you could imagine that the morale boost that that gave to the ukrainian people, that this vaunted russian army was stuck by the road, and the ukrainians were coming up and mocking them, telling their vehicles away. it felt good, and it reinforced that belief that ukrainians had before the war, that they could win. with russia's special military operation stalled, putin resorted to an old and brutal strategy, flattening and destroying cities, to break the ukrainian spirit. he made an example of the city of mariupol. variable is an industrial city of 400,000 on the sea of azov. it lies 35 miles from the