupol's airport. Clashes reached the city center. And on March 19, fighting began at a location that would come to define the siege's final chapter: the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.
The Chechen Factor
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya—a Russian republic in the Caucasus whose brutal wars of the 1990s and 2000s had been crushed by Putin, who then installed Kadyrov as a loyal subordinate—announced on March 14 that Chechen soldiers were participating in the siege.
Kadyrov claimed his forces had briefly entered Mariupol before pulling back. He also stated that Adam Delimkhanov, a close ally and member of the State Duma (Russia's lower house of parliament), was commanding Chechen units in the city.
The Chechens, known for their distinctive beards and fierce reputation, became a propaganda fixture of the Mariupol siege. Kadyrov regularly posted videos of his fighters on social media. Ukrainian forces, for their part, claimed to have killed multiple Chechen commanders.
The human cost on the Russian side was substantial. Funerals for senior officers became a grim ritual. A major general, the commander of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division, was reportedly killed when Russian forces tried to storm the city on March 15. Another general may have been killed by a Ukrainian sniper in the siege's early days—though reports of his death location varied.
The Last Fortress
The Azovstal Iron and Steel Works is—or was—one of Europe's largest metallurgical plants. Sprawling across more than four square miles, it contained a labyrinth of tunnels, bunkers, and underground facilities, some built during the Soviet era to withstand nuclear attack.
As Russian forces captured the rest of Mariupol block by block, Ukrainian defenders retreated into this industrial fortress. The Azov Regiment formed the core of the defense, joined by elements of the Ukrainian Marines, National Guard, and territorial defense forces. Hundreds of civilians had also taken shelter in the plant's underground bunkers.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recognized the gravity of the moment. On March 19, he awarded Ukraine's highest military honor—Hero of Ukraine—to the commanders leading the defense: Colonel Volodymyr Baranyuk and Major Denys Prokopenko of the Azov Regiment.
For weeks, the defenders held out against overwhelming odds. Russian forces pounded Azovstal with artillery, missiles, and airstrikes. Periodic assault attempts were repulsed. The plant became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance—a modern-day Alamo, though the comparison is imperfect.
The soldiers inside posted videos to social media, pleading for reinforcement or extraction. But Mariupol was too far behind Russian lines. No rescue was coming.
The End
On May 16, 2022, major combat operations in Mariupol effectively ended. The Azov Regiment surrendered at Azovstal. Over the following days, remaining Ukrainian forces laid down their arms.
The last defenders left Azovstal on May 20, following orders from Ukrainian military command to cease fighting. They were taken into Russian and separatist custody. Their fate would become a source of ongoing international concern—particularly after Russia designated the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization and threatened to put captured fighters on trial.
The siege was over. Russia and its separatist allies controlled the ruins.
The Human Cost
Allegations of Russian war crimes in Mariupol are extensive. International observers and Ukrainian authorities documented:
- Unlawful attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, shelters, and residential areas
- The deliberate bombing of marked evacuation corridors
- Blocking of humanitarian aid
- Forced displacement and deportation of civilians to Russia
- Systematic looting
- Rape
- Summary executions
The scale of destruction was staggering even by the standards of modern urban warfare. Satellite imagery showed entire city blocks reduced to rubble. The port—once vital to Ukraine's economy—lay in ruins. The great steel plants that had defined Mariupol's identity for generations were shattered hulks.
Victory and Defeat
Russia won the siege of Mariupol. This is an uncomfortable but undeniable fact. The city fell. The defenders surrendered. Russia gained its land bridge to Crimea and its control over the Sea of Azov.
But Western analysts debated whether it was a pyrrhic victory—a triumph that cost so much it amounted to defeat. The siege consumed Russian forces for nearly three months, tying down troops that might otherwise have been used elsewhere. Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol bought time for defenses to harden in other parts of the country. The humanitarian catastrophe became, in the words of one analyst, a "reputational disaster" for Russia.
For Ukraine, the loss was unquestionably a significant defeat. Mariupol was the largest city in their controlled portion of Donetsk Oblast. Its capture gave Russia strategic advantages that complicated Ukrainian military operations for the remainder of the war.
But the siege also created powerful symbols of Ukrainian resistance—the defenders of Azovstal, the word "children" painted outside a doomed theater, the defiance of a city that held out for nearly three months against everything Russia could throw at it.
Aftermath
Following the siege, Mariupol came under the control of the Donetsk People's Republic, backed by occupying Russian troops. In September 2022, Russia held sham referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories and announced the annexation of four regions, including Donetsk. Mariupol is now administered as part of the Russian Federation—a legal fiction recognized by virtually no other country.
Russian authorities began reconstruction efforts, though critics noted these were largely for propaganda purposes and focused on showcase projects rather than comprehensive rebuilding. The city's pre-war population of roughly 430,000 had been decimated—by death, by flight, by deportation.
The prisoners taken at Azovstal remained in Russian custody. Some were eventually exchanged in prisoner swaps. Others awaited uncertain fates. The Azov Regiment commanders who had been honored as national heroes faced potential show trials.
And the ruins of Mariupol stood as testament to what modern siege warfare looks like—a city reduced to rubble, its people scattered or buried in mass graves, its name become synonymous with apocalyptic destruction.
Some battles are won. Some are lost. And some simply consume everything in their path.