Surrounding the theater and once a lush park in the heart of Mariupol, is Avinguda de la Pau. A tree-lined road that connects the outer suburbs to the east and west with the city’s cultural center.
But that was before the invasion of Ukraine. Nearly three months after the brutal siege of the Russian army, Peace Avenue has been transformed into a hellish landscape.
The theater, which became a sanctuary for Mariupol residents, was wiped out in a missile attack that killed hundreds of civilians taking refuge inside.
The trees are charred, the rubble covers the streets and the craters of shells mark the landscape.
As for the buildings, Frank Ledwidge, a former British military reserve intelligence officer and military strategy expert, compared what was left to “hundreds of rows of broken teeth.”
A damage assessment of the UN building in Mariupol analyzed satellite images captured on March 14.
He found that only a handful of buildings in the downtown area had been damaged at the time.
An ABC News analysis of the latest satellite images from April 3 reveals visible damage to almost every building here.
In April, the UN released a quick assessment of the damage to the city. The report divided the city into a 500 x 500-meter cell grid and used satellite imagery to assess whether or not there were damaged buildings inside each cell.
In the built-up areas of the city, he found damage to almost every cell.
The centennial port city of Mariupol, which before the invasion was home to more than 400,000 people, has been virtually wiped off the map.
Houses and shops became lookouts and hiding places. Paddocks converted into mass graves. It is feared that more than 20,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting.
Families fleeing the city have described their homes being bombed as indiscriminately as military sites defending the city.
One of these houses belonged to Aleksander, a resident of Mariupol who did not want his real name to be used in this story.
Since leaving the city under siege, he has spent his remaining money on gasoline trying to rescue and evacuate his Ukrainian compatriots.
Dodging bullets and shells, Aleksander says he has carried up to 1,000 people since the fighting began.
“I do it because I’m a human, not an animal,” he told ABC News in an audio message from Mariupol.
After almost three months of fighting, the city is now under the control of the Russian army.
The battle for Mariupol saw some of the most destructive fighting of the invasion, a tragic byproduct of the city’s strategic importance.
For Moscow, capturing the city meant freeing troops and opening up an unhindered land corridor between Crimea and the eastern Donbas region, where their military efforts are now concentrated.
For the Ukrainians, their ability to slow down the advance of the invading forces and inflict heavy casualties on them became a source of national pride and a touchstone for nationwide resistance.
The battle ended with Ukrainian forces locked in the city’s Azovstal steel.
After weeks of heavy bombardment and attempts by the Kremlin to starve the remaining fighters, the Ukrainian government ordered an end to the city’s defense.
A UN assessment of the buildings in the area of the Azovstal steel plant found damage to 75% of the structures.
Now that the fighting has calmed down, some locals, such as Aleksander, have been able to return to what is left of their homes.
As Aleksander walked through his neighborhood, he made a video for the ABC: It’s a scene of utter despair.
The muddy streets, full of rubble and rubble, look upside down.
At the end of the courtyard, right in front of a children’s music school, the fire creeps into a group of flats.
Outside his home, a massive crater contaminates the street landscape.
“That’s fucked up, so fucked up,” he says as he narrates the video.
In the midst of all the chaos, there is an old Soviet-era car, a GAZ Volga M21, sitting relatively unharmed in the middle of the street.
“Do you remember being here all the time? [before the war]”He says to someone off camera.
For millions of displaced Ukrainians forced to flee their hometowns, it is too familiar a story.
In cities like Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, the fighting lasted months and more.
Testimonials, satellite data, as well as photos and videos posted on social media paint a bleak picture of what’s left of the city.
On the outskirts of Kyiv, where Russian forces withdrew in April, there are disturbing signs of torture and the killing of civilians.
A damage assessment to the UN building identified hundreds of damaged structures in cities near Kyiv. (ABC News)
Reports of damage to the building of the UN Satellite Center building, which probably underestimate the true scale of the destruction, show that more than a fifth of the buildings surveyed in the cities of Bucha, Irpin, Vorzel and Hostomel suffered visible damage.
