The two Mi-8 helicopters tore across enemy territory early on the morning of March 21, startling the Russian soldiers below. Inside were Ukrainian special forces fighters carrying crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles, as well as a satellite internet system. They were flying barely 20 feet above ground into the hottest combat zone in the war.
Ukraine’s top generals had conceived the flights as a daring, possibly doomed, mission. A band of Ukrainian soldiers, running low on ammunition and largely without any communications, was holed up in a sprawling steel factory in the besieged city of Mariupol. The soldiers were surrounded by a massive Russian force and on the verge of annihilation.
The plan called for the Mi-8s to land at the factory, swap their cargo for wounded soldiers and fly back to central Ukraine. Almost everyone understood that the city and its defenders were lost. But the weapons would allow the soldiers to frustrate the Russian forces for a few weeks more, blunting the onslaught faced by Ukrainian troops elsewhere on the southern and eastern fronts and giving them time to prepare for a new Russian offensive there.
“It was so important to the guys, who were fully encircled, to know that we had not abandoned them, that we would fly to them, risking our lives to take their wounded and bring them ammunition and medicine,” said a military intelligence officer with the call sign Flint, who was on the first flight and described the operation to The New York Times, along with three others involved. “This was our main goal.”
As the two Mi-8s drew closer, they banked hard over the Sea of Azov, flying just above the water’s surface to avoid Russian radar. Then it appeared, the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, the last bastion of the Ukrainian defenders. In a video from the flight, Azovstal looms like a besieged industrial fortress, bathed in early morning sunlight.
Beyond it was Mariupol, a city reduced in less than four weeks to a smouldering shell. Corpses littered the streets while the living — those who remained — were mostly below ground, hungry and scared, emerging from basements only to scrounge for water and food.
“It was a sad sight,” said Flint, who was on the lead helicopter. “It was already mostly in ruins.”
For the Kremlin, Mariupol was a prize.
Barely had President Vladimir Putin of Russia given the order to attack Ukraine, on February 24, when Russian soldiers began pouring over the border in tanks and armoured vehicles, rolling toward the city, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov. Missiles streaked through the predawn darkness, slamming into apartment buildings and wounding the first civilians of the war.
That morning, the general director of Azovstal, an industrial behemoth with more than 11,000 workers, convened his board. The director, Enver Tskitishvili, went on a war footing, deciding to power down the blast furnaces and cease operations for the first time since World War II. Then the board made a decision that would shape the battle for eastern Ukraine.
Beneath the steel plant were 36 bomb shelters, a legacy of the Cold War. The shelters, some more than 20 feet underground, had enough food to feed thousands of people for several weeks. Believing the fighting would not last long, the executives saw the plant as a sanctuary and invited employees to come there with their families.
What Tskitishvili did not know was that Ukraine’s military was also arriving at Azovstal. To the Ukrainian soldiers, the plant was a stronghold, surrounded on three sides by water, ringed by high walls, as seemingly impregnable as a medieval keep. It was the perfect place to make a last stand.
“The military never told us, and we never supposed that they would deploy with us,” Tskitishvili said in an interview. “We planned only for the civilian population, and only as refuge from attack. We did not consider ourselves to be participants in the war.”
For the next 80 days, Azovstal would be a fulcrum of the war as Russian brutality collided with Ukrainian resistance. What began as an accident — civilians and soldiers barricaded together inside an industrial complex nearly twice as large as midtown Manhattan in New York — became a bloody siege as roughly 3,000 Ukrainian fighters kept a vastly larger Russian force bogged down in a quagmire that brought misery and death on both sides.
Mariupol stood in the way of one of Putin’s key aims: the creation of a land bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea, the strategic peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014. But the fight also fit the Kremlin’s war narrative. Although several military groups were at Azovstal, many of its defenders were members of the Azov Regiment, a strongly nationalistic group of fighters whose fame in Ukraine and early connections to far-right figures have been used by the Kremlin to falsely depict the entire country as fascist.
Destroying them was central to the Kremlin’s often-repeated goal of “denazifying” Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the battle for Azovstal has already become legend, though a comprehensive account of the siege and the struggle for survival by the troops and civilians inside has been slow to emerge. Dozens of interviews conducted by the Times with defenders and civilians who were at Azovstal — including soldiers who were captured and later released by Russia, along with top military officials and international arbiters involved in negotiating evacuations — paint a picture of an apocalyptic siege that became Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.
In a war largely fought by anonymous soldiers far from the cameras, commanders and regular fighters at Azovstal spoke to journalists and beamed video testimonials to the world on Telegram. Capt Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Regiment at the plant, spent his days and nights fighting above ground, then broadcast his impressions in video messages when he retreated to the bunkers beneath Azovstal.
“We have fought with a group that is many times stronger than we are and have tied them down and not let them move further into Ukrainian territory,” Palamar said in a telephone interview from Azovstal in late April. “But at the same time, the situation is difficult — actually, critical.”
Ultimately, Azovstal became a trap. The presence of civilians hampered the soldiers’ ability to defend themselves. The presence of soldiers meant the civilians had to endure a vicious siege as food and clean water ran out.
Natalya Babeush, who worked as a high-pressure boiler operator at the plant before seeking refuge in one of the shelters, described a hunger so pernicious that children began to draw pictures of pizza and cake. As a volunteer cook for her bunker, she went above ground each day to prepare meals of thin soup and fried dough on a makeshift stove constructed of brick and metal gratings as jets flew overhead, dropping bombs.
But Azovstal sat along one of the world’s bloodiest geostrategic fault lines. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Russian troops, together with local separatists, seized surrounding territory in the eastern Donbas region. The separatists occupied Mariupol for weeks before pro-Ukrainian forces, including Azov fighters, pushed them out.
For several years, as the war in the Donbas simmered, Azovstal executives ordered employees to revamp the decaying bomb shelters and stock them with food and water. Mariupol was only a few miles from the “contact line” that demarcated the territory controlled by the separatists.
“For eight years, we had become accustomed in Mariupol to explosions from time to time,” said Tskitishvili, the plant’s general manager. “We often heard shells explode. We heard the fighting, and so we grew used to it.”
But that changed February 24 when Russian forces attacked the entire country.
Senior Sgt Sergei Medyanyk, a soldier with the Azov Regiment, was at his barracks outside of Mariupol. His wife, Yulia Polyakova, a soldier with Ukraine’s national guard, was at their home in the city. Both were woken at 4 a.m. and ordered to prepare for war.
“We did not really understand what was happening,” Medyanyk said. “We thought maybe it was a training exercise.”
Anna Zaitseva and her husband, Kirill, who worked at Azovstal, bundled their infant son and rushed to take shelter at the factory. She had been so stressed during the Russian military buildup before the war, she said, that she had stopped lactating.
“We came to the shelter,” she recalled, “and took with us only what was necessary, like very big blankets, some food, water, documents and some baby formula.” -- The New York Times.
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