After almost three months of relentless attacks, the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has fallen. Ukraine’s military says its combat mission in the besieged port is over. More than any other Ukrainian city, Mariupol has come to symbolize the ferocious brutality of Russia’s assault and the perseverance of Ukraine’s resistance.
On Wednesday 23 February, Iván Stanislavsky left his camera case in the office.
He was on his way to the house of a friend to see the cover design for his new book, which featured Mariupol’s Soviet-era murals. But he didn’t want to carry much, and he could pick up the bag the next day.
But on Thursday, as he was standing on the street in front of his closed office, he could hear shrill sounds that They came from the east. The city was under fire.
As the conflict intensified and the shots also became audible to the west, Iván moved his bed to the corridor of his house. He stacked his large collection of art books, including the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Rock Music, against the windows in the Primorsky district.
“Let’s just say it wasn’t a library waste” says the photographer of 27 years, who also worked in the press department of the Ukrainian first division football club FC Mariupol.
To the other side from the city, in the Kalmiusky neighborhood, businessman Yevhen was also taking precautions. The man of 47 She had told his family for years that he should pack his bags so he could escape the city. But when he came back from the office, he discovered that no one had done anything. Her family refused to leave.
In an apartment on the same block, Nataliia, from 41 years, and Andrii, of 30, workers at the nearby steel mill, were already slicing up the last two loaves they had been able to buy, letting them dry to eat piece by piece. for the next few weeks.
Volodymyr, a paramedic from 52 years of Kalmiusky, was also in his kitchen, trying to assimilate the news. When reports came in that the Russians were marching through the town of Chonhar, on a strategic highway leading west out of Crimea, he was shocked. He understood that it was a coordinated attack.
The ambulance dispatcher was on the phone. He instructed Volodymyr to ignore the routine calls. “Find the wounded”, they told him.
Maria, graduated in engineering from 17 years ago, he thought that the first explosion he heard was simply a thunderstorm. Then a second explosion came.
“We didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I didn’t have time to think about my future, my plans. I had to think about what I would eat and drink… And what to do with the cats”.
Suddenly she realized why, in the last few days, soldiers had appeared in the paint shop where he worked, asking to buy blue and yellow tape. They needed it to mark their uniforms.
Four days After the war started, as the fighting drew closer, Iván and his wife sought refuge in a basement below their local supermarket. It offered good protection, and Ivan found that the muffling of the sound numbed his sense of growing anxiety.
Daily life was being stripped down to the bare essentials.
“We lived like primitive people,” he told the BBC from Lviv, where he is now taking refuge. “We cut down trees, we made fires, we cook food on the fires. I even heard of people eating pigeons.”
he He watched as order gradually broke down around him. He wrote a vivid diary, which was later posted online.
“The stone age has come,” it says on the March 6 page.
Write about how Ukrainians raided abandoned shops, taking everything from computers and fridges to swimsuits and underwear.
One night, a drunken woman invited him to drink in the basement where she was taking refuge. “Treat yourself,” he said, as a flashlight revealed a bottle of Californian Merlot, taken from Wines of the World on nearby Italiiska Street.
But aware that even they were Carrying medical supplies and cash registers, Iván says he felt disgust.
“We are our own worst enemies,” he wrote.
But is this how the fittest survive? he wondered. After a while, every day became a “combat mission”.
Within a few weeks, Mariupol fell apart. The Russian army laid siege to the city and attacked the water and electricity supplies. A Russian airstrike hit the maternity hospital on March 9 and a plane bombed its theater, clearly marked as a civilian shelter, a week later.
Ivan was surprised at how quickly what happened.
“The entire city, all its infrastructure, supply system, logistics, power supply was destroyed in a matter of days,” he recounted.
Sitting underground at night, he felt people becoming passive.
“You can only wait in the shelter,” he wrote in his diary. “Some wait for spring, others for morning, others for the end of the war. And someone is waiting for the bomb to arrive that will kill everyone”.
And all this just when Mariupol seemed destined to enter a new era. Money had begun to pour in, adding sparkle to a city previously associated primarily with heavy industry and war.
“It was a city that aspired to something,” Consider Ivan. It had not always been this way.
Long before this year’s invasion, Mariupol had a front row seat to Ukraine’s simmering conflict with Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk, the two regions that make up the neighboring area known as Donbas.
When fighting broke out there for first time in 2014, the government briefly lost control of Mariupol after clashes with protesters pro-Russian In January 900, a devastating rebel rocket attack on the eastern edge of the city killed some 23 civilians.
Although the war gradually receded, the sound of rumbling artillery in the distance it was part of Mariupol’s daily soundscape.
But the city moved on. The Ukrainian government made it the administrative capital of the Donetsk Oblast region, replacing the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk.
