Amid the backdrop of ongoing ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine and over 3 million refugees who have already fled the bombings and atrocities, the fighting in the country entered its 22nd day on Thursday. Simultaneous to the reports of significant progress in the negotiations, Russia attacked a theater in Mariupol that was being used by more than one thousand refugees, while the siege on the southern port city continued unabated.
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Satellite images showed the word "children" written on the ground outside the theater in giant Russian letters to signal to Russian pilots not to target the structure. The head of the Donetsk region, Serhiy Taruta, wrote in a Facebook post that "After a terrible night of uncertainty, on the morning of the 22nd day of the war finally good news from Mariupol! The bomb shelter has held. People are coming out alive!" he said, adding that removal of the rubble had begun. About 130 people have been rescued so far from the ruins.
Although Russian forces have also fought in northern and eastern Ukraine in recent days, including incessantly shelling the capital Kyiv, Moscow has failed to notch any strategic victory of note in those areas, if anything. As of Thursday evening, it appeared the brunt of the Russian fighting was focused on the south and Mariupol in particular, now that the southern front has extended beyond Crimea, which was seized and annexed by Russia in 2014.
After conquering the cities of Melitopol and Kherson and seizing the largest nuclear power plant in Europe in Zaporizhzhia, the Russian army in recent weeks has attempted to encircle and bombard Mariupol, the home of one of the largest and most important ports in Ukraine. The city and its 450,000 residents are in dire straits as water and electricity have been severely debilitated, food supplies are dangerously low and bodies are left strewn in the streets.
If Mariupol indeed falls to the Russian army, Moscow would have control of one of the largest port cities in Ukraine and be able to create a land corridor between Crimea and the separatist pro-Russian regions of Donestk and Luhansk. It should be noted that Russia views the southern strip of Ukraine as a vital strategic objective of its invasion.
Russia wants Ukraine's southern coast
The Russian forces are attacking Ukraine primarily from Crimea and are constantly moving eastward and westward along Ukraine's southern coast – seemingly in an effort to ultimately control the entire region and the main ports on the Sea of Azov. This would almost completely sever Ukraine from access to the sea and inflict massive economic damage on the country.
According to many Western experts, this is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's main objectives. Moscow has wanted to create a land corridor connecting Crimea to the mainland ever since invading and seizing the peninsula in 2014, triggering the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Currently, Crimea's only link to Moscow is through a single bridge, built after the Russian annexation. Moreover, if Russia does manage to reach farther west, to Odessa and beyond, it won't only have severed Ukraine's access to the sea but also have surrounded the country from three sides.
The new Russia: History and mythology
In addition to the strategic importance of the region from Moscow's perspective, Russia's southern front in Ukraine is also historically significant. The region that stretches from Odessa in the south to Luhansk in the east was conquered by the Russian Empire in the 18th century after a series of battles and wars with the Ottoman Empire. The region has since been known as "Novorussia," or "New Russia."
Under the Soviet Union, most of Novorussia was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which later became Ukraine as we know it today. In 2014, after annexing Crimea, Putin said that although Russia had lost the territory known as Novorussia for various reasons, its people had remained there.
"The mythology Putin is propagating is that these are historically and culturally Russian lands," Karl Qualls, a professor of history and an expert on Russia at Dickinson College, told the BBC. "It's true it was part of the Russian Empire, but there were no Russians who lived there. There were many more Romanians than Russians and even the Ukrainians were very dominant," he said.
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