Before falling in mid-May, the basements of the Marioupol metallurgical factory were a high place of the Ukrainian resistance. “Le Monde” was able to go there as part of a press trip organized by Moscow.
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The small calendar displayed on the wall, in a corner of the dormitory, stopped on May 14. After that, no one was tearing up the pages. Have the Ukrainian soldiers entrenched there were too much absorbed by the fighting to continue this besieged ritual? Have they evacuated their reduced to another building, another underground from the factory? Three days later, on May 17, the first redditions were reported: 265 men, including 51 injured. The beginning of the end of the Azovstal resistance, which will end in the capitulation of more than 2,000 combatants, according to the figure of Moscow. Meanwhile, the place has become one of the symbols of the Russian attack against Ukraine. A labyrinth of destruction and death that the Russian army showed for the first time to a group of around thirty journalists, Monday, June 13, including that of the world, as part of a press trip through Donbass and the territories of the Ukrainian southern captured by Moscow.
The road that leads to the metallurgical combinat has a tune of diving in hell. Even commensurate Marioupol, a city almost entirely destroyed by more than two months of siege and bombing, the districts bordering the factory are distinguished: ripped houses, charred buildings and reduced to the state of carcass. The invasive greenery that makes summer the charm of the cities of Donbass also bowed. The brush is full of shards of metal, sockets, uprooted concrete blocks; The trees are mowed, trenched, burned. Rare cars venture on the smashed roadway: residents who come to search the rubble of their house.
azovstal was the pride of Marioupol. Some 1,100 hectares (one tenth in Paris) of concrete and metal placed on the Azov Sea, right in the center of the city. Eight million tonnes of steel and cast iron produced each year. Even in peacetime, the place is impressive, with its high buildings, its tangles of metal pipes, rails, high stoves. The bombs burst the concrete, twisted the metal beams, transformed the ground into a heap of shells and debris. The wind carries acrus of corpses: not all were out of the rubble. The vision is that of an apocalypse landscape. Only protection against the flood of fire, the endless undergrounds and tunnels built as shelters in the Soviet era, the deepest of which count up to seven levels.
The explosives would be everywhere
It was one of these underground passages that the Russian soldiers decided to show the press. The choice is anything but trivial: the place in question was one of those used by the Azov regiment, a military unit which occupies a central place in Russian communication. Other units of the Ukrainian army participated in the defense of the factory during the month of siege. Some underground passages were also used by the hundreds of civilians entrenched with the soldiers, who shared part of their ordeal – on the spot, the Russian soldiers who supervise the visit prefer to speak of “hostages”.
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