How the Ukrainian resistance continues to derail Vladimir Putin’s plans to seize power

If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion were planned, Serhiy Volyna would be dead and Lilia Cheridnichenko would have fled Ukraine or meekly submitted to Russian rule.

Instead, Major Volyna, who commands the 36th Separate Marine Brigade, the last Ukrainian unit inside the besieged port city of Mariupol, was still alive this week. From inside the ruins of the Azovstal steel factory, she posted videos on Facebook and sent letters to Pope Francis, calling on the international community to intervene and save his wounded soldiers and the estimated 1,000 civilians trapped with them.

“Hell on earth” is how Major Volyna described the situation inside Azovstal in a letter to the Pope. “Women and children live in the bunkers below the factory. They are cold and hungry. Every day under enemy fire. Every day, injured people die because there is no medicine, no water, no food.”

The future, for Major Volyna and for Mariupol, looks bleak. But he and his unit of several hundred fighters have rejected repeated calls to surrender. In doing so, they have kept a large Russian force inside Mariupol, preventing it from redeploying elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, now the main front in this 57-day war.

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The destruction of my hometown of Mariupol is something I can never forgive.

More than 800 kilometers northwest of the Azovstal siege, Ms. Cheridnichenko was carrying out her own smaller act of resistance. On Thursday, the 54-year-old returned to Irpin, a town on the outskirts of kyiv that saw some of the heaviest fighting during Russia’s last futile attempt to seize the capital at the start of the war, and set up a checkpoint. shoes at the town’s open-air Easter market.

The market, which Ms. Cheridnichenko said was about half the size of its pre-war ones, was located across from a bank that had all its windows blown out and part of the roof damaged by heavy weapons fire. Shoppers walked over, often inadvertently, a blast mark in the pavement where a mortar shell had landed.

Police said this week that they had recovered 269 bodies since Russian forces withdrew from Irpin in early April. Survivors said they felt the need to continue, if only to spite Putin.

“Life! Irpin!” Mrs. Cheridnichenko yelled, grinning widely as shoppers began to pour into the city’s first market day since February 22, two days before the invasion began. Next to the shoe stall From Ms. Cheridnichenko, a dozen other vendors served tables laden with sausages, dried fruit, jams, pickles and other items, including wallpaper.”I cried this morning when I saw my customers. I was so happy to see their faces again ”, said Ms. Cheridnichenko.

The war continues in the east of the country, where Russian forces that withdrew from the kyiv region earlier this month have been redeployed, and anti-aircraft sirens remain a feature of daily life in and around the capital and other major cities. But for Ms. Cheridnichenko, being outdoors and among friends was a victory, after 38 days and nights holed up in a bomb shelter in a parking lot with her five grandchildren.

“I don’t have a husband, but I have the character of a warrior. So I gave the example to my grandchildren that everything would turn out well. Even when I was scared, I would smile for my grandchildren.”

Putin, in a speech just before ordering his troops across the border, dismissed Ukraine as a made-up country, a land that was taken from Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But more than two decades of his meddling in Ukraine Politics — first by backing pro-Russian politicians and then starting a proxy war in eastern Ukraine that he used eight years later to justify this full-scale invasion — has helped solidify exactly what the Kremlin chief said doesn’t exist. : a fierce, proud and unified war. Ukraine.

That determined national spirit, coupled with a growing supply of Western weapons, has allowed Ukraine to at least prolong a conflict that many analysts had predicted would end almost as soon as Putin sent his troops into the country.

“kyiv in three days,” Sergey Markov, a political analyst linked to the Kremlin, predicted to The Globe and Mail in a WhatsApp message on February 26, using the Russian spelling of the Ukrainian capital. This week, Markov said the war would last “a few months.”

And it wasn’t just Moscow that got Ukraine wrong. On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden, who warned before the war that Russia would “plunder” kyiv, admitted that he was “amazed” by Ukraine’s resistance. He said the country had proven to be “tougher and prouder” than he thought.

Mariupol, which has been under assault since the first day of the war, and where at least 18,000 people have been killed, epitomizes Ukraine’s rejection of the Kremlin’s plans. On Thursday, Putin announced that Russian troops would not attempt to storm Azovstal, which has become a three-mile-wide fortress, but would seal it off so that “not even a fly” can get in or out.

While he claimed “success” and said that Mariupol had been “liberated”, Ukrainian officials said the opposite was true. “They cannot physically capture Azovstal. They have understood this. They suffered huge losses there,” said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko told The Globe that Putin, by assuming that the Ukrainians were the same as the Russians he has ruled since the turn of the century, had fundamentally misjudged the country he was trying to conquer.

“We will win this war for one reason: Ukrainians fight and defend our families and children. The Russian army is fighting for money. And I hope everyone can see the difference between dying for money and dying for their children and their children’s future,” Klitschko said on the steps of kyiv’s city hall, where he met Thursday with a visiting group of European politicians. “We never stay on our knees. we never want [to go] back to the USSR, the Russian Empire. We see our future as part of the European family.”

The European delegation, led by former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, was the latest in a series of recent trips by Western leaders, and another sign that kyiv is slowly returning to its former self. The city, which before the war had a population of more than three million, was a ghost town in the first weeks of the war, as most of its residents fled or spent the day in shelters.

These days the city has a half-awake feel, with a few restaurants and shops operating, though traffic remains light, even at what would normally be rush hour.

Despite the sense of relief in and around the capital, the war is far from over. Markov said “no one knows” whether Russia’s war goals would end with the “liberation” of the southeastern Donbas region or whether Russia would again try to capture kyiv.

The horrors of this war continue to unfold in places like Irpin. On Thursday, seven new graves were dug in the local cemetery. Still, the residents of this city, like the fighters inside Azovstal, continued to fight.

“There is a desire to live,” said Pyotr Rudnik, 54, whose house was badly damaged in an airstrike on March 6 that completely destroyed the house next door. He and his wife survived because they took refuge in his basement.

On Thursday, Mr. Rudnik was one of the first buyers to arrive at the Easter market. “We’re not leaving,” he explained. “We are living here.”

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