Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, reports the state-run Russian news agency Ria Novosti.
Putin flew to Mariupol by helicopter. In the city, he inspected several areas, including the coastline, spoke with local residents and is said to have visited a family he was invited by, writes the Russian media.
Putin visited Mariupol after he was in Crimea, according to the Kremlin.
He was there on Saturday, on the day nine years after the annexation of the peninsula. The visit comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for him for war crimes.
Mariupol, located in the Donetsk region, was besieged by Russian forces for months before it finally fell in May. The capture of the city was Russia’s first major victory in the war.
First Donbas visit
It is Putin’s first trip to the Donbas region, which consists of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the closest he has been to the front lines of the war since he decided to invade the neighboring country.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has visited soldiers at the front several times in an attempt to boost morale, Putin has mostly stayed inside the Kremlin where he has directed the “military special operation”.
One of Putin’s pretexts for the invasion of Ukraine was to save Russian speakers in the region from an alleged genocide. Russia has supported separatists there since 2014, when the Crimean peninsula was annexed. Donetsk is one of the four regions that Russia has since claimed to have incorporated.
Brutal battle
Mariupol, located on the shores of the Sea of Azov, was left in ruins after the fierce fighting there. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) believes that a Russian bomb attack on a maternity clinic early in the war was a war crime.
The battle for the city is one of the bloodiest of the war. Ukrainian authorities have previously estimated that at least 25,000 people were killed in the fighting for Mariupol, and that between 5,000 and 7,000 of them died in the ruins of bombed houses.
90 percent of the residential buildings in the city were destroyed or damaged, according to the UN.
In the past, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has also visited the city
