Analysis
Article reserved for subscribers
Advance in “corridors”, will to “take and hold”… The way in which the Russian army carries out the battle to capture the city, martyred by fifty days of seat, testifies to the political importance which the Kremlin grants to him.
After fifty days of terribly deadly urban combat and siege for civilians, the Battle of Mariupol seems to be coming to an end, the port city of the Sea of Azov hanging by a thread: the Azovstal factory, in which the last Ukrainian contingents are entrenched. Everything in the way the Russian army carried out this offensive testifies to the political nature of this objective. “Take and Hold”summarizes Joseph Henrotin, editor-in-chief of the specialized journal Defense and International Security. “In Soviet and Russian culture, you go beyond urban areas and leave them behind. If for political reasons a city is worth it, it is surrounded to smother it and make it fall like a ripe fruit, with major bombardments,” develops a French military source.
In Mariupol, Russian forces arrived from the west and the east, from Crimea and Donbass. After this first…