Opinion

Sep 24, 2023

Leon Aron is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of "Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991."

The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition now. Such wars are ultimately decided not on battlefields but in the contest of will among political leaders. Who will blink first: Moscow, or Kyiv, Washington and Brussels?

Though Russian President Vladimir Putin reigns unopposed, he still has to manage public perceptions. With sweeping battlefield victories elusive, he has mobilized vast resources to try to rebuild the ravaged city of Mariupol — as a symbol of the benefits of Russian occupation for the residents who remain in Donetsk, and as proof of Russian capacity for success to a broader audience in Russia.

It's for this reason that Russia still allows journalists access to a city so close to the front lines of the war.

I spoke to a photojournalist based in Russia who traveled to Mariupol in March, interviewed residents there and shared some photos with me. The journalist was extensively questioned by the Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) before being granted entry into the occupied area but, once there, was allowed to travel unaccompanied. The Post and I are not identifying the journalist out of concern for their safety.

What emerges from the photojournalist's accounts is a rare, if incomplete, glimpse into the reality of Russian occupation. Military assets were off-limits, though air defenses could be seen trying to intercept incoming strikes on the outskirts of the city where Russian troops are presumably stationed. The mood was somber and tense, and people were generally suspicious and nervous. Nevertheless, some residents were guardedly willing to talk.

Welcome to occupied Mariupol. Before the war, it was Ukraine's key industrial center, specializing in metallurgy and shipbuilding, with a population of 440,000. The city was captured by Russian troops after a fierce month-and-a-half-long battle last year. But the fight did not end once the city fell. Ukrainian defenders held out in the labyrinths and basements of the giant Azovstal industrial complex for five more weeks.

Aimed at extirpating every sign of the city's Ukrainian past, propaganda begins at the city's gate, where the Ukrainian spelling of the city's name is replaced with Russian lettering.

The square that used to house a memorial to the "defenders of Ukraine" now features a statue of Prince Alexander Nevsky, the 13th-century vanquisher of the Catholic Teutonic Knights. Nevsky's victory is celebrated in Putin's Russia as a precursor of the current struggle against a West supposedly hellbent on despoiling Russia's soul, eroding its national values and, ultimately, crushing its sovereignty.

A version of this propaganda line has been drummed into the minds of soldiers fighting in Ukraine on Russia's side. "Everyone understands that it is a war between Russia, Europe and America," an officer of the Kaskad (Cascade) unit from the puppet Donetsk People's Republic (which "joined" Russia last fall) told the photojournalist. "It's in the U.S. interest to continue this war, because they earn a lot of money from it. America has achieved its main goal — it has grabbed Russian energy resources and sold them at exorbitant prices."

Today, an estimated 150,000 people are left in the city. More than two-thirds of the former inhabitants either were killed or left for unoccupied Ukraine. Others have moved to Russia. Russia has been accused of forcibly relocating migrants, and Putin recently announced that anyone refusing to get a Russian passport would be deported a year from now. Even before the announcement, however, there were long queues of people waiting to get their Russian documents. Many Russian companies are demanding that candidates show Russian papers to be employed. The lines for collecting pensions at the local post office look like Soviet food queues.

Food trucks are not exempt from propaganda messaging. They may be painted different colors, but the slogan running the length of their roofs is always the same: "Mariupol is Russian. Period!" The message is likely a deliberate echo of a spectacle that has become commonplace across Russia: More than 800 abandoned McDonald's restaurants have been renamed "Vkusno — i tochka," or "Delicious — period."

In Putin's Russia, television remains the main propaganda vector. In occupied Mariupol, it is ever-present. It goes without saying that the various channels available to Mariupol's residents are all controlled by the Russian state.

The model for Mariupol is Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, which also was reduced to rubble through two wars prosecuted by Russia in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin's proxy strongman in Chechnya who has become fabulously wealthy and powerful as a result of Russian efforts to reestablish control there, has openly said that Mariupol will follow in Grozny's footsteps.

