Mariupol, the second city of Donbass after Donetsk – secessionist and occupied by Russia since 2014 – is the first of the ten most important cities in Ukraine, since the outbreak of the war, on February 24, and after the failure of the assaults Russians on kyiv and on Kharkiv, to be conquered. It is also the first Ukrainian city to be almost wiped off the map. On the Ukrainian side, and despite the military defeat, the defenders of Mariupol, and in the end, of the Azovstal factory, entered the military history of the country as symbols of the most valiant Ukrainian resistance, the most relentless, against a much more powerful army. “The irony is that one out of every two residents of Mariupol is of Russian origin and all the inhabitants speak Russian,” says the mayor of the port city, Vadym Boitchenko, to demolish Moscow’s assertion that its offensive military is intended to come to the aid of allegedly oppressed Russian speakers in Ukraine.