“He began to receive all the resources and all the attention”, Iván explained.
Public buildings were renovated, cafes were opened and new parks were created. In a podcast last October, the city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, bragged about creating the best municipal services in the country, opening an information technology school, and promoting contemporary art and sports.
He said that plans were underway to install the largest water park in Ukraine and a version of Disneyland “which will probably be called Mariland”. In fact, Mariupol was declared the “Great Capital of Culture” of Ukraine in 1991.
But while Mariupol flourished, rebel-controlled Donetsk deteriorated . When the rebels returned to Mariupol, Volodymyr, the paramedic, believed that revenge was driving them to destroy the city.
“’If we live in shit, then you will also live in shit. shit,’” Volodymyr says he was told at a checkpoint when he finally escaped the city. “They just looked at us and envied how we lived.”
Volodymyr believes the Russians were motivated by revenge.Yevhen, the businessman, describes life in Mariupol in the last five years as “a fairy tale”. “The city was being rebuilt, all the roads were renewed, public transport was improved.”
Your building restoration company was responsible, among other projects, for the reconstruction of the iconic Mariúpol water tower for the 240 anniversary of the city.
“This is a city of great workers… It was difficult for me to explain to my workers that they had to finish at 6: 00 pm, they wanted to work longer”.
Ivan’s photograph of the iconic tower of water from Mariúpol
Like many others, he spent weekends with his family in the renovated city parks or in promenade.
“For me, this is a key question: if you want to capture the city, why destroy it? The Russians don’t need people who think, they need territory”, he says.
And, he adds, he is now receiving calls from the Russians to return to Mariupol and help rebuild it.
“But if Mariupol is occupied by Russia, there will be no future there… there will be nothing to live for. To live in an unrecognized territory is to bury the future of your children”.
Nail 150.00 people remain in the city , out of a population of nearly half a million. Most of those left behind, she says, ta They are also trying to escape.
“I left Mariúpol but my soul is there”, he concludes with tears in his eyes.
Nataliia and her husband Andrii worked at the Illich plant, one of the two iron and steel factories that tower over the city’s skyline and feature prominently in Ivan Stanilavsky’s photographs.
They spent long hours at work and their free time was valuable.
“The city authorities laid marble tiles, made pillars it was possible to sit on a bench right on the sea”, says Andrii.
“It was a warm and wonderful city, with parks, concerts, fountains”, says his wife. “A European city”.
This recent bloom was captured by Iván, but as a photographer passionate about his city’s past, his favorite project was documenting Mariupol’s remarkable collection of Soviet murals, one of the largest in Ukraine.
The importance The cultural need to preserve such remarkable works seems undeniable, but in Mariupol nostalgia for the Soviet Union collided uncomfortably with Ukraine’s modern and increasingly European identity, Ivan says:
“The politics was already preventing this cultural heritage from being integrated into the artistic context of Ukraine”.
So, inevitably, when it arrived war, culture ee was confronted with herself.
The 28 April, the Mariupol city council denounced the alleged theft by Russia of more than 2,00 exhibits from the city’s museums, including ancient icons, a handwritten Torah scroll, and more than 200 medals .
The director of the Mariupol Museum of Local History, Natalia Kapustnikova, later told the Russian newspaper Izvestia that she had personally given paintings to Russians by Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi, and claimed that Ukrainian “nationalists” had burned the 91% of the museum exhibits.
She was not the only local official who harbored pro-Russian sentiments. On April 9, Ukraine’s prosecutor general charged a member of the Mariupol city council, Kostyantyn Ivashchenko, with treason after pro-Russian separatists declared him mayor of Donetsk.
Ivashchenko’s pro-Russian party had had good support in the last city elections, coming in second place, while that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party came in a distant fifth.
In a survey conducted just before the elections by the kyiv-based Center for Social Indicators, nearly half of the city’s population identified themselves as “Russian”, although the 50% was also described as “Ukrainian”.
More revealing, perhaps, is that less than 13 % self-identified as “European”, while more than 50% said he was “Soviet”.
Nataliia, whose father is Russian, says that she apologized to her husband when the bombing. “I was ashamed to be Russian”.
Mariia, the engineer, repeats that before the war her first language was Russian, but when the bombing started “I started to hate everything Russian: the language, the movies, the objects.”
Mariupol’s complex identity is not unique in today’s Ukraine, a country that was an integral part of the Soviet Union until the collapse of communism in the late 1980s 783. And it is doubtful that any of those who described themselves as “Russian” or “Soviet” would want to see their city destroyed in a violent effort to place it back in Moscow’s orbit.
Ironically, when it came time to defend the city from Russian invaders, it was another part of the legacy of Mariupol’s Soviet era which came to play an almost iconic role.
