“The fighting is fierce, it’s urban guerrilla warfare. It’s street fighting, but there isn’t really a front line”. This is the situation in Mariupol described on Wednesday 13 April by There is Samoylenko, Ukrainian officer from the Azov regiment fighting inside Mariupol. Some 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers are still inside the city, besieged for more than a month by the Russian army.
Illya Samoylenko, Ukrainian officer of the Azov regiment, recounts the hell of the fighting in Mariupol – The report by Omar Ouahmane and Gilles Gallinaro
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On the spot, the Ukrainian forces are preparing for the fall of the city but do not want to give in and ask “aid from the West, which has not given us military support for the past eight years. I am very grateful to the countries that since February 24 have delivered arms to Ukraine, says Illya Samoylenko. But we in Mariupol, besieged by the Russians, received nothing.” The officer asks in particular for heavy weapons, “more efficient”to face the Russians, after killing some “at least 2,000”, he assures.
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He insists : “We have been fighting without artillery support and without air support, without supplies for over a month and a half.” There is Samoylenko describes a fierce battle: “NOTWe will fight until the end. We will not surrender. We will fight not to death, but to victory”. The fighting takes place in a field of ruins, the city is already largely devastated by Russian fighting and bombing.
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According to this officer of the staff of the Azov regiment, an initially paramilitary group created at the time of the Donbass war by an ultra-nationalist leader who today still uses SS insignia from the Das Reich division, and who has been part of the Ukrainian army since 2014, theare russian “use planes that bomb indiscriminately, bombs that fall on homes, civilians, hospitals and theatres”. Soon running out of ammunition, he assures us that the Russians are razing the city, district by district.
On the spot, the situation is desperate, a hell for the civilians trapped in the middle of the fighting and deprived of everything. If the combatants still have limited supplies of water and food, indicates this officer, the inhabitants trapped there have nothing left, and “suffer from hunger.”
“Russia is trying to block any humanitarian aid coming from the Ukrainian side. A real genocide! And then the Russians abduct and move the inhabitants of the occupied areas of Mariupol.”
Illya Samoylenko, officer of the Azov regimental staffat franceinfo
Illya Samoylenko claims to have had in her hands “leaflets distributed to civilians announcing their ‘relocation’ to the far east of Russia, to Vladivostok or Kamchatka for example.”
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On the spot, while “civilians are dying in the street”, the officer fights every day so that the whole city does not fall into the hands of the Russians. He also wishes to point out that if “the enemy is already in town, he does not control everything, contrary to what he claims”. “Russia may have taken a third of Mariupol, but now they are engaged in urban warfare. To be able to claim total control over an area, they have to sweep everything away. What the Russian army is doing with its indiscriminate bombing “, he explains. Adding that “the Russians violate all the laws of war, all international treaties”.
“They used prohibited ammunition, and even chemical weapons, yesterday in Mariupol. We cannot say what it was because we do not have a laboratory, but residents showed unusual symptoms.”
Ilya Samoylenkoat franceinfo
For Ilya Samoylenko, Russia is in the process of “committing thousands of war crimes, here in Mariupol. And she’s trying hard to hide her dirty secrets. How does she do it? She shaves everything, so without evidence, there’s no punishment !” When asked what will happen to him if he decides to surrender to the Russians, the officer replies: “If I surrendered, they would torture me, they would mutilate me, this is what they would do to me”. The imminent fall of Mariupol should accelerate the second phase of the Russian offensive, the objective of which is the annexation of the Donbass region, disputed since 2014.
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