Chapter One: The Invasion CHAPTER ONE THE INVASION THE SIEGE OF MARIUPOL had started twenty days before the bombing of the theater. It began as the war began, in the predawn hours of Thursday, February 24th, 2022. Russian heavy artillery and planes bombarded Ukrainian air defense systems, military installations, airports, government buildings, and critical infrastructure. Armored columns carrying roughly a hundred and ninety thousand troops began crossing the Ukrainian borders and moving toward four strategically crucial cities. They made for the capital of Kyiv via Belarus; toward Kharkiv, Ukraine''s second-largest city, from southeastern Russia; and toward Kherson from the Crimean Peninsula. They moved on Mariupol from the Donetsk People''s Republic, a breakaway statelet which Russia had carved off Ukraine in 2014 after annexing Crimea, and which Moscow had run as a crypto-satrapy ever since, arming one side of a stalemated low-volume shooting war that had dragged on for the previous eight years: the Russo-Ukrainian War, as we now call it. Putin had always denied he controlled the Donetsk People''s Republic, a fable which dissolved once and for all when Russia''s 58th Combined Arms Army and its 150th Motorized Rifle Division linked up with fighters from the DPR''s so-called People''s Militia. This combined force swept in a crescent north of Mariupol, cutting off land routes into the city and setting up firebases.
With field guns, tanks, mortars, and the multi-barrel mobile rocket launchers commonly known as Grads, they commenced a barrage of Mariupol''s eastern outskirts that would spread west across the city and continue for eighty-six days. At the same time, Russian jets scrambling from the Millerovo and Primorsko-Akhtarsk bases bombed the railways, power plants, and water pumping stations around Mariupol, and the 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade detached from the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol and steamed for the Mariupol port. With a rapidity that shocked Ukrainian commanders, and probably the more competent Russian ones, Mariupol was being encircled. Elizaveta Fatayeva didn''t learn those details when she awoke that first morning to news of the war. Few Ukrainians did. The news was stinting in specifics. The same footage of Russian tanks rolling over the border was replayed again and again on television. Addressing the nation, President Volodymyr Zelensky offered, instead of details about the invasion, attempts at fortitude and solace.
"We know for sure that we don''t need the war. Not a cold war, not a hot war, not a hybrid one," he said. "But if we''ll be attacked by the troops, if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack, but defend ourselves." It was not the most stirring call to arms from Zelensky, who had not yet transformed into the inspiring wartime leader the world would soon come to know, but then Liza, as she went by, a willowy nineteen-year-old with long blond hair and eyes that seemed demure until you realized they were studying your eyes, didn''t require martial stirring, nor solace, not yet. She wasn''t too worried. She thought the impudent bear to the north was merely baring its teeth and growling, just as it had been doing on Ukraine''s eastern border for most of her life. Putin wanted some concession or another from Ukraine or the West, she told her mother, Oksana, with whom she lived in an apartment in Zakhidnyi, a residential district of drab concrete apartment blocks north of the theater.
Maybe it was more assurances from NATO that it had no intention of admitting Ukraine, maybe a pledge from Washington to keep long-range missiles out of the country, or something more obscure, but once he got it, Liza told her mother, he''d withdraw. Oksana wanted to believe her daughter, who knew more about these things than she did. If this all sounds tragically complacent in hindsight, it must be remembered that such was the prevailing attitude of most Mariupoltsi, indeed most Ukrainians, including Zelensky, before the war. Few thought Putin, who was known for his risk-averse pragmatism as much as he was for his cruelty, could be reckless enough to try to conquer all Ukraine. Liza left to go to her job in the bakery department of a supermarket. The shelling to the east of the city was still so distant, it was barely audible as she made her way. While certain stores in Mariupol had already closed, their owners sensing there would be a siege or perhaps knowing there would be--Mariupol''s business class still had close ties with Russia--Liza''s had not. The doors opened and shoppers crowded into the aisles.
