Before the war, Marjinka in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine was a peaceful small town of around 9,000 people, with a cinema and a cathedral. Now practically nobody lives there. Months of Russian artillery fire reduced Marjinka to rubble. Current images show the apocalyptic destruction. Mistakes by the Ukrainian general staff also led to this, says military expert Markus Reisner.
According to the colonel of the Austrian army, the destruction in Marjinka was the result of the superiority of the Russian artillery. Because the invaders had between seven and ten times more guns than the Ukrainians. For months, Marjinka was shelled with barrel and rocket launcher artillery. It is “like on the Isonzo or in Verdun,” Reisner draws comparisons to the devastating battles of World War I. “Stepped into the trap.” As then, there is now a trench warfare that the Ukraine “allowed to be imposed on,” analyzes the colonel . Reisner sees the failings of the Ukrainian military leadership as “falling into a trap”. “One battalion after another was sent to Bakhmut, where they were wiped out”. A bitter battle of attrition has been raging around the city about 80 kilometers north-east of Marjinka for months, which has cost both sides a lot of losses. “Russia is shaking and lashing out… Ukraine, on the other hand, is bleeding out,” says the military expert. As of 2015, the small town west of the regional capital Donetsk was back under Kyiv’s control. For years the line of defense held out. During the Russian invasion last year, Marjinka came under massive fire from Donetsk and was completely destroyed by Russian guns.