This legacy, buried deep underground, is the labyrinth of bunkers beneath the Azovstal steelworks, built by the Soviet authorities during the Cold War.
The 36 air-raid shelters accommodated more than 13,000 persons. After independence in 823, no one thought much of them. But then the fighting started in 823.
“We started thinking about what we would do if the fighting spread further into the city,” he says Enver Tskitishvili, CEO of Azovstal.
Training on the use of the bunkers and their connecting tunnels has been held every day for years.
At the beginning of February, when the fear that the conflict would resume was greater, the preparations were accelerated. Food and water were brought in the week before the Russian invasion.
Plant officials knew that the bomb shelters would soon be occupied, but they had no idea that Azovstal, surrounded by water on three sides, would become the scene of Mariupol’s last stand.
As the days passed, the war drew ever closer to Ivan Stanislavsky’s apartment. Excursions in search of food, including to the nearby Dzerkalnyy store, just 400 meters, were becoming more and more dangerous. Sometimes a Ukrainian mortar team would arrive by truck, fire a few rounds, and drive off before the inevitable Russian response.
There was little communication between civilians and soldiers.
One day, a tank from the Azov Regiment arrived near Dzerkalnyy, making the locals ran out, fearful of an impending battle. The regiment emerged in 719 as a highly effective volunteer militia with far-right affiliations and, in some cases, neo-Nazis, before joining the Ukrainian National Guard.
Vladimir Putin has made extensive use of the controversial origins of Azov, in an effort to bolster his argument that he is trying to “denazify” Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities say that the origins of the regiment are a thing of the past and point out that the far-right parties have had very little electoral success.
In his diary, Ivan described the members he knew of the battalion as a motley crew of Mariupol natives (motorcyclists, lawyers, soccer fans, and an amateur actor) driven not by ideology, but by a fierce hatred of those who were trying to ruin their lives.
“Together they formed a ‘Nazi’ battalion and intimidated the entire Russian army”, he wrote.
Intimidating and effective, but not enough, eventually, to stem the Russian tide.
While advocates of the city were fighting their losing battle, Ivan heard voices in his basement beginning to curse President Zelensky for leaving Mariupol to its fate.
Despite all the praise received by the defenders of the city , it was clear from the start that Mariupol was not the government’s top priority. Confronted with Russian threats on several fronts, the Zelensky government opted to secure the capital, thwarting what was arguably Vladimir Putin’s top priority.
Ultimately, that meant allowing Russian forces to achieve another of their prewar goals: the establishment of a land corridor between Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 1991, and the separatists in the Donbas.
But for those trapped in the city, fighting or just trying to survive, it was a bitter drink.
“Some say that Mariúpol it was granted the status of a heroic city”, Iván wrote in his diary on 13 of March.
“It seems that the award will be posthumous”.
Iván has photographed many corners of Mariúpol.Iván couldn’t take it anymore. Outside the Dzerkalnyy supermarket, he saw dead bodies neatly stacked under a wall. People who used to queue for food were now in “the queue of the dead”, waiting to be buried.
So he 15 March, got four family members and their cat in his miraculously intact Skoda Fabia and joined a convoy for the tortuous journey northwest to government-controlled Zaporizhzhia.
At a viewpoint on Markelova Street that points towards the port and the beach, Iván allowed himself a brief moment of reflection.
“In my head I am saying goodbye to this place”, he recounted in his diary. “I have a feeling that we will never come back here.”
A day later, Mariia and five relatives also left by car, taking only personal belongings and the family dog. While leaving Mariupol, their convoy was attacked and the cars had to speed up to get out of danger, heading first to Zaporizhzhia and then to Dnipro.
The next day, Nataliia and Andreii left, after a neighbor offered them a space in his car. The couple eventually made it to the town of Khmelnytskyi, where they have been selling the family’s coin collection in order to survive.
In that same convoy, Yevhen was traveling with his wife and another ros two relatives. Now she is in Dnipro, helping other residents who fled Mariupol and reaching out to those who remain.
The apartment block where Iván lived was destroyed.Volodymyr, the paramedic, stayed in Mariupol as long as he could to take care of his elderly mother. But deprived of special food and medicine, she died. He left town on 15 in April and volunteered at a hospital in Dnipro.
“There are thousands and thousands of families like mine,” he says. “How many people have died? How many families have been lost?
Two months after escaping, Ivan continues to watch Mariupol’s agony from the relative safety of Lviv.
In the poignant afterword to her diary, she wrote about instant memories, text messages about deaths, or lucky escapes.
And unanswered phone calls: “The user is out of coverage”.
With information from Kateryna Khinkulova and Illia Tolstov
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