The extent of the damage is almost unimaginable, however, for military observers such as Mr. Ledwidge, it wasn’t unexpected.
That’s because he’s seen it all before: bombing cities and terrorizing the civilian population is a tactic taken directly from the Kremlin’s military manual.
“It’s not just cruelty. It’s just cruelty with a purpose,” Ledwidge said.
“It is to deliver the message, in extremely violent terms, that we have control over you.
“There’s nothing you can do about it. We can take you anywhere.”
It was a tactic used by the Russian army when it annihilated cities in Eastern Europe on its way to Berlin during World War II.
He was re-employed in Chechnya in the 1990s, in an attempt to crush a rebel pro-independence movement that had formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russian forces hit the capital Grozny on the ground, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process.
A Chechen woman rests in front of her demolished apartment building in central Grozny on February 17, 1995. (Reuters)
The tactic was further refined when Moscow became involved in the 2015 Syrian civil war.
He used his military power to help prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, whose dictatorship was facing collapse at the hands of opposition forces.
In response, the Russian army unleashed a wave of ruthless bombing campaigns in rebel-held territory.
In Aleppo, large areas of the city were removed.
Medical facilities, schools and markets were bombed and civilians were killed indiscriminately or brutally beaten to death.
The UN described the conditions in the most affected areas of the city as the “apex of horror”.
The eastern districts of Aleppo were decimated during the conflict. (AP: Hassan Ammar)
It became known as the “Syrian Playbook” and it wasn’t long before surprisingly similar tactics were unleashed on the Ukrainian population.
A timeline for destruction
In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, when Russian forces began pouring across the border into its neighbor’s territory, Moscow was adamant that it would not target cities and its invasion “posed no threat to a [the] civilian population “.
These guarantees were based on the vision of Russian President Vladimir Putin for a quick and decisive victory in Ukraine. Things, of course, did not go as planned.
Instead of encircling and invading cities, the Russians were plagued by organizational and tactical failures.
They had also greatly underestimated their opposition.
Putin became “angry and frustrated,” according to CIA Director William J. Burns, who told the U.S. House Intelligence Committee on March 8 that, as a result, the invasion it could become “ugly.”
“[Putin]It is likely to double and try to destroy the Ukrainian army without regard to civilian casualties, “he said.
His predictions have been proven, and Putin’s change of strategy has had devastating consequences on the ground.
French company Masae Analytics used synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data captured by European Union satellites to detect damage to Ukrainian buildings.
SAR bounces microwave pulses on the Earth’s surface, the signal returned to the satellite is decoded to map the physical properties below.
Masae Analytics used this data to detect damage to buildings in the cities of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
The footprint of war is evident in almost every corner of these cities: industrial sites and shops are among the damaged buildings, as well as houses, schools and hospitals.
Calculating where the damage overlaps with the footprints of open source buildings, an ABC News analysis found that on April 29 in Chernihiv, almost 43 percent (or 3,098 buildings within the city limits) they had suffered some level of damage.
In Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, 46% of its buildings had been damaged.
But it is in Mariupol where the greatest proportion of damage has been identified.
More than half of the existing buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
The true scale of the damage is probably much larger, as the analysis was based on visibly incomplete OpenStreetMaps building footprint data. Some estimates bring the total damage to Mariupol close to 95 percent.
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“Russia’s military high command is desperate to make Putin successful. And that means they will literally do anything, even kill civilians and destroy their cities to do so,” said Mick Ryan, a divisional general. retired who served in the Australian Defense Force. for more than three decades.
Mr. Ryan says nowhere that this has been more evident than in Mariupol.
“It was a sore throat that they tried to remove,” he said.
One of thousands of residential buildings destroyed in the fighting in Mariupol. (Reuters: Alexander Ermochenko)
Both Mr. Ryan as Mr. Ledwidge says the brutal tactics witnessed so far in the invasion of Ukraine are likely to be reused as the Russians seek to reclaim territory in eastern Ukraine.
Comments from Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk Province, suggest that this may already be happening.
“I don’t even want to talk about what’s going on with people living in Popasna, Rubizhne and …