Today at 18:56
“When I woke up, the city was already liberated.”
The liberation operation began at 4:20 in the morning, while the city slept. Mariupol journalist Ivan Synepalov shows the bank building, where the militants set up their headquarters. On June 13th, 2014 the hottest phase of the liberation operation took place here.
“During the operation to liberate Mariupol, in fact everything was located here, because at that time the city council had already burned down, they were not there. The Azov batallion, Dnipro, the National Guard came and surrounded the whole residential quarter. It seems that they assaulted from 4 sides simultaneously,” said Synepalov.
Oleksiy Lysenko was one of the first who entered Mariupol. He remembers how the militants prepared a trap – they mined several streets, but nothing happened.
“The assault in Mariupol itself was like a police operation. Militants had an armoured reconnaissance vehicle with machine guns, which we fired at during the first minutes of the fight. They had a lot of land mines laid out on 2 streets. But we were lucky, our weapon hit a power cable, and all these landmines could not explode,” said Lysenko.
Mariupol was occupied for almost 2 months – between April 13th and June 13th.
Roman Svitan, military adviser to the governor of the Donetsk region, Serhiy Taruta, says that militants were provided with weapons brought by the sea from the Crimea occupied by Russia. The militants from Donetsk were led by FSB officers, including the Russian political consultant Aleksandr Boroday. Later he took the post of Prime Minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. Some of the militants were trained in the Russian city of Rostov.
“Training in Rostov lasted until May. The base was a sanatorium on the outskirts of Rostov. We knew it. They entered Donetsk together with a platoon consisting of 30 Chechens. Since the number was small and communication capabilities were weak, we managed to dismantle the unit it in Mariupol,” said Svitan.
Some militants managed to escape even before the assault. During the day, one of the groups known as the Chechen gang got information about the plan to liberate Mariupol.
“The militants began to scatter in residential quarters and districts, they were being caught for a very long time, throughout the day. They were captured in basements in this area. It was the longest part of the operation,” said Synepalov.
Initially, the Mariupol liberation operation was scheduled for May 23, 2014 before the Presidential election, but after intelligence operations, it was rescheduled for June 13th.
“Some people were afraid of us, but there were many who greeted us, went out on balconies and hung flags during the liberation,” said Lysenko.
By the end of the day, Ukrainian flags were hoisted over the administrative buildings of Mariupol. Members of the National Guard units, the Azov and Dnipro Battalions, as well as special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were involved in the special operation to liberate the city of Mariupol.
