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The Fight for Mariupol

February 22, 2015 – While filming near Mariupol, Donetsk region, Eastern Ukraine, Hromadske journalists witnessed the withdrawal of the 14th Donbas battalion from Shyrokyne. Shyrokyne is a village which has become one of the focal points of the fight between Mariupol and Novoazovsk – a town on a Russian border. The soldiers had just escaped from being encircled for four days. They faced fierce shelling in the lead up to the ceasefire.

Out of the 28 volunteer fighters of the battalion, two died and three were injured, one of whom is in critical condition. The battalion abandoned their positions and was helped to get back to government-controlled territory by the East Ward regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On the 12th of February, the Ukrainian Army started to evacuate civilians. // Kira Tolstiakova, Khrystyna Bondarenko, Anna Tsygyma. Filmed 02.17.2015

February 24, 2022 – FRANCE 24 senior reporter Catherine Norris-Trent spoke Wednesday to residents of Mariupol, who have mixed feelings about the threat of a Russian attack. The majority Russian-speaking city is about 60 km from the Russian border, overlooking the Sea of Azov.

March 12, 2022 – Russian forces are continuing to pound the port city of Mariupol, which has endured some of Ukraine’s worst misery since Russia invaded.

March 13, 2022 – Russian tanks fired at residential buildings in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Friday. It wasn’t possible to tell whether they’d first received fire from the targeted locations. Fires could be seen raging in parts of the residential blocks, and dark smoke rising. Fighting has also been intense around the capital of Kyiv. This video is from the Associated Press.

March 17, 2022 – We have seen perhaps the most confronting blast in the Ukraine war zone so far. A theatre in Mariupol where more than a thousand people were sheltering has been destroyed. We don’t know the death toll, but the world is assuming the worst. An atrocity that was enough for the US president to brand Vladimir Putin a war criminal. Although there are signs a peace deal may come, the reality on the ground is beyond distressing and growing worse.

March 19, 2022 – Today a Ukrainian police officer stood in a street of his destroyed city, Mariupol, and issued a direct appeal to the presidents of the United States and France, asking them to provide his country with a modern air defense system. He made this video, authenticated by the Associated Press, in which he said, “Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth.”

Russian forces in Mariupol have been accused of human rights violations and war crimes. However, propaganda in the state-controlled media in Russia presented the invasion as a liberation mission and blamed Ukrainian troops for attacks on civilian targets in Mariupol.

March 21, 2022 – We take you inside the Ukrainian city that’s become the center of resistance to Putin’s plans to create a new order in Europe. Join reporter Sarah Ferguson, camera operator Ryan Sheridan and producer Tony Jones on a heart-stopping journey across the battle lines of Ukraine, from the western city of Lviv near the Polish border to the embattled capital, Kyiv, and on to the historic and strategically vital southern city of Odesa on the Black Sea, which seems about to become the next front line in the war.

Across the country, quiet civilians are now military volunteers, determined to save their country from the Russian invaders. ‘If they dare come here, we will burn them to ashes. Not one will be left alive,’ one fighter told us. Their message over and over is that the people of Ukraine will fight to the end.

March 26, 2022 – “People were screaming, calling their parents, children were lost.” Maria Radionova was one of hundreds of civilians sheltering in the Mariupol Drama Theater when a Russian missile hit the theater.

April 13, 2022 – In Mariupol Wednesday, Russian troops and their separatist allies drove into a city they’ve already destroyed following a six-week siege that gutted 90 percent of the buildings. As Ukrainian forces prepared for more intense battles, 120,000 civilians remain trapped in Mariupol. Nick Schifrin reports.

April 17, 2022 – Ukrainian forces vowed to defend the besieged city even after Russia issued an early morning ultimatum. President Zelenskyy warned of major consequences if the city falls and says that could end negotiations.

April 22, 2022 – ABC News’ James Longman reports on the latest news on the war in Ukraine.

May 3, 2022 – Sky’s Alex Rossi reports from Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine as civilians arrive on coaches after being evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks in besieged Mariupol. The UN has confirmed that 101 people were successfully brought out from the plant, where some had been living in underground bunkers since the beginning of Russia’s invasion – two months ago.

May 4, 2022 – The Russian airstrike on the theater in Mariupol on March 16 stands out as the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date. An Associated Press investigation recreated what happened finding the attack killed closer to 600 people.

May 5, 2022 – Video released by Nik Mark, one of the Ukrainian soldiers holding their line in the besieged Azovstal complex in Mariupol, on May 4, 2022. The video shows a female soldier sing “Our Father Bandera” with other soldiers in the darkness of their bunker as Russia intensifies artillery and missile strikes to wipe out remaining Ukrainian forces at the Azovstal steel plant.

The Azovstal is the last holdout of Ukraine soldiers in the southern port city of Mariupol. Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, said intense attacks and non-stop shelling continued on the steel plant overnight into Thursday.

