Heavy fighting has been going on since Friday in the strategically important city, which is surrounded by Russian forces.
“They throw everything at it,” Aurel Braun told CTVNews.ca.  “If they fail, how could they succeed anywhere else?”
Braun is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Toronto, whose research focuses on Russian foreign policy and Eastern Europe.
“They blew up the city of hunger, they bombed the city, they killed people, they use the navy, they use their air force, they are involved in indiscriminate killings,” Brown said.  “If they can not take the city even with this, then what is the credibility of the Russian army?”
CTVNews.ca also spoke with Dominique Arel, President of Ukrainian Studies at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Frank Sysyn, Professor of History at the University of Alberta and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.  Russia is said to be pursuing strategic and propaganda victories with its increasingly savage attack on the industrial port city.
THE BUILDING OF DRY BRIDGE The occupation of Mariupol will give the Russian army a direct link between the annexed Crimean peninsula and the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where Russia has supported an separatist war since 2014, the same year it occupied it.
“They want to build a land bridge,” said Braun of Toronto.  “And Mariupol is what reserves the completion of this land bridge.”
Mariupol was briefly occupied in 2014, although Ukraine managed to drive out the invaders.
“Some argue that Putin’s failures in 2014 make him particularly vindictive against Mariupol,” said Sysyn of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.  “I think that the relative prosperity of Mariupol compared to the economic catastrophe of much of the autonomous Donetsk region has also made it an object of revenge.”
With a population of over 400,000 before the war, Mariupol is the second largest city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and falls into territories that Russia claims are part of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic.
“The jewel is Mariupol, the only city in Donbass that remained under Ukrainian control in 2014,” said Arel of Ottawa.  “That is why, first and foremost, Mariupol is considered so important.”
PUTIN’S PROPAGANDAMARYOPOL hosts the Azov Order, which has been accused of being a right-wing nationalist group.  Originally formed as a volunteer militia, the Azov Battalion played a critical role in repelling Russian forces and their proxies from Mariupol in 2014 and has since fought with Russian-backed factions in eastern Ukraine as part of the country’s National Guard.
The occupation of Mariupol could fuel Russian domestic propaganda that its “special military operation” is for the “de-Nazism” of Ukraine.  Brown imagines that Azov’s fighters could undergo demonstration tests.
“They can use the captive members of the Azov brigade as Exhibit A of Nazism,” he said.  “This would not help to convince the people, but to convince the Russians in the Kremlin-controlled media.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has described Ukraine as “neo-Nazi” controlled, even though the country’s president is Jewish.
In Russian propaganda, Azov symbolizes the “fascist”, “neo-Nazi” nature of the entire Ukrainian government.  That’s ridiculous, of course, “Arel said.  Russia now justifies the destruction of the city and political buildings in Mariupol to “cleanse the city of nationalists.”
Both Arel and Brown acknowledge that there are far-right elements in the Ukrainian military, as is the case in most other countries.
“That would say on this basis, the Canadian Army is a neo-Nazi army,” Braun said.  “It’s so absurd.”
Putin’s illusions In addition to reclaiming a former part of the Soviet Union, it has been argued that Putin is trying to revive Russia’s imperial glory when Mariupol was part of an 18th-century Black Sea region known as Novorossiya, or New Russia.  The term has been used in Kremlin propaganda in the past to denote areas with large Russian-speaking populations in southeastern Ukraine.
“Putin firmly believes that Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine are loyal to Russia,” Arel said.  “In practice, it is not.”
Many Azov fighters, for example, speak Russian as their first language.
“There is a kind of mythology that Putin is pushing, that Ukraine is an artificial construction of the state, that Ukrainian nationality is a myth created by the West, and therefore, if you speak Russian, you are Russian,” Brown said.  “Which is not exactly right, because we can see that in so many places in Ukraine now, where the majority of people can speak Russian, they do not consider themselves Russian.”
Instead of greeting Russian soldiers with open arms, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians resisted and protested the unprovoked invasion.  Sysn says this could lead to Putin escalating attacks on civilians.
“Putin obviously did not study Irish history and through which he could have discovered that not all English speakers are pro-British,” Sisin said.  “Now it has alienated the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine and I am afraid it has decided to decimate the population of Ukraine, partly leading so many as refugees and destroying the Ukrainian economy.”
AN ECONOMIC MONEY The port of Mariupol is the largest in the Sea of ​​Azov and the city is home to an economically important iron and steel industry.  Maritime traffic to and from Mariupol had already been reduced due to restrictions imposed when Russia built a bridge from its mainland to annexed Crimea, restricting access between the Azov and Black Seas and beyond.  If Russia occupied Mariupol, the entire Azov Sea would be firmly under its control.  But with so much of the city now leveled by Russian ammunition, it looks like the financial blow has already been paid.
“An occupied Mariupol will be subject to sanctions and Russia does not need its steel,” Arel said.  “The city has been destroyed in any case.”
ETHON AND MARIUPOL When Ukraine occupied Mariupol after such a long and brutal siege, Braun says it would be an incredible morale booster for Ukrainians and a huge setback for Russia.  On the contrary, a Russian victory would make Mariupol one of the largest cities in the month-long war.
“From the Ukrainian point of view, they can think of it as their own kind of Stalingrad, where they resist, where they turn it, where they do not let it fall and it becomes a kind of hero city,” he said.  .  “If they manage to survive against all odds, then here they could see it as a kind of turning point.”
With files from the Associated Press


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