After days and days of bombing, the Russians announce that they have conquered Mariupol, the battered city in Eastern Ukraine. Ukrainians and Americans deny this is true, but there is one final surprise: Vladimir Putin, in a spectacular meeting with his defense minister, orders to suspend the final attack on the historic Azovstal steel plant, where 2 Ukrainian soldiers of the Azov battalion are barricaded, but also many civilians who risk dying of hunger.
Why did Putin abandon the final attack on the steel plant?
Putin's move came as a surprise, but certainly not an act of generosity. Quite a calculation. It serves – said the tsar – “to preserve the lives of our soldiers and our officers” but the area of the steel plant – he added – must be isolated “so that not a fly flies” and that no one can enter or leave. Who will save the soldiers and civilians barricaded in the underground shelters of the steel plant?
Unconfirmed rumors say that in the shelters of the steel plant there are also American military advisers whom Putin has no intention of killing (if anything, of taking prisoners) in order not to trigger an epic clash with the United States, which, in turn, has decided to intensify supplies of weapons, including heavy ones, to the Ukrainians.
After Mariupol, more massacres or finally the peace talks?
What will happen now? Nobody knows, even if there are those who hope that the de facto conquest of Mariupol could induce the Russians to sit down at the negotiating table with Ukraine, but there are no elements that can confirm it and the American decision to strengthen Ukraine's military equipment with 800 million dollars of heavy weapons (cannons and drones above all) seems instead to imply that Putin does not want to negotiate and that therefore now the moment remains that of war.
Especially since the Ukrainians claim that in some cities, Russian soldiers continue to fire on Ukrainian civilians and volunteers. “In the morgues – say the Ukrainians – there are a thousand bodies of civilians” and President Zelensky affirms: “We have proved that the Ukrainian state and institutions are effective enough to withstand the test of war. We are doing as much to protect freedom in Europe as others have never done."
How it will end no one knows, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war that followed remain one of the most terrible pages of the new century, which continues to collect black swans, from the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers to the economic crisis and financial triggered by the Lehman Brother bankruptcy up to the pandemic and now the Russia-Ukraine war.