Liza studied them. Their eyes weren''t desperate or even particularly anxious, she observed, though the arms below them were stuffing more into their baskets than she''d ever seen. Liza''s boyfriend, the acting student Dima Murantsev, a rangy but not awkward young man with a mop of brown hair and kind, close-set eyes, awoke to the news of war in a very different way. Just twenty years old, Dima had long been an observer and analyst of Ukrainian and Russian politics. A Ukrainian loyalist, which is to say a congenital skeptic when not a full-throated antagonist of Russia, he had watched over the previous year as Russia amassed troops and weapons on Ukraine''s borders. He''d taken note when American officials began warning their Ukrainian counterparts that Putin intended to invade. By February of 2022, countries were evacuating their embassies in Kyiv. On February 23rd, hours before the invasion, President Zelensky called up all military reservists between the ages of eighteen and sixty.
Dima was not a reservist--he doubted he could fire a gun. But like Zelensky, who suffered the same failure of imagination, telling foreign leaders he thought Putin was probably just carrying out a menacing training exercise, Dima couldn''t quite make up his mind what to think. Dima had moved to Mariupol from the Russia-controlled Donetsk People''s Republic. His parents and most of his family still lived there or in its smaller sister in contrived secession, the Luhansk People''s Republic. Together the two "temporarily occupied territories," as the Ukraine government officially referred to them, made up a goodly portion of the region known by Ukrainians and Russians alike as the Donbas, the lands of the Don River basin that lay along the border of the two countries. Having lived under effective Russian occupation, Dima knew what Putin was capable of. He would put nothing past the Russian. Before the war, when the prospect of an invasion had come up with friends, Dima always reminded them that there already was a war in the Donbas.
The frontline between free Ukraine and the DPR hadn''t moved in close to a decade, it was true, but there was still constant shelling and sniping across the line. Thousands of soldiers and civilians had died. There were demolished Ukrainian villages a short drive from downtown Mariupol, and no one knew how many Ukrainian captives still languishing in the network of underground prisons and torture chambers run by Russian intelligence-- the basements , as they were known. Some of those basements were very near Mariupol. Dima had not forgotten about them, even if the rest of Europe and the world, and many Ukrainians, including his friends, had. "They would ask me, ''What do you mean, what war?''?" Dima later told me. "And I would reply that we''d been fighting Russia for eight years." Still, he couldn''t see the rationale in a Russian invasion, or as the American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken phrased it when warning Zelensky it was a certainty, a "reinvasion.
" What could Putin have to gain by it? Could he possibly think he would overrun Ukraine, with its forty-five million citizens and standing army of seven hundred thousand, its landmass larger than France? If not, was Putin after more of the sort of impoverished, pensioner-infested territory that he already held ten thousand square kilometers of in the Donbas, and that Dima had, like every other young person of sound mind living there, escaped? And if that was what Putin wanted, why be so coy about it until now? "I thought it would make no sense if they were to attack now," Dima told me. "Then why were they hiding the fact that they were there for eight years in the first place? That''s just dumb." If there was a war, it would be theatrical and short, a means to some political end for Putin. This is what he''d told Liza, and she''d absorbed his analysis. Dima''s family, however, viewing the situation from the far side of the looking glass that is the Russian news media, disagreed. On February 22nd, two days before the invasion, Dima had received a distressing phone call from his father. He was already weeping when Dima picked up. He was convinced Russia would invade and that Mariupol would be hard-hit.
He begged Dima to get out while he still could. "Dima, please, figure out a way to go to Lviv," his father pleaded, referring to the city in far-western Ukraine to which many Mariupoltsi and other Ukrainians were already fleeing, "or return to us." Dima sensed he''d been drinking. "Dad, what are you talking about?" he said. "Are you drunk?" "Dima, I''m not joking," his father said. "This is serious." "You''re just listening to a lot of crap. Don''t worry.
Nothing will happen." Crap or no, the next day, February 23rd, Dima sat fastened to his laptop and phone in his dormitory room at the College of Culture and Arts, in Mariupol''s Tsentralnyi district. It was a short walk east to the dramateatr , as Mariupoltsi called the theater. Dima watched the camera feed from the statehouse in Kyiv. A podium stood humanless for hours. "We were waiting, and waiti.