Russia’s siege of Mariupol a grim sign for other major Ukrainian cities

Scenes from the city of Mariupol in Ukraine’s southeast have been as grim as they get. No water. No electricity. No heat. And heavy bombardment.

Officials in the encircled city say they can’t offer an accurate estimate of fatalities because no one has been able to leave the relative safety of wherever they’ve taken shelter to go out and find the dead.

Mariupol, a heavily fortified city of 430,000, may be a dismal harbinger of things to come for other Ukrainian cities, as Russian forces - unable to capture the country quickly - carry out siege tactics and mass shelling to take over major metropolitan areas.

A senior Western intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, warned this week to brace for “massive loss of human life, especially civilians,” in the coming days and weeks as the war in Ukraine enters a new stage.

“These will be real sieges,” the official said. “They will be almost medieval in their approach. They will cordon cities. They will bombard them until the ground bounces. And then they will go in, and they’ll go street to street.”

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If the Russian military uses those tactics to assault the capital, Kyiv - a city of nearly 3 million - and other densely populated areas such as Dnipro and Odessa, it will mark a particularly grave turn. Already, a million people have fled the violence in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on, the conflict may also become less visible. Early on, international journalists have closely covered the invasion from Kyiv and other cities that still have electricity, Internet and cellphone service. But if Russian forces disable local utilities, as they have in Mariupol, the developments will become far more difficult to broadcast.

Mariupol’s capture, a prime Russian objective ever since a separatist war broke out in the country’s east in 2014, would help Moscow to complete a “land bridge” from Russian territory to Crimea on the Black Sea.

Ukrainian cities that are less fortified or strategic may escape similar sieges. The Russian military recently captured Kherson, an important economic hub along the Black Sea and the Dnieper River, without resorting to the days-long bombardment being used in Mariupol. Big cities such as Kyiv that the Ukrainian military is gearing up to defend, however, could well be pummeled - at great cost to those who remain.

Mason Clark, the lead Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the Russian military used a similar playbook in Syria as it fought alongside the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, often targeting civilian infrastructure to force a city or part of it to capitulate.

“They likely assess that it is a more cost-efficient way of forcing these cities to surrender,” Clark said.

The Russian military all but leveled Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, during the first Chechen war, in the 1990s, and in the second, which began just before Putin became Russia’s president in 2000.

Clark said the aim of the Russian military in Grozny was not just to force Chechen separatists to capitulate but to destroy the city itself as a way to break their will. It’s not clear whether Moscow has the same aims in Kyiv, he said, noting that the Ukrainian capital could see comparable destruction anyway.

In a post on the messaging service Telegram, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko encouraged residents to have faith in the ultimate victory of Ukrainian forces, describing the siege there as an “act of genocide by Russian occupiers against the Ukrainian people.”

Russia has presented the invasion as an effort to “denazify and demilitarize” the country and rescue Ukrainians from a Western-backed government that has been holding them hostage.

Boichenko said that Mariupol has emergency services ready to restore electricity and water but that a cease-fire is needed to carry out that work.

“We aren’t simply saying it, we are screaming it, so the international community hears our voice about the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe for our city,” Boichenko said Thursday.

He said negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials regarding humanitarian corridors had raised hopes that medicines and food would be allowed into the city.

In addition to Ukrainian forces, Mariupol has been a primary base for years for the Azov Battalion, a far-right extremist militia that has been involved in fighting for Ukraine since the start of the separatist conflict in 2014. Those fighters have been a particular target for Russian forces and its separatist proxies, who have sought to highlight the existence of far-right groups in Ukraine to falsely label the central government as being run by neo-Nazis.

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In cities across Ukraine, locals have begun building barriers to impede Russian armored vehicles from easily entering and have stocked up on molotov cocktails and guns in preparation for urban combat. Advancing Russian commanders will probably try to avoid urban combat as much as possible for fear it will lead to a large number of Russian casualties. The result is likely to be a reliance on airstrikes and artillery, in addition to siege tactics, all of which can cause significant death among civilians.

“I don’t know what other outcome there is other than winning ugly for Russia at this point,” said Scott Boston, a Russian military analyst at the Rand Corp.

The Russian air force hasn’t been very involved in the military operation so far, Boston said, and he would expect to see more airstrikes as forces try to close in on Kyiv.

He said the Russian military faces logistical problems that could inhibit its ability to move the huge amount of ammunition needed to surround big cities and shell them into capitulation, as in Mariupol. The military, he said, would need to amass an overwhelming amount of combat power to take on an operation inside a city as big as Kyiv, and it would become difficult for the Russians the longer such fighting dragged on.

“The longer it goes,” Boston said, “the worse it will be.”