by Trudy Rubin
MARIUPOL, Ukraine — The airport in Ukraine’s second-largest port is shut. A Moscow-led “rebellion” around the city in 2014 made it too dangerous for planes to fly in.
At that time, Mariupol repelled the Russian-backed “rebels.” But the city still sits adjacent to the front line, separated from a Russian-controlled enclave in eastern Ukraine only by military checkpoints that bar most vehicles — and by a buffer zone of wrecked seaside homes.
On a visit a week ago, as I spoke with locals and refugees from nearby Russian-occupied territory, I could easily imagine the future Vladimir Putin envisions for Ukraine. If Russia can gain control of the entire country via a second invasion, or can at least expand the eastern enclaves that Moscow already controls to include Mariupol, the outlook is grim.
Although the city is calm for the moment, the drama swirling around it is the most momentous crisis to beset Europe since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. It will test whether, 30 years later, Putin can re-create the heart of the Soviet empire by threatening or using force.
To reach Mariupol from the capital, Kyiv, I had to take a 15-hour night train. The city itself is dominated by two massive steelworks and by the rail tracks on which rolled metal sheets are carried to loading docks on the Sea of Azov.
The city’s port is operating at only around 50% to 60% capacity because Russia now illegally controls the narrow entrance to the Azov and often blocks the entry of international ships that export Ukraine’s steel and grain to the world.
In better days, Mariupol was a tourist destination, with modest beach resorts and a small, attractive historic downtown centered on the Greek revival-style drama theater in the main square.
Then came 2014, when Russia sent thuggish Ukrainian “separatists” from Moscow to eastern Ukraine to lead the rebellion against the Kyiv government.
Separatist militias lobbed shells at a market place in the eastern section of Mariupol in 2015, killing dozens of civilians. I stopped at two poignant stone memorials on the spot where the innocent victims were blown apart as they shopped at vegetable stalls. Local fighters drove out Moscow’s armed minions at the time.
“Unfortunately, we have been living for the past eight years under a slow-burning conflict,” Kseniya Sukhova, secretary of the Mariupol City Council, told me. She is gamely trying to promote Mariupol as “a model city under difficult circumstances,” promoting better health care and new universities, fixing up the marina and parks and holding cultural festivals.
But new business investment is hard to come by when no one knows if Putin’s proxies, helped by Russian soldiers, might try again to take the port. That is one of several scenarios Ukrainians envision as possibilities for the Russian troops assembled on their country’s borders.
The object would be to permanently destabilize Ukraine, making NATO or European Union membership impossible. As part of this option, Russia might try again to occupy Mariupol port.
Vladyslav Serbin, one of the refugees from the city of Donetsk, was a university student in Donetsk when armed men appeared there, destroyed the airport, and took over the city administration. Donetsk’s coal mines are being shut, he said, while factories are disassembled and their machinery sent to Russia. Non-uniformed men with guns roam the streets, and no one dares criticize the Russian-backed, Mafia-style leaders.
The new regime has some support, Serbin admitted, from Ukrainians who had served in the Russian army or elderly Russian speakers nostalgic for the Soviet Union. But businesspeople, those who are educated and those who resent the repression have fled to Mariupol or elsewhere in Ukraine.
“People who live there do not hope for tomorrow,” he told me bitterly, while recounting the story of his grandma who couldn’t leave and died alone there of COVID-19. “Ukrainians who are armed can take whatever they want.”
This is the nightmare most residents of Mariupol want to avoid at all costs.
Civic activists are mobilizing to be ready in case the worst scenario materializes. Kateryna Sukhomlynova was one of thousands of civilians who rose to the occasion in 2015 when the separatists attacked an unprepared Ukrainian army that was barely functioning, without uniforms or food. “We tried to help any way we could,” she said. “We cooked borscht and soup for them,” she added.
Now, aided by the Maltese Red Cross, she has organized several projects to ensure that volunteers are prepared to aid a far better organized Ukrainian army as well as local civilians, in case of another invasion.
“The reality is so different now,” she said. “People from all over Ukraine are sending food. Even babushkas [grannies] are sending the last [cents] from their pensions. Medical aid is now being sent from Germany and Poland. We’re not as helpless as we were in 2014.”
Yet, she said, locals will not flee if the fighting starts again.
“We would like the world to know this is our land, our hometown, and we are not leaving,” she said firmly.
