Destroyed houses near the Azovstal plant in Mariupol. File photoMARIUPOL, 24 Apr.The head of the Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, told reporters that Mariupol began to prepare for the restoration of the city and the return to peaceful life, the city will become better and more beautiful than it was. will be done in the coming days, weeks, months. It is important for us to start this process in full, at once. I repeat once again that Mariupol will be better than it was, more beautiful than it was, and more suitable for life than the conditions were before that,» Pushilin said.Pushilin attended an Easter service in Mariupol At the time of the proclamation of the DPR in 2014, Mariupol, with a population of about 450 thousand people, was the second city of the republic after Donetsk, but in June of the same year, Ukrainian security forces regained control of Mariupol. On March 7, 12 days after the start of the Russian special operation to demilitarize Ukraine, the deputy commander of the Vostok battalion, Alexander Semyonov, announced that the city was surrounded, and a cleansing of its individual districts had begun. On April 16, the official representative of the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashenkov, announced that the entire city territory had been cleared of the Ukrainian army, foreign mercenaries and neo-Nazis from the Azov regiment (against whose militants a criminal case was initiated in Russia). The remnants of the Ukrainian group are blocked at the Azovstal metallurgical plant. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops and, as of March 25, they have completed the main tasks of the first stage — they have significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.
