A woman walks down Pashkovsky Street in MariupolMOSCOW, Apr 9Ukrainian troops constantly fired and placed tanks between residential buildings in Mariupol long before the entry of Russian troops into the city, said Mariupol resident Masha, who witnessed what happened. who they are shooting at, because there weren’t even Russians in the city then,” she said in a video provided by RIA Novosti of the Russian Defense Ministry. According to the girl, about two weeks later, when Russian troops were just starting to enter Mariupol, Ukrainians placed mortars in residential buildings and fired at residential areas and houses. Tanks standing in residential yards also started shooting at houses. “They didn’t care who they were shooting at and where they hit,” she says. The girl claims that the Azov people began to shoot people, and when the AFU soldiers wanted to surrender they were also shot. The nationalists went into the basements where people were sitting and either shot them or drove them out into the street and drove them to where the mines were. «People, of course, were simply blown up,» she says. 450 thousand people was the second largest city in the republic after Donetsk. However, in June of that year, the Ukrainian security forces regained control of Mariupol, and its eastern suburbs became one of the hottest places of conflict in Ukraine. On March 7, 2022, Alexander Semyonov, deputy commander of the Vostok battalion of the DPR, said that the city was surrounded, and a cleansing of some of its districts had begun. Currently, the forces of the Russian Federation and the DPR are fighting for the final liberation of the city. Among other Ukrainian units, the Azov nationalist regiment is stationed in Mariupol, against whose militants a criminal case has been initiated in the Russian Federation. in mass killings, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on 24 February. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.» To this end, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine» bloody crimes against civilians» of Donbass. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops and, on March 25, they completed the main tasks of the first stage — they significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.