May 5, 2022 – Russian efforts to seize the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol are meeting fierce resistance Thursday, as Ukrainian fighters continue their last-ditch stand in the port city. This as the United Nations announced a new operation to evacuate some of the 100,000 people still trapped in Mariupol. Nick Schifrin reports again from Kyiv.

May 6, 2022 – CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh sits down with Ukrainian Marine Hlib Stryzhko who was fighting for Mariupol before Russia held him for 17 days.

May 17, 2022 – The siege of Mariupol is all but over as hundreds of its Ukrainian defenders finally abandoned the steel plant where they had held out for months under relentless bombardment. More than 260 Ukrainian soldiers, some of them seriously wounded, have left the ruins of the Azovstal steel plant and turned themselves over to Russian forces.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainian military, intelligence and negotiating teams, as well as the Red Cross and the United Nations were involved in the evacuation operation. It’s not clear what will now happen to the Ukrainian troops. Ukraine hopes that they will be freed in an exchange with Russian prisoners. While Russia called the operation a surrender, the Ukrainians said Mariupol’s defenders had successfully completed their mission to tie down Russian forces.

May 17, 2022 – The battle for Mariupol appears to be over, after hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers on Tuesday surrendered from their final holdout. The city has suffered one of Europe’s bloodiest battles since World War II. And now, Russia appears to hold the entire Ukrainian port city, its largest gain of the war. Nick Schifrin has the story.

September 1, 2022 – A family from Mariupol described going through a Russian filtration camp and then being taken to Moscow. The mother eventually got her children out via Belarus and Poland, while the husband chose to remain. Human Rights Watch calls the practice of forcibly moving Ukrainian citizens a war crime.

December 3, 2022 – Maxar satellite images of the city of Mariupol, in eastern Ukraine, taken in March 2022 and November 2022. These images show the numerous changes that have occurred since the Russian siege of the city in March and the extensive damage that was caused by weeks of airstrikes and artillery bombardments.

Across the city, dozens of destroyed or damaged high-rise apartment buildings are now being demolished and large stockpiles of construction supplies are seen near several of the shopping centers. A new Russian military compound has been built in the center of the city and the city’s main cemetery, Starokrymske, has had a significant expansion in its number of graves.

December 22, 2022 – The Russians pounded the Ukrainian industrial port city of Mariupol into submission. Now, they are rebuilding it in their own image and tearing down symbols of the fierce Ukrainian resistance.

December 22, 2022 – While the Russians are slowly rebuilding the shattered Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, they are also erasing the former national identity of what was a symbol of Ukrainian defiance.

December 29, 2022 – “We are always thinking and waiting for victory and peace in our country.” People who fled from Russian occupied Ukraine have no idea what they can return to after Russian shelling destroyed Ukrainian cities like Mariupol.

January 10, 2023 – 28-year-old mortar battery commander, Major of the “Azov” regiment Arsen Dmytryk, miraculously survived the attack on the Olenivka prison. Fellow prisoners from the row of beds he used to sleep – all died. We’ve asked the interview to take place in his hometown of Berezhany in the Ternopil region. However, we arrived at the moment when Arsen was planning to go to Lutsk to attend the funeral of his brother in arms from “Azov”, who died in the battle of Bakhmut. We went on the road together.

February 16, 2023 – Spring, 2022. Russian troops begin their destructive conquest of the coastal city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov. In this film, survivors from war-torn Mariupol recount their traumatic experiences. It is the story of a crime against humanity, told from the survivors’ point of view. Women and men who lived in Mariupol during the first month of the Russian invasion recount what they saw and felt. What choices did they have to make, as they, along with their friends and family, came under heavy fire? Nadia Sukhorukova is a journalist who kept a diary during this time of terror and air strikes.

In less than a month she became a witness to hundreds of civilian deaths. She documented everything she experienced. Through her chronicle of the siege, which she published on social media, the terrible events in Mariupol were made tangible to thousands of people. This documentary tells of a city where everything was destroyed – except hope. It is the story of a crime against humanity, told from the survivors’ point of view. Women and men who lived in Mariupol during the first month of the Russian invasion recount what they saw and felt.

What choices did they have to make, as they, along with their friends and family, came under heavy fire. Nadia Sukhorukova is a journalist who kept a diary during this time of terror and air strikes. In less than a month she became a witness to hundreds of civilian deaths. She documented everything she experienced. Through her chronicle of the siege, which she published on social media, the terrible events in Mariupol were made tangible to thousands of people. The documentary tells of a city where everything was destroyed – except hope.

March 19, 2023 – Russian President Vladimir Putin has made what the Kremlin calls a spontaneous visit to occupied Mariupol. Exiled authorities from the Ukrainian city have condemned the trip, which came hours after another unannounced stop in Crimea, the peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014. That, in turn, came on the heels of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on Friday, accusing him of war crimes.

March 23, 2023 – A formation of volunteers that has become one of the toughest in the world. Fighters that kept defense for several months in a complete encirclement. Patriots that became a scarecrow of Russian propaganda. All this is about Azov and their combat path to the world’s recognition.