Ukraine update: Mariupol has become 'a true concentration camp' and a hideous, ongoing crime scene

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Earlier this week, Russia declared that it had taken “all of Mariupol.” Which meant that they had captured all of the city except the vast collection of factories, buildings, sheds, scrapyards, and material heaps of the Azovstal complex. Established in 1930, Azovstal was one of the Soviet Union’s largest manufacturers of steel and other alloys through World War II, the Cold War, and into the present day. During all that period, the complex continued to grow, and as it did its importance to the USSR, which was marked by an increasing complex of shelters and tunnels explicitly designed to keep the factory’s 40,000 workers on site and in business, even in the middle of war.

The tunnels beneath Azovstal were designed to take a near-direct hit from a nuclear weapon. For the last two months, hundreds of Ukrainians, including families with children, have been in those shelters and tunnels as part of the resistance to the Russian invasion of their city. And for the most part, those tunnels and shelters have served their purpose, holding out against not just a constant pounding from artillery, incredibly, but against weeks of bombardment by Tupolev Tu-22M “Backfire” bombers that blanketed the area with explosions felt miles away.

But not everywhere is equally protected: On Wednesday evening, a field hospital located within the complex failed under the constant weight of the Russian air and artillery assault.

Dozens of people, including children, have reportedly died in the attack as Russia continues to bring down the boot on the last holdouts in a city already turned to rubble by weeks of constant attack. Most of those still remaining below Azovstal are fighters from the national Azov Regiment, who Russia has made into the boogeymen of this war. The regiment knows what would happen to them if they tried to surrender. They know what would happen to their families, to their wives and children. 

Azovstal was built to be a shelter under the worst imaginable circumstances. Now those circumstances are here. And unless something changes soon in Mariupol, what started as a shelter will end as a tomb.

Elsewhere in Mariupol, the BBC reports that Russia has set up “filtration camps” at which local citizens are processed before being taken away to unknown locations within Russia. Some of the few to escape from those camps call conditions there “unimaginable.”

“It was like a true concentration camp,” Oleksandr, 49, says. …

Elderly people slept in corridors without mattresses or blankets, Olena says. There was only one toilet and one sink for thousands of people. Dysentery soon began to spread. “There was no way to wash or clean,” she says. “It smelt extremely awful.”

Those suspected of being “Ukrainian Nazis” or who showed any sign of protest were taken away to be tortured or killed. 

“The filtration camps are like ghettos,” she says. “Russians divide people into groups. Those who were suspected of having connections with the Ukrainian army, territorial defence, journalists, workers from the government – it’s very dangerous for them. They take those people to prisons to Donetsk, torture them.”

The situation in Mariupol is intolerable for the people there. It should be intolerable for everyone who is not there.

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