Eternal flame. Archival photoMARIUPOL, May 5Residents of Mariupol are putting in order the monuments dedicated to the participants of the Great Patriotic War, a RIA Novosti correspondent reports on Thursday. One of these groups of caring citizens paints and cleans rust from the monument to the sailors participating in the war, which is a boat mounted on a pedestal in the form of a wave. The monument was installed on the embankment in the center of 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 plant and refuse to capitulate. 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 Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Armed Forces strike only at the 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.
