Joshua Yaffa writes:

It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and told him the city was being bombed.

The attack was directed at a military base for the Ukrainian Air Force’s 25th Transport Aviation Brigade. In recent years, the unit’s aircraft have flown in support of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to deliver fuel to a Danish-­run scientific station in Greenland. Russia wanted to seize the base and fly in personnel and equipment for its ground campaign. Cruise missiles crippled the control tower and a fuelling station. Ukrainian pilots scrambled to get their planes airborne before they could be destroyed. Within minutes, an aviation technician was killed as a blast hit the IL-76 transport plane he was preparing for takeoff.

At daybreak, a hundred or so men went to the local branch of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps, to join up. A Ukrainian commander took out his pistol and laid it on the table. “This is the only weaponry we have,” he said, and sent the volunteers home. That afternoon, the 25th Brigade was ordered to pull out of Melitopol entirely, a tactical retreat. “It was painful,” Marina Rodina, one of the unit’s medics, told me. “We knew the city was counting on us.” But the brigade’s mission is transport logistics; the five hundred or so airmen at the base had no heavy weaponry, just Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. Rodina and the others could only hope that, if Ukrainian forces evacuated, Melitopol would be spared further assault.

Fedorov, who had gone to his office at city hall, was informed about the pullout by phone. “Imagine the situation,” he told me. “I’m a mayor of a city with a hundred and fifty thousand people, three hundred thousand if we include the surrounding region. It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark. Russian tanks are at the entrance to town and all I have are five garbage trucks, three tractor trailers, and, I don’t know, a metal shovel. That’s it. There’s not a single armed person left.” [Continue reading…]