https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-visit-to-europes-front-with-russia-11587166080?mod=opinion_major_pos4
Mariupol, Ukraine
The huge troop-transport helicopter dates from the Soviet era. It flies just above the tree line, nose down, to avoid Russian radar. After two hours of flying over smooth ground, frozen lakes and ruined villages in the dark winter night, we arrive here at the headquarters of the Navy Guard, where we meet the officers who for six years have led the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region.
I didn’t wait for the briefing. The nearly deserted fish market in the center of town told the story. So did the empty shops on Lenin Avenue and the enormous blast furnaces of the Azovstal factory, running at half power and emitting thin clouds of dirty black smoke. This shutdown of a key industrial city wasn’t caused by a pandemic. The separatists, unable to take control of the city, imposed a blockade.
In Shyrokyne, a seaside resort half an hour’s drive east, all that remains of its 2,000 residents are a couple, Maxime and Tatiana, former innkeepers who’ve come in under the protection of a national guard unit to lay flowers at his father’s grave. The elegant houses that lined Shapotika and Pushkin streets are reduced to piles of rubble. Lt. Martha Shturma, our interpreter, says this was an ordinary resort with no strategic importance. Its remains to tell a story of gratuitous destruction: the church with the collapsed roof; the clinic reduced to concrete pillars and mined; the school pulverized by heavy artillery, where we find a section of blackboard, half-burned notebooks and a backpack, miraculously spared.