A local imam said Kadyrov's people had reached out to them directly, offering seemingly unlimited assistance. "[On our own] we would have maybe had enough money to paint the benches. But they even [offered to] replace the damaged marble — everything," he said. "The marble is being shipped from Turkey, cut in Rostov and then transported here."

But though enormous effort is being put into rebuilding the center of the city, the devastation dealt to Mariupol by Putin's war cannot be easily hidden or built over. Private residences are still in rubble. The ruins are ubiquitous, and people are searching for belongings in whatever is left of their homes. "My eshchyo zhivy!" — "We are still alive!" — is scratched on the door of one house, but bodies are still being pulled from the ruins, and cemeteries are filled with mass graves. Signs with no names, just numbers, mark the graves of entire families wiped out by tank shells or bombs, leaving no one to identify the dead.

Luda, a middle-aged woman, was looking for her son's grave with her husband's brother. They finally found it — the number 6453 carved into a wooden desk. Her son, Vadim Issaev, a 25-year-old Ukrainian police officer, was fighting off the Russians until the end.

"A cross or flowers, there is nothing else we can find to buy," she said, as she laid a wreath on the grave. "He was buried here only in June. He had no more legs when he was dug up. He had no more skin. I had to see his whole body, he was not buried deep."

Lena, 49, and her husband sleep in a basement while they slowly rebuild the aboveground part of their destroyed house. Lena wrote a poem that she showed to the photojournalist. "The walls of the basement shake from explosions. The candles flickered out. Darkness. Silence. I thought we died. … O not to go mad from pain and fear! I am crying out a prayer. I pray to survive in this hell."

She did. But only to be surrounded by "desolation and death," the poem continues. Will she ever again see her daughter, who fled west as Russian tanks approached? Or her granddaughter, who was born shortly thereafter? "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!" she concludes.

The horrors of the war have scarred many of the remaining residents. A sense of betrayal and of being forgotten is palpable.

Vladimir, 52, a construction worker, was particularly bitter. "Where the fascists live, in Lviv [in western Ukraine], people sit in restaurants and coffee shops," he said, using a variation of Putin's label for pro-independence Ukrainians — "Nazis." "And here, where 90 percent voted [to join] Russia, everything is in ruins. I have started to become more critical of Russia, and have questions." When he initially fled the fighting, only a few houses were destroyed. By the time he returned, everything was flattened. "That is how the Russians ‘liberated’ us."

"It is disgusting to watch television, everyone is lying," Alla Nikolaevna, 87, said as she collected belongings from her former apartment before the building was demolished. "And our Russian propaganda is everywhere. Yes, it is only bulls--- everywhere!"

But after lamenting the horrific conditions she has endured, she added that she was grateful to the forces of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic. "They brought bread, they brought water." It's not clear how much of this was genuine conviction and sympathy for Russia, and how much it was just caution about speaking ill of the occupying forces to a journalist.

Yet amid the lies, fear and death, some young people are defiant. Vika, 15, is a student at one of the few schools that have been rebuilt. She explains that the new curriculum is all about Russification. The students are forced to learn and sing the Russian and Donetsk People's Republic anthems, and paint pictures for the soldiers on the front. Still, she unfurled a Ukrainian flag on the street. A friend had given it to her for her birthday.

A few months earlier, she had taken the flag out in the city's main square. Someone — a Russian or a Ukrainian, she doesn't know which — had shouted to her that she could be shot for such behavior. Vika did not need a reminder. "I’m only afraid that if Russian soldiers stop me and check my bag, I’ll be shot," she explained. "My mother wanted me to hide it, but I always carry the flag with me."

As the journalist was taking a photo of the Nevsky statue, above, they saw another teenage girl flipping the bird to the hallowed Russian symbol.

Two days after the International Criminal Court charged Putin with war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest, the Russian president came to Mariupol for a few hours. He was filmed stopping by the "Nevsky micro-district," inspecting a new apartment and listening for a few minutes to the effusively grateful occupants.

As he was leaving, a barely audible voice is heard on the video, crying out from a distance: "Eto vsyo nepravda!" — It's all lies!