Russia's Putin makes surprise trip to occupied Mariupol
KYIV, UKRAINE — Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the occupied port city of Mariupol, his first trip to Ukrainian territory that Moscow illegally annexed in September and a show of defiance after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges.
Putin arrived in Mariupol late Saturday after visiting Crimea, southwest of Mariupol, to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday. He was shown chatting with Mariupol residents and visiting a school and a children’s center in Sevastopol, Crimea.
Mariupol became a worldwide symbol of resistance after outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces held out in a steel mill there for nearly three months before Moscow finally took control of it in May. Much of the city was pounded to rubble by Russian shelling.
Putin has not commented on the arrest warrant, which deepened his international isolation despite the unlikelihood of him facing trial anytime soon. The Kremlin, which does not recognize the authority of the ICC, has rejected its move as “legally null and void.”
The surprise trip also came ahead of a planned visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, expected to provide a major diplomatic boost to Putin in his confrontation with the West.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told “Fox News Sunday” that any call for a cease-fire in Ukraine coming out of the Putin-Xi meet- ing would be unacceptable to the U.S. because it would only “ratify Russian’s conquest to date,” and give Moscow “time to refit, retrain, re-man and try to plan for a renewed offensive.”
Putin arrived in Mariupol by helicopter and drove himself around the city’s “memo- rial sites” and coastline, Russian news reports said.
Following his trip, Putin met with Russian military leaders and troops at a command post in Rostov-onDon, a southern Russian city, and conferred with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who is in charge of the Russian military operations in Ukraine, Peskov said.
Speaking to the state RIA-Novosti agency, Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khus- nullin made clear that Russia was in Mariupol to stay. He said the government hoped to finish the reconstruction of its blasted downtown by the end of the year. “People have started to return. When they saw that recon- struction is under way, people started actively return- ing,” Khusnullin told RIA.
Mykhailo Podolyak, chief of staff for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, heaped scorn on Putin’s trip to Mariupol. “The criminal is always drawn to the crime scene,” he said. “While the countries of the civilized world are announcing the arrest of the ‘war director’ in the event of crossing the border, the organizer of the murders of thousands of Mariupol families came to admire the ruins of the city and mass graves.”
When Moscow fully captured the city in May, an estimated 100,000 people remained, out of a prewar population of 450,000. Many were trapped without food, water, heat or electricity. Relentless bombardment left rows of shattered or hol- lowed-out buildings.
Mariupol’s plight first came into international focus with a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital on March 9, 2022, less than two weeks after the invasion began. A week later, about 300 people were reported killed in the bombing of a theater being used as a bomb shelter. Evidence obtained by The Associated Press suggested the real death toll could be closer to 600.
A small group of Ukrainian fighters held out for 83 days in the sprawling Azovstal steel works in eastern Mariupol before surrendering, their dogged defense tying down Russian forces and coming to symbolize Ukrainian tenacity in the face of Moscow’s aggression.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world denounced as illegal, and moved in September to officially claim four regions in Ukraine’s south and east as Russian territory, following referendums that Kyiv and the West described as a sham.