This is a war of extinction, say street fighters of Mariupol
Officer who lost an eye and a hand in previous conflict with Russians tells of ‘hell’ in rubble of shattered city
WHEN Eli Samoilenko was blown up while taking on the Russians in 2017, he suffered catastrophic injuries. These days, the 27-year-old soldier from southern Ukraine has a glass eye and a hook in place of his hand.
But he has not allowed his wounds to prevent him joining those of his fellow citizens resisting Russia’s latest attempt to annex parts of their country.
He is among a hard core of soldiers who remain in besieged Mariupol, even though weeks of heavy Russian bombardment has destroyed “almost 90 per cent of the city”.
“All the fights now are on the streets,” Mr Samoilenko, an Azov Battalion officer told The Sunday Telegraph from a bunker deep within the city.
“But the problem with street fighting is that you cannot hold a straight line of defence. You can fight the enemy but the front line is shattered because everything changes so quickly.”
Mr Samoilenko said Russia’s army outnumbered Ukraine’s and fought with bigger units, such as tanks, heavy artillery, naval combat ships, multiple launch rocket systems and aircraft.
Ukrainian soldiers had to rely on small arms, armoured vehicles and tanks, he said.
And no resupply lines operate to the cut-off city, so the ammunition available to the fighters is limited to what they have with them, he said.
He added: “It’s terror on the streets and with one word I can describe Mariupol: hell. Literally hell.”
Yet despite the grim conditions, he said Ukrainians were determined not to lose Mariupol.
“It’s a war of extinction, a war for the existence of Ukrainians and we will fight until the end,” Mr Samoilenko said.
“Mariupol … can fall only with his last defenders. Mariupol right now is the backbone of Ukraine’s defence.”
While Russia has more soldiers than Ukraine, he said, it “cannot outnumber us in motivation and professionalism”.
“We are more trained than them and we have something to fight for. They don’t.” He also said Ukrainians were fighting a war for Europe, “because Russia will not stop at us”.
Mr Samoilenko is part of the controversial far-Right Azov Battalion, which has been mired in controversy since it was created in 2014 to fight Russian separatists after the annexation of Crimea. Its fighters have proven key to protecting Mariupol but it has also been repeatedly used by Vladimir Putin to bolster his propaganda narrative that all Ukrainians are neo-Nazis.
The battalion has latterly been absorbed into Ukraine’s army and has “attempted to de-politicise itself ”, according to Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert in the European Right.
Mr Samoilenko was keen to stress that he and his fellow soldiers were ordinary people. “Almost all the soldiers who became the Azov Regiment were civilian people, regular guys, IT workers, teachers, from a variety of professions but the situation forced them to join the military,” he said.
Previously used to working office jobs, these “regular guys” have now “seen terror in the eyes of the civilians”, he said. Nearly 5,000 people are thought to have been killed during the three-week siege on Mariupol, including more than 200 children.
“This is genocide,” he said. “The city is not damaged, the city is not under attack, the city is destroyed. Every single building in Mariupol is damaged. I see the people starving, I see the dead bodies on the street, there is no ability for metropolitan services to maintain all of these situations, or bury the corpses. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe in its most horrible form.”
Among the worst attacks, said Mr Samoilenko, was the bombing of a Mariupol theatre where 300 people are thought to have been sheltering from the shelling.
“I’m trying to be calm as much as possible, as a professional, but some things are very … it’s not emotional, it’s personal,” he said.
“I’m trying to imagine the way of thinking of people who perform like this and it just drives me nuts. It’s impossible for a normal person to think like this.”
The Red Cross was yesterday renewing its efforts to evacuate civilians and on Friday sent a team to lead a convoy of some 54 city buses and private vehicles out of the city, but they were forced to turn back.
Yesterday, Mariupol city council said 10 empty buses were heading to Berdyansk, 84 kilometres (52.2 miles) west of Mariupol, to pick up about 2,000 people who had managed to get there independently.
During the course of the war, Russia and Ukraine have agreed to establish humanitarian corridors to allow the evacuation of civilians, and have traded blame when evacuations failed.